How Can You Have Hope in a World So Broken?

Los Angeles has spent the week engulfed in climate crisis-driven flames as Donald Trump is about to become president for the second time, all the while insurance becomes a business existentially threatened by the changing climate, upending the very concept of American home ownership and providing an obvious catalyst for a 2008-style housing crisis. Barack Obama, a man who taught the Democrats a lesson 17 years ago they still haven’t learned, just humored Donald Trump’s ego at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, symbolically demonstrating alongside its rank and file’s deafening silence that America’s opposition party never had any real plan to oppose someone they claim is an autocrat hellbent on destroying America. Four Supreme Court Justices just told us they will disregard the very basic concepts of the rule of law to let Trump do whatever he wants, while seemingly nearly every leech-like billionaire in America has excitedly bent the knee to their new dear leader who will enable them to be their worst selves they have always desired to be.

Hopelessness isn’t an opinion; it’s a fact of our current political reality. The wolves have busted down the door, and no one has any plan to stop them.

Fire is proving to be stronger than the fragile society not ready for climate change that we have built, and it has never been clearer that we are on our own. The American experiment has failed to protect us from its excesses and is about to fail us in a way that we have not experienced in our lifetimes. It is generally agreed that the U.S. is in “decline,” the only disagreement is to the degree, and wherever the American empire is in its long-term trend towards collapse, it is about to accelerate under Trump and Musk’s kleptocracy.

Humans naturally fear uncertainty, a feature of our survival instincts telling us that if we’re not sure if that’s a bear in front of us, we should probably not hang around to find out. This manifests most often in our politics through a fear of the other, which comprises most of the intellectual basis of American conservatism. This ignorant, nativist strain has always run through this country to varying degrees, and its worst instincts have been achieved by enslaving Black people who were valued as three-fifths of a person in our founding document, while also passing immensely racist and nativist laws like the Alien and Sedition Acts and the 1924 Immigration Act. Adolf Hitler even cited these United States laws as inspiration for his own genocidal aims.

But we’re here now. Those in the past helped fight the forces that inspired Hitler to build towards the present, and they had hope in a better future, therefore so must we. We have no other choice. Despair is nihilism, and nihilism naturally allies yourself with the forces causing that despair.

It sounds strange to jump from a comparison of America and Hitler to hope, but this is actually where I want to turn this article on its head and attempt to earnestly answer the question posed in the title. Not to be a white guy sharing a Martin Luther King Jr. quote, but as an editor, I know a good writer when I see one, and he famously said in his “I Have A Dream” speech, “out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” I opened with the mountain, now let’s explore the stone.

King’s quote was in reference to the Declaration of Independence as an unfilled promissory note to the American people, a logic which still applies today in a world determined to roll back the progress gained by the Civil Rights Era. The only people who can guarantee that promissory note to us is us, and it takes leaders to lead people to fight for it. In 1954, it was difficult to see a path to the death of Jim Crow and the enshrinement of civil rights as federal law outside of Earl Warren’s Supreme Court, but then the Montgomery Bus boycott happened the next year, and the work of local activists long working behind the scenes now became more prominent, as a range of leaders emerged to meet the moment. A decade later, a president would sign the Civil Rights Act into law, as this nativist American strain of thought suffered another rebuke to its worst impulses.

This is not to make a comparison of then to now, as the conditions are not at all the same, but to point out that this war being brought to people’s doorsteps is a familiar one we have won battles in before. Jim Crow never really went away afterwards, and a lot of it was just repackaged into the racist American prison system that houses the largest prison population in the world, and now this vision of a racial caste society has a brand new generation of freaks determined to bring it back, so it’s our turn to pick up the mantle in this fight that is as old as America itself.

The assumption that what we know now will still be true tomorrow undergirds so much of our evidence-based thought that our logical brain desires in order to remove the uncertainty plaguing its analysis, and it leads us to miss the forest for the trees sometimes. Political horserace-driven and gossipy coverage further centers our focus on the present, and because the dumbest and most craven people run our mainstream media that still employs legions of good journalists, it produces an environment that tells us a lot of important bleak realities about our present, but without any ability or even effort to contextualize it or provide solutions for it, creating the kind of informed uncertainty our base instincts love to turn into abject fear.

This defense of hope might just be me having terminal political science brain and seeing things over a decades- or centuries-long timeframe, but one of the lessons of history is that we are not condemned to our present fate. The Reconstruction Era in the wake of the Civil War saw one of the most successful democratic advancements in U.S. history, and the New Deal was built out of the rubble of the Great Depression. Just because a bunch of careerists coasted through a genocidal Democratic administration resting on its laurels of not being Donald Trump does not mean this is what the Democrats will forever be going forward. After all, some of us still remember 2008 when Hope and Change were more than just a lifestyle brand.

Plus, your logical brain should know that bad things are not all that is happening in the world right now. Hawai’i’s climate and oil lawsuit that in a perfect world, could be a big deal one day, was just allowed by the Supreme Court to remain in state courts in opposition to the wishes of Big Oil. Dave Levitan was able to write a hearty recap of the year in climate progress for Splinter in one of the hottest years on record, noting that:

There’s no point in sugarcoating the overall picture here — writ large, climate change is bad and getting worse, and global progress to slow it is not moving anywhere near fast enough. But there is progress — a lot of it, and the glass-half-full view is that much of the momentum can snowball, with price reductions for renewables further pushing fossil fuels to the side, technological advances in areas like geothermal energy helping open new avenues for emissions reductions, and, maybe, a global appetite for a cleaner, safer world acting as an exponential catalyst.

There are plenty of known positive catalysts out there that could help achieve various kinds of progress. One of my biggest hopes for climate breakthroughs is my unshakeable faith in humanity’s proven inability to anticipate exponential changes and the potential for them to exist both technologically and politically in this fight. The 2026 and 2028 congressional maps look more difficult for Republicans than Democrats and provide a golden opportunity for the Democrats to retake Congress from the smallest House majority in a century and slow Trump’s agenda. The economy is starting to flash some warning signals, and the jobs data is making the market a little nervous, which could be bad news for everyone, but good political news for any Democrat smart enough to start to staple a slowing economy to the Tarif Man who smart rich people are literally betting will make worse, and undercut his popularity with the same strategy that sunk Joe Biden. As a wildly overrated president once correctly said: it’s the economy, stupid. Trump will very likely not make things better and every study suggests his economic policies will make life worse for working people while enriching the oligarchs, and eventually, Biden’s economy that people hate will become Trump’s economy once again.

You are not helpless in the face of the Trump 2.0 era. You can aid this effort to oppose his agenda by calling your Democratic congresspeople and telling them to fight back every time there is a fight. Speaking as someone who has been around politics their entire adult life, I can promise you that if they think their constituents have their back—in numbers—politicians are infinitely more likely to take up your fight as their own. Phone calls work to get their attention (screaming at them online does not), it’s why so many Democrats wanted to ban Tik Tok in the wake of an avalanche of people calling and telling them to stop doing a genocide.

There is no such thing as past the point of no return in fighting the climate crisis. Every degree of temperature rise we cut into saves lives, and people are working every day to find better ways to do that. The hope to build a better future than the present is never lost, and there will be heroes who emerge out of the coming crises, just like they have in the past. This is not to sugarcoat the present–the Trump years will be extremely bad–and we don’t know what awaits us on the other side of next week’s inauguration. But in a world where our logical brain has identified so many obvious threats headed our way, the uncertainty we naturally fear is actually one of the best sources of hope that a better future is still possible. Don’t give up. This fight requires each and every one of us, and if there is any ultimate lesson to take from the Trump era, it’s that we cannot predict the future, we can only be ready for the moments it presents to us.