Hope Is a Discipline

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink"

The Last American President: Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Hope Is a Discipline

In dark times, hope isn’t a passive emotion: it’s a discipline, a practice we must cultivate daily through action and solidarity, a discipline that keeps us moving forward no matter how hard things get. It keeps us grounded and focused on a positive future.

Mariame Kaba, the prison abolitionist and organizer, puts it perfectly: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline. . . . we have to practice it every single day.”26

Given that the enemies of democracy and advocates of authoritarianism are massively well-funded, have been liberated by Republicans on the Supreme Court, and control a large part of our media and social media infrastructure, the path forward won’t be easy. There will be setbacks, moments of despair, and very real dangers. But if history tells us anything, it’s that people facing far worse odds have repeatedly and successfully defended or even brought into being (as our Founders did) democracy against authoritarian threats. If South Koreans could defend their democracy against corruption, if Chileans could end Pinochet’s brutal regime, if South Africans could dismantle apartheid, if America could prevail against the fascists of the Confederacy, then we modern Americans can certainly protect our democratic institutions.

In the famous words of anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

The question isn’t whether we can defeat authoritarianism: history both proves that we repeatedly have and that, going forward, we can. The question is whether we will, like our forebearers, again muster the courage, wisdom, and solidarity to do so.

Democracy isn’t just a system of government: it’s a moral commitment to human dignity, equality, and freedom handed down to us by Indigenous people (as I detail in The Hidden History of American Democracy), preserved by generations of Americans willing to fight and die for it. Its defense isn’t just political; it’s profoundly personal and the work that today falls to you and me. Thus, each of us must decide what role we’ll play in this defining struggle of our time.

As you close this book, I hope you’ll carry not just an understanding of the threat we face, but a deepened commitment to the values of democracy that are so worth fighting for, along with a renewed and practical knowledge of how to join that fight effectively.

The future isn’t yet written. It’s created, day by day, via our collective choices. This is why it’s so imperative that each of us make choices that our grandchildren will thank us for.

The billionaire authoritarians and their toadies believe their hour has come. Let’s prove them wrong.