Hope is ineffective in a collapsing democracy – it forecloses action and masks racial inequality

Yet, it also more narrowly reflects a crisis of democracy itself: a democracy that in the eye of many is no longer able to live up to its promise to make us co-authors of our own future – or at least not equally for all citizens, for hope (and its absence) are by no means homogenously distributed both across and within societies. As Stockdale (2021) has shown, systems of privilege and oppression based on various features of social difference structure our lives in important ways and hence the availability of hope. For instance, while those living in the most affluent parts of the world may (still) have reasons hope that they will not be too seriously affected by climate change, many others are already in the midst of having their livelihoods destroyed, with the worst yet to come. This, however, is only one of two dimensions of hope’s crisis. For at the same time, there is a backlash, particularly from within activist circles, against hope itself, a challenge to the idea that hope (even if it were to be available) can play a productive role in politics in the first place. The more radical parts of the climate movement in particular – from Greta Thunberg’s (2019) famous exclamation ‘I don’t want your hope, I want you to panic’ to Extinction Rebellion’s (2019) slogan ‘Hope Dies, Action Begins’ – worry that hope leads to passivity and wishful thinking. Alternative attitudes such as fear or panic, they suggest, are more appropriate to convey the urgency of the radical action required to at least attenuate the climate catastrophe. In a similar vein, proponents in the fight against racial injustice worry that hope is an ideological tool to keep systemic discrimination in place. For instance, ‘Afropessimists’ such as Calvin Warren (2015) or Frank Wilderson (2020) have argued that we should embrace ‘black nihilism’, because a politics of hope preserves the metaphysical structures that sustain black suffering. Hope, on his account, is nothing but the illusion that we come incrementally closer to what is actually impossible, racial justice. Someone like Obama, who promises (and appears to himself embody) incremental progress toward a ‘post-racial era’, in fact masks the continued reality of racial inequality. In putting their hope in these charismatic figures, people of colour are distracted from the hard realities they continue to face in the contemporary US and ultimately led to affirm the oppressive structures that keep them in their predicament