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Why Have Hope?
While there’s a lot wrong with the nation right now, I remain hopeful that we will undo much of the recent damage and set the country on a better path. I think there are sound reasons to consider that a possibility, beginning with the increasingly visible failures of modern progressivism.
I’m not such an optimist that I believe in utopian solutions to our current problems. I don’t think that has ever been an option, and I think it is unrealistic to imagine that we’ll move the country to some place of enlightened liberty that it has never actually occupied. But I do think that we can move back and forth on the continuum of freedom and prosperity; that we’re largely free and prosperous today; and that we can increase both our freedom and our prosperity in the near future. I don’t think it will be easy. I do think we can do it.
I think we have our best chance of countering the enemies of liberty — the woke activists, the broken universities, the progressive institutions, the leftist bureaucracy — if we engage lots of normal Americans in the effort. By normal, I mean people who aren’t obsessed with politics and culture, but who would like to remain secure and free and who recognize absurdity when they see it. I think there are a great many such people, and that those people are our allies. We should encourage them to join other conservatives in becoming more stalwart supporters of conservative candidates and more outspoken critics of the left’s excesses.
In other words, I think we should strive to rally the troops.
To inspire enthusiasm, to motivate people to enter the fray, it helps to offer some realistic prospect of victory. That’s what I mean by hope: expressing optimism that we can oppose what sometimes seems to be a juggernaut of bad progressive ideas — and oppose it successfully.
There’s a reason that the left would like to prevent us from speaking critically about it. The left knows that it doesn’t win debates. The left knows that coverage has to be spun so that normal people don’t know what activists on the left say and do. That betrays a weakness, a weakness we on the right don’t have. We want to engage the left. We want to ask questions, challenge their assertions, expose their programs. We have the better history, the better track record, the better story. That’s our strength. That’s their weakness.
There are two very different visions of America in conflict here. It’s a serious conflict, with a lot at stake. A competent coach doesn’t go into the locker room at halftime and tell his team that they’re going to get the same drubbing in the second half than they did in the first. A competent commander doesn’t tell his men that they don’t have any hope of winning. A competent businessman doesn’t tell his staff that there’s no way they’re going to prosper because the competition is going to run rings around them. Leaders inspire confidence. They find a way to remain hopeful, and to encourage hope in others. Because without hope people stop trying, give up, go home, and don’t contribute.
Those of us who are engaged in the political and cultural debates are, whether we like it or not, leaders. We would do well to think about how we can inspire the relatively disengaged to join in and support the conservative side. We should think about how we can inspire hope.
Published in General
Here’s a hint for inspiring the troops. Acknowledge their concerns as legitimate in a specific way. “I know YOU think it’s bad but it really isn’t as bad as you think” is dismissive. It demoralizes because people think their concerns are being belittled and ignored.
After acknowledging, specify actions that can still be taken.
End with a note of hope based in reality that if we work together and face the challenges and hard work head on, we will be victorious.
Persevere.
One thing you can be certain of that supports your call for hope is, with a current divide that appears to register about down the middle, the framework the founders left us with and that we still have major parts of in play today works. And facts show us that where the “woke” contingent is trying to take us has been tried and shown not to work. So, there’s that.
There’s a book in the Bible I like to call “The Happy Book”. It’s an odd name for the book, because the context is anything but happy. The church Paul is writing to has suffered intense persecution.
And yet, the letter is so full of hope and joy!
If your goal is to inspire through writing instead of acting, I recommend you read Philippians.
I’ve thought about this for the last year. I always get back to the question of, “Can this nation be saved without bloodshed?”
The proposition that we can succeed may be true, but its truth may depend on whether we believe it.
That’s the William James answer.
(We also need religion. That’s also the WJ answer.)
While HR preaches about hope, I’ll preach the answer is in the hands of the people. The people are still the final authority. It’s just that a divided people are not very authoritative. The people who show up to vote are too evenly divided. We need an overwhelming majority and I still think all those silent people out there are more with us than against us. If 75% of the voters tell our representatives what needs to be done, it will not be any trouble for them to do it. And it won’t matter what party they are in. Okay, that’s a little forward-thinking, but no more forward-thinking than what they did 250 years ago.
At the same time, we need to strengthen the states. We’re melding into this one big pot and that’s unhealthy because what is good for California is not necessarily good for Arkansas and vice versa. Maybe this is a common goal that a lot of people could get behind and see a benefit, because so many other things would get fixed if the rights, funds, etc are left with the states to do the fixing.
Nothing Hank you have said gives me hope. I am not buying nor engaging in a noble lie.
I think you have this right in terms of the possible numbers. If we do have 75%, but many have been too busy to pay attention in detail to what is happening, election integrity will be key to get it right. Congressional margins without consensus levels are not appropriate for passing new programs like the Left is perfectly willing to do.
Yes. We don’t need to be in a close game with time winding down, trying to foul our way to a come-from-behind win, what a ref could throw in the last 10 seconds (college basketball reference). We need a blowout where it’s so obvious the other guys concede the day before the election.
Seemed to me that’s what 2020 should have been, considering the Biden “rallies” etc. Didn’t stop them then, will it stop them in the future?
Won’t happen.
To many Americans hate us. They would rather feel good about their vote and destroy the nation.
My thought is the silents shifted sides for whatever reason. 2020 was a complicated flukey year. The ideal situation would be to have most states in the hands of conservative leaders. Whether or not state leadership played a role, it would still be better.
I suspect the actual result will depend on how good their cheating machine is next year.
Probably not, but there’s always hope. I think I’ll stick with my version of reality for now. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Not the political middle, just the middle of where we all think it is.
Sectarian civil war is coming. I hate it, but it is real.
I got married and left the USAF in 1973, into a zero job market and stagflation. It didn’t really get better until the late 1980s.
I’m not sure I will outlive what’s coming now. If I do outlive it, I expect to be broke.
It took 20 years to get into this hole and it is going to take 20 years to dig our way out. There is reason for hope, but it is going to be a long slog.
Our stories are better in that they comport to reality. However, they are only better if they think beyond step one. Initially, free stuff sounds better than any actual economic sense.
True, but the Left has never been as organized as they are now and they have never been so determined to snuff out everything that Conservatives believe in. No negotiation; no compromise.
The Left owns 95% of the mass media and almost all of our higher education institutions.
Throwing in the fact that our foreign enemies have never been stronger (thanks mostly to us), we may not have 20 years.
Yes, but the Left has never been eating itself so much either.
I agree, Henry, you are right in that the Republican Party is the only party to vote for and that we should vote, and also that we should talk to as many people as we can to try to persuade people to vote Republican. But this strategy only works if voting counts.
I believe that the 2020 election was not right. And the Time article was just the tip of the iceberg. Besides me, I know of only one other member who has consistently harped on the importance of election counts really reflecting how real citizens vote, and believing that if any further elections are rigged, then the republic really is over.
The deep state — as Mike Flynn pointed out in some detail — is not the aggregated entrenched liberal bureaucrats in the executive branch, or federal legislators, or even activist leftist judges, but the authoritatively and functionally higher intelligence organization of the US government, what some call the “fourth branch of government”. Ultimately, we are not dealing with election laws, or news corporations or information tech corporations (though they play a large part) but those who give the orders to government leaders. Mail-in ballots are a large part of this.
Mandatory vaccines even for the immune and the ensuing firing of non-compliant workers, and “green laws” and gas shortages to slow-walk transport of goods, and shutting down pipelines and oil extraction, and paying people to remain unemployed and bursting the budget, and Democrat-approved riots, and timely car explosions and “coincidental” police suicides, are not coincidence, or confusion or incompetence but malice.
We know that the 2020 election was either stolen or it was attempted. There are anecdotal reports of election fraud now occurring in Virginia. And if the Democrats get their way, this will only intensify. State legislators need to address this across the nation, or else one of two things will happen. Violence (if not technically war) will break out and the country will fragment, or we will be living in a New Green Deal, or worse, a Venezuela-like country in which we will have to “lower our expectations” (as I believe Jen Psaki said) for rice and noodles, for medicines, for electricity and refrigeration, for bread and powdered milk, for meat products, for toilet paper, and likely for clean drinking water. Either way, the army will be used.
Doom-saying? Yes. Outrageous? Yes. Are we on track for this? If elections are not representative, definitely Yes. If the people cannot vote with their feet, or their pocket book, or the ballot. Then, Yes.
If you want to do something, call your state congressman each day and say that you want real, verifiable, policed election reform, with criminal investigations of the 2020 elections and criminals prosecuted; and if you don’t get it before the 2022 election Republicans will start voting you out. And if that doesn’t work, Republicans will see that you eat last.
I don’t know what else to do.
And above all take the Election Assistance Commission’s advice and get rid of the voting machines with internal modems.
https://ricochet.com/1033553/g-k-chestertons-take-on-electronic-voting-systems/
Blue thumbs, hand counts, and paper ballots.
“As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.”
― Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War
This is my go-to quote when I am tempted to despair.
I think each of us chooses our attitude toward life’s events and the people we meet.
I thought about this a lot with the challenge Trump presented as a presidential candidate during the 2016 primaries. He had no experience in government, either as a civil servant or as an elected official. In theory, he was the head of the large and prosperous Trump Organization, but given the 18 books he was the author of (even if he had a writer put them together, it was still a big time commitment), and his reality television shows and his brand-promoting activities, and his well-known active social life, there was little in his resume to give any indication of what kind of president he would be.
For voters to support him at the primary stage was a leap of political faith of historic proportion.
He often rubs people the wrong way, and he can be very abrasive. But as the primaries wore on, people listened to him, mostly out of curiosity. That was the point at which people chose how they would feel about him.
We can choose to greet life with our sense of humor in tact and with a clear picture of what we can control and what we can’t. I often think of the people in bomb shelters during the Blitz in London. They were trapped, and all they could do was see if anyone around them needed help. And that’s how they got through it. Because it’s in helping others that we find our own strength and resiliency.
If the world is ending, I’d still rather spread hope and humor to others around me because fear and anxiety are pretty horrible. If we are all going to die tomorrow, it will be easier if we aren’t terrified on our way out the door.
I am very fortunate in having a very solid faith in God and knowledge that he has a plan and purpose that I don’t know but that will work out well in the end. :-)
I like the way you have described this process and I think it is accurate in a significant way.
After all then, Donald Trump was elected POTUS. Then he was treated in very shameful and inappropriate, even illegal, ways for 4 years by numerous influential elements of American society including the Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the public media, and academia. Not the America I lay claim to.
That’s true, but it was the unpredictable great America that elected him in the first place. :-) :-) That was a pretty amazing moment. :-)
Individuals voting versus corrupted institutional leadership.
It does certainly say something for the disaffection Americans have for the political establishment.