Hope Is Not Dead. It’s Just No Longer Cheap.

This is not a good time for the republic, and pretending otherwise would be embarrassing.

The political atmosphere is toxic, institutions are under strain, and the second Trump era has brought renewed fights over executive power, the courts, immigration, protest, and the basic norms of restraint. Reuters recently reported that the administration has made aggressive use of emergency appeals while pressing a broad view of presidential power against lower-court intervention.

None of that is reassuring. But neither is it the same thing as final collapse.

One reason for hope is almost perversely simple: the struggle is still happening in public. Judges are still ruling. Lawsuits are still being filed. Journalists are still reporting. Citizens and advocacy groups are still contesting power rather than merely bowing before it. That does not mean the system is healthy. It means the system is still alive enough to be fought over. Reuters also noted that Trump’s opportunity to further reshape the federal judiciary was limited by the relatively small number of current judicial vacancies.

Another reason for hope is that not every part of American life is collapsing at once. The economy is anxious and uneven, but it is not a smoking ruin. The Associated Press reported that new unemployment claims recently stood at 213,000, still low by historical standards, while job openings rose to about 6.95 million in January even as hiring remained sluggish. That is hardly glorious, but it is also not the stuff of immediate national disintegration.

Then there is the less fashionable reason for hope: democratic life has never depended entirely on wisdom from above. More often, it has depended on pressure from below — from citizens, local communities, volunteers, teachers, clergy, lawyers, organizers, and other inconvenient people who refuse to become spiritually house-trained. AmeriCorps, for example, still explicitly frames part of its mission around strengthening civic engagement and community capacity.

This is where I part company with both cheap optimism and theatrical despair. Cheap optimism says everything will work out because America is somehow enchanted and indestructible. Rubbish. Theatrical despair says the game is already over, so nothing matters. Also rubbish. Hope worth having has to live between those two forms of nonsense.

It has to be disciplined.

That is what hope means now. Not confidence that history will behave itself. Not faith that the powerful will suddenly become decent. Not a vague, scented belief that “things always work out.” Hope now is the decision not to surrender one’s moral and civic agency to chaos. It is the refusal to let cynicism masquerade as sophistication. It is the refusal to give demagogues, grifters, and bullies the extra victory of colonizing our inner lives.

So yes, there is reason for hope — not because the times are easy, and certainly not because our political class has earned trust, but because the country is still contested by people who have not entirely given up. Courts still matter. Facts still matter. Communities still matter. Ordinary citizens still matter.

That is not naïveté. It is not denial. It is not a bumper sticker.

It is a discipline of refusal: refusing despair, refusing passivity, and refusing to believe that the worst people among us deserve the final word.

And at the moment, that may be the most American form of hope we have left.