Hope
There have been dark days since Donald Trump was elected President.
And there have been others like the Tuesday, November 4th election that were full of light.
But through it all, we must always remember that hopelessness is the enabler of injustice.
Hopelessness Leads to complacency… and complacency enables authoritarianism.
And as my colleague Reggie Hubard says: If you can’t get them to hope, you can’t get them to vote.
In his book: The Soul of America..the battle for our better angels….the great historian Jon Mecham reminds us that we’ve been here before.
That American history has always involved battles between hope and fear…and each time, with a combination of strong leadership and popular organization, hope… “Our Better Angels” have won.
It gives me hope that last Tuesday we generated an affordability Blue Wave across America… and that Democrats have overperformed our Presidential margins in the 40 Special Elections Since November 2024-- by an average of 15%.
It gives me hope that 34 House seats that are held by Republicans are “in play” on the DCCC “Red to Blue” target list…. And we only need 4 to take back the House.
It gives me hope that we have great Senate candidates in swing states like Ohio, North Carolina, Kentucky, Maine, Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, and Texas.. and of course states like Illinois… and that allows us to have a good shot at taking back the Senate.
It gives me hope that the President’s party has lost House seats in 81% of the last 11 Midterm elections… And in the Senate that the party of the President has lost seats in all but one midterm since 1982.
It gives me hope that the polling shows that Donald Trump’s approval rating has been massively underwater virtually since his inauguration and continues to sink….to its lowest level yet….. As is the approval of his “big ugly bill” that takes health care from ordinary Americans to give tax breaks to billionaires. And his foreign policy, and his economic policy… and his immigration policy are in the toilet as well.
Turns out ordinary Americans don’t support starving people by cutting SNAP and doubling their health insurance rates while Elon Musk is awarded a trillion-dollar compensation package by Tesla. And turns out Americans are repulsed by people being disappeared off the streets of our country by armed masked men.
It gives me hope that what really makes America great is its diversity – that except for Native Americans -- we are all descendants of immigrants – some of whom were brought here in chains and many others who chose to come here because America welcomed them. Remember Emma Lazuras poem on the statue of liberty .. it says: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”.
What really makes America great is our struggle to create a society where everyone can share in the bounty created by the world’s richest nation.
What really makes America great is our pioneering commitment to democracy and to the principle that all people are created equal.
As a young man in the civil rights movement, I watched on TV as one of my hero’s John Lewis was beaten to within an inch of his life on the Edumund Petus Bridge in Selma Alabama while he was fighting for the simple right of black Americans to vote. The Edmund Petus Bridge was named after a grand wizard of the KKK.
Fifty years later, Jan and I had the privilege of marching over that same bridge behind Congressman John Lewis as he walked arm in arm with Barak Obama, the first black President of the United States
Dr. King was right: The arc of the moral universe is long, and it does indeed bend toward justice. So long as WE provide the hands that make it so.
So let me close with the words Jon Mecham used to close his book:
“For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago carried out so imperfectly is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in service of those better angles who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.”
If we organize.. with…. as my colleague Heather Booth says… love at the center…. We will not only defeat authoritarianism…. Together we can create the most progressive period in modern American history.
Robert Creamer, a partner at Democracy Partners, has been a political organizer and strategist for five decades, was a consultant in three Democratic presidential campaigns, and worked on many major national issue campaigns. He is the author of Nuts and Bolts: The Formula to Progressive Electoral Success. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer or BlueSky @rbcreamer.bsky.social
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