Hope Without Optimism

The first presidential election I could vote in was in 2004. I thought George W. Bush was an idiot, though mostly a harmless idiot. I was honestly more afraid of his vice president, Dick Cheney, who seemed cartoonishly evil but was more competent than Bush. All of which meant that, pretty much no matter what, I’d be voting for the Democratic nominee, John Kerry.

Here’s all I can remember about John Kerry: He was almost painfully boring. Bush’s whole shtick was that he was a regular guy you could get a beer with. Sure, he was dumb as a rock, but at least he was personable. Kerry didn’t seem to know what the word “personality” even meant. I very much got the sense that people weren’t voting for Kerry so much as against Bush.

Even still, I thought it would be a shoo-in. I mean, how could anyone want four more years of Bush??? So when my roommates and I gathered to watch the news on election night, we were all crestfallen to see Kerry had lost. It was a cruel and somewhat scarring way to participate in my first presidential election. This was not the soaring democracy of The West Wing but a cold dose of reality.

Fast forward to the end of June, when Biden and Trump held their first — and only — debate. I tried to quell the lingering sense of 2004 dread by telling myself that the debate would be a solid win for Biden. Trump would surely implode. Biden might not be great but he could certainly do well enough to secure a win. After all, Biden had given a pretty solid State of the Union only a few months prior.

Needless to say, things didn't go as planned. Trump wasn’t as unhinged as I thought he would be — although he was plenty unhinged — and Biden looked decrepit. People weren’t focusing on what the two men were saying, but how they said it. The fact that Trump lied in just about every answer he gave didn’t seem to matter because at least he spoke definitively. Biden’s rambles, stumbles, and feeble voice were an unmitigated disaster. It was painful to watch.

A week later, feeling completely and utterly in despair over the November election, I started reading Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton. Eagleton is something of a bigshot in the field of literary criticism — one of the few theorists who, like Harold Bloom or Edward Said, have name recognition. I don’t really know what it says about me that in that time of darkness I turned to a literary critic for help, but let’s not dwell on that, shall we?

I wanted to like Hope Without Optimism more than I did. Even though it’s only 137 pages, it took me over a month and a half to read. That’s because, like poetry, I had to read Eagleton’s prose very slowly. It required a lot of concentration to follow his sentences, mostly because of the academic diction. That, and I often didn’t understand the (many, many!) references he made throughout the book, a decent number of which were in relation to Karl Marx, Ernst Bloch (a German philosopher), and Christianity. Even the references I did grasp (Shakepeare, T.S. Eliot) were still a little hard to follow because of the dense text. 

That is my first real criticism of the book: For all of the many great ideas Eagleton has (and he has a ton — the dude is a genius), they aren’t all accessible. It’s frustrating when I read academic texts like these that are purposefully opaque. I’ve never understood why it’s more important for these folks to sound smart and important rather than, you know, be clear and direct. I value writing that can easily and succinctly convey ideas, not writing that requires time and energy to decode. Good writing is clear writing; bad writing is not. It’s as simple as that.

I think this was particularly frustrating for me because I could recognize the genius behind Eagleton’s words. For a book where I felt like I spent most of the time being confused, I’ve underlined a surprising number of passages. That’s because, buried in these dense paragraphs, there are gems of ideas — sentences that are almost aphoristic in their simplicity. “Faith and hope are most needed where knowledge is hard to come by” (112) is a great example. Or: “Not to succeed in the end is not necessarily to have failed” (132). Or: “It is not the case that what has still to achieve its full potential is thereby deficient in reality. An egg is not defective because it is not yet a chicken, or a program of political reform vacuous because it falls short of utopia” (104). That’s great stuff!

Another issue I had with the book is that, for a literary critic — you know, an English major — the text lacked basic forms of structure, outline, or organization. I often didn’t know why a certain paragraph would follow the previous one, or what Eagleton’s larger thesis even was. If you remember anything from a writing class you took in high school or college, you probably remember the standard five-paragraph essay: introduction (with a thesis statement!), supporting paragraph 1, supporting paragraph 2, supporting paragraph 3, conclusion. You’re supposed to use topic sentences to inform your reader what each paragraph is about, and you transition smoothly from one paragraph to the end.

But those English-paper fundamentals were practically nonexistent here. Now, to be fair, this is probably more on me than on Eagleton. With a title like Hope Without Optimism, I was hoping (excuse the pun) that it would be more of a how-to: How to have hope without optimism. And this book is definitely not that. Instead, it’s more like a jam band riffing on the idea of hope. I get the sense Eagleton used the Oxford English Dictionary to find as many instances as he could of the word “hope” in classic literature or philosophy so that he could then analyze what aspects or qualities of hope those authors invoke. In that way, the book is more of a collage than an argument. You’ll learn a whole lot about what other people think about hope, and less about how to have that hope yourself.

While the book didn’t end up being the salve I was hoping it would be, time kept moving forward. The press began to question Biden’s ability to win in November. George Clooney began to question Biden’s ability to win in November. Members of Biden’s own party began to question his ability to win in November. Fissures were forming at a time when we needed unity.

I’ll be honest, I was kind of hoping Biden would stay in the race. I’ve participated in enough elections at this point to realize that — at least for presidential elections — polls are often wildly inaccurate. The numbers weren’t looking good, but I was remaining hopeful (with no help from Terry Eagleton). After all, the person most likely to step in for Biden was his own running mate who was already on the ticket. Mostly, though, I was worried that if Biden stepped aside that the Democrats wouldn’t be able to unify around a single candidate quickly enough to avert disaster. I was thinking about 2004, when really it seemed like 1968.

And, look: I was wrong. I was shocked — in a good way — how quickly momentum swung behind Harris once Biden stepped aside. It’s been a beautiful thing to see. Record-breaking donations. A stronger, more unified party. Joy! This election was always going to be between two vastly different mindsets, it just feels even more of a clear distinction now: The Republicans are leaning into doom-and-gloom, while the Democrats are looking forward with resolve.

I watched a good number of speeches from the Democratic National Convention this past week. Michelle and Barack killed it. Bill Clinton dropped a mind-blowing factoid: Since 1989, there have been 51 million jobs created in the United States. Of those, 50 million jobs were created under Democratic presidents, while only 1 million jobs were created under Republican presidents. Tim Walz gave a pep talk, and his son’s tears of joy were heartwarming. Harris closed out the week strong and full of energy.

Now, that said, I recognize that most of the speeches from last week were the grown-up version of someone running for high school class president: “Vote for me and we’ll stock all the vending machines with sodas!” I think a lot of people have been critical of Harris for not releasing specific policies, which: fair. That said, she’s only been the candidate for about a month now, and she’s still Biden’s vice president. There isn’t much she can do in that time to put together detailed policies right now.

But to me this talk about policies feels like a trap for Harris. If she leaned hard into policy then the Republicans would only ramp up attacks that she’s some kind of radical socialist (she’s not, as much as I’d love that to be the case). And if she doesn’t provide policy details, then they can keep up their attack that she doesn’t have anything in place the way that Trump has Project 2025 lined up. So it’s a losing hand either way.

And in the end I don’t think policy is necessarily all that important. That’s because every president is going to do something that will disappoint you or make you angry. It’s the ultimate losing hand. There are over 333 million Americans and only one president. There’s no way one person can ever accomplish everything we want them to. And sometimes they’re going to have to make decisions that go against what we believe. To me, it’s more important to look at what a certain president has done on balance — have they generally done more good things than bad? Are most of their proposals things that will help others or harm others? In general, do they match up with what I believe or not?

This is the problem with a two-party system: It’s probably always going to feel like a lesser-of-two-evils situation. And until ranked choice voting becomes standard, we’re basically stuck with it. Alaska and Maine are now using ranked choice voting for presidential elections, and states like California, Colorado, and Minnesota all have municipalities that use ranked choice voting for local office. The progress may be slow, but it’s happening.

And that, to me, is the biggest takeaway here. It’s what Terry Eagleton said earlier: Even if a policy falls short of utopia that doesn’t mean it’s a waste. We can still move the needle forward. Progress is progress. Do I wish a pro-Palenstinan voice could have spoken at the DNC? Sure. Do I wish we’d stop supplying Israel with so much money and munitions? Absolutely. Do I want universal healthcare? You bet! But I realize that big, systemic changes like these move slower than smaller changes.

Republicans have been good at playing the long game. Whether it’s repealing Roe v. Wade, using REDMAP to control redistricting, or the Southern strategy, Republicans are good at setting their sights on a goal and slowly chipping away until they get what they want. I’d like to see the Democrats take a similar approach. For now, though, I’m happy knowing that the Harris-Walz ticket is more aligned with what I believe than the Trump-Vance ticket is. I’m cautiously hopeful that joy can beat darkness, that normal can beat weird. If nothing else, it’s great to feel like I’m not just voting against Trump but for Harris.