The news today about "Joe Lieberman" winning is yet more evidence of how deeply entrenched in our politics is sectionalism and a conservative vision of our democracy. Conservative democracy remains a force in our democracy in significant part because it can manipulate arcane anti-majoritarian rules in the Senate.
So many hopes will be frustrated by this setback. So many moved to Washington to help secure a better America and they must feel betrayed and abandoned by the president and many in their own party. Some will be tempted to give up hope for the American democracy altogether.
And so I thought it might be time to write about the roots of our hope, about the politics of hope.
Hope is hope based on something we already have, something that is working in us and in our nation. We in the United States have won crucial battles for social justice and equality in the New Deal and the Great Society that represent a deepening and a strengthening of our democracy. Those victories have not gone away. And those victories and others have taken root in us and work in our hearts. Not all of us of course, but far, far more than the polls would suggest.
Even without the Medicare buy-in and the public option we seem poised to win a striking advance in our welfare state, one that is as imperfect as it is important.
Accepting these bitter defeats is hard, especially so since all the advances come from the liberal and progressive elements of the Democratic party and the Obama administration seems determined to openly turn its back against the progressives in the name of political realism.
When was the last time you heard President Obama praise Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat, West Virginia, for the hard effort he has put in on health care reform in the Senate? But President Obama can't say enough about Senator Olympia Snowe (Republican, Maine).
This political calculation from a president who defied the political realists and who preached a politics of hope.
Yet liberals and progressives need to remember that a massive increase in health insurance coverage for nearly all Americans is an historic victory. We also need to remember that our democratic hope does not rest in this or that piece of legislation or victory, as important as they may prove to be.
Democratic hope does not depend on success after success; indeed, hope is hope against hope, hope forged in the face of defeat. And defeat will be ours again and again because a politics of reaction and division is alive and well.
Hope does not depend on whether the White House acknowledges that the future of the Democratic party rests with the progressives, which is of course the simple truth. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the president had the courage to say that.
Hope comes from a resolution that can accept and be strengthened even in defeats or setbacks.
Here is Christopher Lasch on hope, words that keep me from throwing in the towel and hiding out from it all:
Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life to those who lack it...The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope...[A] blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.
Those words are from an entry of mine, "Hope when it seems nowhere in sight," written in 2007, when I thought hope had permanently fled our politics. We are today in a much stronger position that we were then.
It appears that Joseph Lieberman will have his day; small, vindictive men have all too often stood in the way of progress.
And Lieberman's victory is a vivid and bitter reminder that the Senate is perhaps the greatest threat to a stronger democracy capable of facing problems with realism and imagination and devising workable solutions, a democracy that exemplifies the promise of majority rule and individual rights.
When we hope truly our hopes are not foolish nor do they depend on any particular advance or setback. Our hopes are founded in a vision of democracy and social justice that is deeper than we know even as it seems so often to be permanently beyond our grasp.
Yet, when we fail and fail again it seems that our hope has permanently fled. The Senate and its arcane rules against majority rule, the backbone of any democracy cannot forever thwart our hopes. In due time the filibuster itself must be reformed.
And our hope must somehow include our new president who has, in many ways and at least so far, proved a disappointment, a president whose timidity in matters of war and economic policy seem baffling to us.
The is a president who campaigned on the audacity of hope and who, upon winning, seems to have lost his confidence. We have to hope against hope that we are wrong and that he is buying time for the first giant step in health care reform that, along with other marginal gains, may begin to bend the curve of our democracy toward a genuine politics of hope.
Whatever he does, our hope is a hope against hope, a hope that will not be defeated.
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