Most of us know the President of the United States is not elected; rather they are selected by a mostly invisible cadre of elite power brokers who believe in growing their own power at all costs. In the end, an enormous amount of energy and attention is diverted to national elections precisely because it does not offer any chance for real change.
Right now new candidates like Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul are making grandiose speeches and promises of renewal to what everyone knows is a battered and tired nation. Every four years the faces change, but the message remains the same. Their political action committees have names like “Believe Again” and “Our American Revival.” Well, I guess they do sound better than William McKinley’s 1900 campaign slogan, “Let Well Enough Alone.”
In 2008, Barack Obama exemplified that message as clearly as any candidate in recent memory. Hope and change were the promises then, first one, then the other. Put your hopes in me and my campaign, and I will bring you change. This is a common message in our society. The message of the modern political campaign is fundamentally religious. “Believe in me and I will give you new life.” Politicians for the most part do not appeal to our reasoning, but rather to our emotional desires for meaning and purpose. National politics is always a tribal activity.
Of the two messages, hope and change, change is more ill-defined and nebulous. It can mean anything or nothing. Everyone can pour their vision for a better country into change. It can contain as many or as few specifics as necessary to sell the image the politician wants to project.
But hope is the more dangerous of the two terms. There is a widespread belief in the US that hope gives us strength and that by refusing to give up hope we are empowered to keep going and to be stronger as individuals. Our belief in hope is near sacrosanct. We tell ourselves, “We can never give up hope!” But hope conceived with the surrender of our better reasoning does not empower us, but rather those we place our hopes in. Hope is optimism, and as historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler once said, “Optimism is cowardice.”
Hope is a Mortgage
When we take out a mortgage on a house, there are many things in our life that we give up. We tie ourselves to that place. We constrain ourselves financially. We accept the responsibility that comes with maintaining a home. We do all of this because we believe these sacrifices will help us in the long term. Sometimes these sacrifices work to our benefit and sometimes they don’t.
Hope is a mortgage. Hope is not like a mortgage. It is a mortgage. By hoping, we suspend what is good for us now and look to a future we believe will be better as a result.
President Obama insist that hope is the fuel that inspired the founding fathers, the civil rights marches, and other agents of change. But this is a subtle twist on what the word really means. Hope is not fuel to engage in the now; it is first a passive state of mind. Hope only bears fruit when it encourages actions which are beneficial in the long run.
When a politician asks us to hope in their campaign, he insist it will make us stronger. But taking on hope is taking on a debt, and in the world of politics it is rarely repaid in full. Hope is the surrender of reason. You give of yourself in both time and money. For a politician who wants to become president, hope is a resource they harvest to fuel the zeitgeist, giving them an air of legitimacy on their coronation day.
Except for the pathetic few who maintain hope year after desperate year, the winning candidate’s promises are always exposed as fraudulent. The media laments this sad fact as the reality of politics, but never admits that hope was fraudulent to begin with. Politicians are called naive, but never liars. That is taboo. To do that might undermine the next prodigal son or daughter slated to rejuvenate the political system with new hopes and new debts of the soul.
Again and again change remains elusive, but that won’t stop the next politician from trying to seize on hope.
Promises of Voting
A few months ago, President Obama suggested the country consider implementing mandatory voting. “It would be transformative if everybody voted,” he said. “That would counteract [the effect of money in politics] more than anything.” Supporters of mandatory voting hope it will rejuvenate the people’s power in the country and reduce the effectiveness of money in politics. How such a mandate would change the fact that there are only two viable political parties is never addressed.
By now, I suspect you are beginning to see that hope has a duality to it. It is the suspension of the now in favor of a future that we imagine is possible. But consider that today, we are slaves. Today we have no representation in our government. Today we are little more than pawns in the battles of massive power brokers who claim to be our leadership. President Obama asks us to hope, to suspend the present on a mortgage that the future will give us our freedom.
This promise of transformation comes from the “hoper” in chief, a man who has failed to deliver on meaningful change in 7 years of managing the machine. We continue to embrace this message election after election knowing the promise to be hollow. We suspend our critical faculties and pick a man to believe in — Ron Paul, Barack Obama, Ross Perot. We choose, then we hope. But hope is analogous to covering our eyes in the dark praying there are no monsters.
