Events of the past few weeks have heightened my usual pessimism into Schopenhauer territory. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has devolved into a bloody slog that will at the very least cleave away more of its Eastern territory while causing mayhem on world food markets. The Supreme Court is about to destroy the Roe decision in a way likely to undermine other rights. One of the justices is married to a woman involved in a coup against the US, and is facing zero consequences. A court in Minnesota struck down Minneapolis' drive to solve the housing crisis. The Uvalde and Buffalo massacres have been horrifying enough, the lack of action in their aftermath just makes me feel hopeless. The Fed just jacked up interest rates, intentionally tanking the economy to deal with high inflation in an election year. The Republicans currently attacking teachers and trans youth are poised to win power. This same group of people still refuse to acknowledge the enormity of 1/6, and many who fought to overturn the election will soon wield even greater influence. The 1/6 hearings themselves are only really preaching to the converted.
I look out right now at a nation on the brink of autocracy, and a world where nationalism and militarism are ascendant. The conservative capture of the courts means any legislation that could be passed will just get struck down. Those laws won't happen anyway due to gerrymandering, voter suppression, lopsided Senate representation, and Democrats who refuse to suspend the filibuster. President Biden like those Senators and the Democratic leadership in general is stuck in a long-lost past of bipartisan comity and are simply incapable of rising to the fascist threat that we currently face. I do not know how anyone who isn't a right winger can feel optimistic about the future right now.
We have long been in denial about the state of things. A lot of pundits and politicians have conceived of Donald Trump as the cause of conservative extremists, unwilling to see that he was an effect. He was elevated because he spoke to the conservative base, and without him around the base is still persisting. They have been emboldened by how election manipulation and judicial capture have made it possible to govern as a minority. They aren't even trying to gain a mandate, but despite that will likely get a majority in the midterms due to the bad economic situation. Anyone who isn't pessimistic right now is a fool.
At the same time, I would argue that we should put our justified pessimism in the context of American history. I recently read Heather Cox Richardson's West From Appomattox about Reconstruction, and am halfway through Jefferson Cowie's The Great Exception, which puts the New Deal in the context of broader American history. Both historians show that moments of expanded freedom like Reconstruction and the New Deal are rare and fragile in American history. They are exceptions from a norm where policy is governed by the old Jeffersonian ideology, which in modern America effectively means corporate dominance and suppression of minorities. It takes special circumstances to break through the stranglehold of that way of thinking. The rise of Trump presented one of those moments for a "new birth of freedom," but that moment is long gone now.
I've also been digging into the work of Derrick Bell, whose actual (as opposed to mythical) critical race theory is grounded in a highly pessimistic view of American history. According to Bell, the success of the civil rights movement was down to a convergence of interests, not a moral change of heart by white Americans. The Cold War made Jim Crow a counterproductive embarrassment in a decolonizing world, and thus white elites had to acquiesce to protestors. Not out of conviction, but out of material benefit.
I am not sure if I 100% back all of these ideas, but I do think that some pessimism can be useful right now. Yes, pessimism can curdle into toxic inaction and apathy. However, we don't talk enough about how optimism enables deadly complacency. Way too many liberals these days seem to think that history moves in a progressive direction, and that progress is inevitable. They find it to be so inevitable that do not even bother fighting for it.
We need pessimism because we cannot find a way forward until we fully understand how bad things are and how difficult they will be to change. "Just go out and vote" isn't good enough when the votes are suppressed and the courts rigged. If the system is being rigged by a bunch of proto-fascists, then it is also essential to imagine far more radical adjustments to our frame of government. It also means building strong, lasting movements. Those movements need to be there when the right conditions appear to make change, rare as they are. That work is hard, and takes time. It also pays off.
The American labor movement built itself up over many decades and faced many setbacks before the New Deal. Because that movement was there, however, it could mobilize in that moment. A similar moment may not come soon. Heck, it might not happen in the next twenty years. Even so, it's time to put away childish notions of history's arc bending without a whole bunch of us making that bend happen.
I am very pessimistic about the immediate future, but I also know I cannot abandon my children to live the rest of their lives in the kind of world right wingers want to build, We may not be able to stop them for a long, long time, but the only way we ever will is by clearly seeing just exactly what we are up against.
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