This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
I have been asked to comment on the feeling of powerlessness and resignation on campus, given Trump’s presidential victory last year. If not confronted and challenged, it could lead to an even greater undermining of American democracy after Trump.
What can be done to resist such resignation? I’m an intellectual historian. I deal with ideas, and I essentially focus on philosophy, social theory, intellectual history, and literature. I have to answer this question at the level of ideas.
The first thing I’d say: We have been in a worse situation in this country than the one we’re currently in. If you go back to the 1930s in this country, the economic crisis brought on by the crash of Wall Street resulted in a level of economic chaos that does not describe the current moment.
If you look at race relations in this country, as bad as things are in terms of ICE (which is a national tragedy, in my opinion), and as much as the Trump administration seems to be in the eyes of many a form of white supremacy, things have been much worse in this regard. I’m thinking of the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; I’m thinking of failures of reconstruction; Jim Crow existed well past mid-century.
I only mention this because perhaps part of the feeling of fatalism has to do with not putting the current moment in a wider historical context. And when we do that—when we put it in a wider historical context and realize that some of the challenges that we’re having today are not unprecedented—then we recognize that those challenges were overcome. In some ways, we see that the fears of racial extremism in the interwar period gave way to the New Deal in the United States. The fascist period in Europe, for instance, was followed by the rise of the welfare state in these very places. All of which is to say that maybe, as the famous philosopher Roberto Unger once put it, we’re living in a counter revolutionary interlude to a wider revolutionary moment.
I think if you are a liberal, and I think if you are a progressive, one of the things that you are committed to, even in times of despair, is a view that ultimately has some commitment to the belief that things can change for the better. And it doesn’t necessarily involve a philosophy of history or some kind of theological view that necessitates that this happens. Rather, it’s a conviction. And that conviction has to be maintained even in times that are as challenging as this.
So, one of the things I would suggest is how history can be used to encourage us. If we are going to look at the fall of the Weimar Republic, for instance, and say, “Well, that’s happening today with the fall of American democracy,” we can also look to history and say, “Well, what allowed for the recovery of democracy? What allowed for the enlightenment? What allowed for cultural renewal?”
In other words, history works both ways—to just focus on one side of the story, I think, is to give a distorted view of our past. As I speak right now, Mamdani has won the mayoral contest in New York. He started off with 1% support, and less than a year later, he won a majority. So things can happen unexpectedly.
One can’t be predicated on despair, can’t be predicated on a kind of cynical view of history. Rather, what makes you a liberal and what makes you a progressive is that you have the conviction and the faith, the political faith, to hold on to the promise of change for the better.
My encouragement: don’t allow a certain kind of fatalism rooted in negative historical occurrence to guide and direct how we’re understanding the current moment. That’s not to deny reality. It’s simply to change the feeling of powerlessness, the feeling of resignation. We are never resigned.
That’s more of a pep talk and more of a sermon than any kind of practical thing, but sometimes, I fear that we need that kind of talk—we need a good sermon to inspire us.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is an Assistant Professor in the College of Social Studies. He can be reached at dsteinmetzje@wesleyan.edu.
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