The Politics of Hope and how it became a weapon for discrediting conservatism

Yet conserving hope and giving it meaning requires that it is rooted in conservative values

Photo by Ploegerson on Unsplash

In recent decades the sentiment of Hope has been hi-jacked, rebranded, politicised and packaged as the Politics of Hope. Those who advocate this rebranding exercise seek to harness the inspirational qualities of hope to support their political project. One of the advantages of the rhetoric of hope is that it is an empty political vessel, which can be filled with whatever meaning or sentiment that is required to appeal to the public. Hope as stand-alone phenomenon that is not attached to any specific aspiration is an ‘apple pie and motherhood term’ designed to capture what is left of society’s feel-good factor.

The rhetoric of the politics of hope lacks substance and conviction. Yet it serves as flexible instrument for image management. As we explain below the politicisation of hope was motivated by the objective of drawing a favourable contrast with its moral opposite – those who supposedly live in the past and who refused to face the future.

In recent times the slogan ‘Hope not Hate’ has served as a slogan for a variety of UK based leftist organisations who oppose movements and people demanding an end to illegal migration. The Hope-Hate couplet aims to establish a clear moral distinction between the pro-migration lobby and the haters, i.e. those who are supposedly dominated by the negative emotion of hate. By claiming a monopoly over the sentiment of Hope the pro-migration lobby seeks to establish the moral high ground against their morally inferior ‘hopeless’ opponents.

The narrative of the politics of hope seeks to fill the gap left by the difficulty that western societies have in projecting a positive political orientation towards the future. Hope serves as an emotional substitute for future oriented political thinking. That is why politicians often perform the role of being the messenger of hope. The use of hope as a key message of a political public relations exercise was perfected by Democratic Party operators in the United States. During his 1992 presidential campaign Bill Clinton hit upon the idea of using his hometown of Hope, Arkansas as an inspirational metaphor for his messaging. His frequently repeated refrain ‘I still believe in a place called Hope’ highlighted his humble origins and his strong belief in the American Dream[i]. This was also the recurrent theme during his acceptance speech of the Democratic presidential nomination in July 1992, which opened with the statement, ‘tonight I want to talk with you about my hope for the future, my faith in the American people and my vision of the kind of country we can build together’. He concluded his speech with the sentence, ‘I end tonight where it all began for me: I still believe in a place called Hope’[ii].

During his election campaign and afterwards, Barack Obama self-consciously branded himself as the messenger of hope. As one study noted, ‘widely described as iconic, in 2008 a poster with a stylized stencil portrait and the simple word ‘hope’ on it came to represent the campaign of what would be the first African American president of the United States’[iii]. Hope became the rhetorical signature of the Obama years in the United States. In turn the civil right activist, Jesse Jackson was hailed as ‘ambassador of hope’ at a memorial attended by the Clintons, Obama and Biden in March 2026[iv].

The politicization of hope has succeeded in turning its narrative into a common currency of political life in the Anglo-sphere. As one study observed; ‘with its ascendancy in American political discourse during the past few years, hope has become a watchword of politics’[v]. The Introduction to The Oxford Compendium of Hope states that ‘Hope is in the air: in many different contexts and across cultural boundaries, the importance of hope is increasingly recognized, both as a resource for dealing with crises and the fuel that is needed to attain’[vi]. The idea of using hope as a resource underlines its opportunistic and instrumental use.

Both implicitly and explicitly hope is presented as an important catalyst for change[vii]. The representation of hope as an agent of change also serves as an implicit critique of conservatism. As we discuss below historically the narrative of the politics of hope has served the role of discrediting the outlook of conservatism.

The attempt to capture hope by servants of a progressivist agenda

It is in the work of the 19^th century American essayist and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson that we find the earliest traces of the anti-conservative impulse driving the politicisation of hope. In a lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston in December 1841, he drew a sharp contrast between the ‘party of Conservatism and that of innovation’[viii]. He asserted that the antagonism between these two parties; ‘is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature’.

Emerson’s aside on the supposed hope-less character of conservatism and its contrast with the party of hope is worth citing at length. He wrote that:

‘There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle, which conservatism is set to defend, is the actual state of things, good and bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of things. Of course, conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success…..Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth. Conservatism is more candid to behold another’s worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory’.

Emerson’ s influence is clearly evident on the writings of the American historian and political commentator Arthur M. Schlesinger. My research into the genealogy of the term politics of hope led me to conclude that Schlesinger’s book, published in 1963 was the first major publication to refer to the Politics of Hope in its title[ix]

Schlesinger’s aim was to dispossess conservatives from possessing the sensibility of Hope. The introduction to his collection of essay begins with a reference to Emerson’s claim that humanity is ‘divided between the party of Conservatism and the party of innovation, between the past and the future, between Memory and Hope’[x]. He claims that his essays are written ‘from the viewpoint of Hope in an age of Memory’. For Schlesinger the conservative age of memory is the 1950s- an age where the ‘consensus of togetherness and the rhetoric of moralism and self-congratulation’ prevailed’ – age of clichés and pieties. He is delighted that the boring conservative 1950s were overtaken by an era that represented the politics of Hope – which apparently also prevailed in the rest of the world. In a celebratory tone. He noted that ‘we no longer seem an old nation, tired, complacent and self-righteous. We no longer suppose that our national salvation depends on stopping history in its track’.

Anyone reading Schlesinger’s Politics of Hope, would draw the conclusion that the decade of the fifties had an ‘air of forgotten nightmare’. For Schlesinger, hope which went AWOL in the conservative 1950s made a triumphant comeback in the 1960s. The contrast between Hope and Reform was summed up by the author’s claim ‘that ‘some people resent change and others welcome it’ and that ‘some are satisfied with what we have, others think we can do better’.

Schlesinger’s naïve emotional investment in the politics of hope was abruptly challenged by the corrosive impact of the Vietnam War on American society. In 1967 he warned that ‘we cannot hope to resolve every contradiction and outcome and overcome all the evils and produce an American solution’[xi]. By the time he published his The Disuniting of America in 1991 he understood that something had gone deeply wrong in his society. Gone was the rhetoric of the confident anti-conservative cultural warrior. Instead, his attempt to find something to hope about came across as desperate. Paradoxically, he temporarily embraced a conservative outlook on which hope could be rescued. He hoped that ‘history can give a sense of national identity’ and that the values of the past can provide the foundation for national unity[xii].

Thrashing about in his quest for an agent of hope Schlesinger looked to the academic community to play the role of an agent of change. In the late sixties he wrote of a ‘favourable difference between the United States today and fifteen years ago – that is, the increased size and weight of the academic community’[xiii]. He declared that;

‘There are twice as many students enrolled in institutions of higher education in the country as there were a short decade ago. By the end of the sixties there will be almost three-quarters of a million teachers in our colleges and universities and seven million students. This amounts to a formidable political constituency- and one which can be counted on to be uncommonly bright, well informed, articulate and irascible’.[xiv]

Like many of his liberal colleagues Schlesinger invested his hope in a constituency that turned out to be fiercely intolerant, emotionally immature and illiberal and fiercely hostile to the traditions on which America was built. These early pioneers of what would turn into the politics of identity and cancel culture appropriated the rhetoric of hope to legitimate their interest.

By the 1990s Schlesinger began to grasp the threat posed by America’s institutions of culture and education. In his chapter ‘The Battle for the Schools’, in his The Disuniting of America Schlesinger decried the influence that identity entrepreneurs have succeeded in exercising over the children’s curriculum. He was also aware of the threat posed by multiculturalism to the cohesion of American society. Though Schlesinger was sensitive to the divisive impact of the shift from the ideals of the melting pot to that of multiculturalism, he like many others tended to underestimate the durable corrosive influence of identity politics. Ever an optimist, he concluded on an quixotic note, ‘I believe the campaign against the idea of common ideals and single society will fail’[xv]. Were he alive today, he would be shocked by the intensity of cultural and identity related polarisation in American society. The dominant sentiment communicated in The Disuniting of America is not the Politics of Hope but a mixture of anxiety bordering on despair.

For a conservative commitment to hope.

It is absurd to imagine that hope can be monopolised by a single cultural and political movement. In the real-world people who hope to reappropriate the legacy of the past collide with activist who hope to rid society of its historical traditions. Hope can be for outcomes that we perceive as noble or as ignoble. Nazis had their hopes about the future of the Third Reich just as much as those who hoped that the world should be rid of their influence.

In a mature and civilised society, the hope for change exists in a creative tension with the aspiration to conserve the humanity’s civilisational accomplishment. The importance of acknowledging the conservative dimension of hope is eloquently explained by Alan Mittleman in his study, Hope in a Democratic Age (2009). Mittleman argues that society ‘needs both emancipatory and conserving hope’ and he insists that hope ‘can be found in the active safeguarding of traditions’ and not as we mistakenly believe ‘in the abandonment and escape from traditional norms and ways of life’[xvi].

Hope becomes emptied of meaning if it is detached from the experience of the past and dispossessed of the hard-learned insights of previous generations. As Mittleman explains; ‘’hope finds meaning in the depths of experience and finds those depths protected by the best of inherited traditions and practices. Hope wants meaning to endure’. And in a warning to the anti-traditionalist he observes, ‘Hope in a democratic age, in a liberal society, should be deep and wise; it should draw strength from the abiding values of society and from the ancient traditions of value that precede the society’[xvii]

In an ideal world the goals of freedom an equality would run in tandem with older republican values such as community, sovereignty, solidarity and respect for tradition and hope would lubricate all these seemingly contradictory ideals. The binary short-sighted vision proposed by supporters of the politicisation of hope willingly ignore the fact that no one possesses a copyright over hope. Through reducing hope to a tool of propaganda they also fail to grasp what is uniquely important about this sensibility.

Rather than representing hope as an instrument of politics it should be seen as merely an attitude towards the future. When hope acquires influence over human behaviour it helps people to overcome their fears. It banishes ‘despair, renewing our power for love and work’[xviii]. Following the insight of Aristotle and later that of Thomas of Aquinas, hope should be understood as an important virtue. It is a sensibility that involves choice and a capacity to choose well. As a virtue it is far too important to be usurped by unprincipled political activist who main aim is to undermine the moral integrity of people of a conservative disposition. As it happens when it comes to taking our classical virtues more seriously those who wish to conserve our traditions have some very important things to say.

This substack is based on serious research and is inspired by the conviction that readers of Roots & Wing are motivated to engage with challenging content. Essays such as the one on In Defence of the Right to Hate (see below) and the current discussion on The Politics of Hope aim to interrogate the dominant narrative prevailing in the Western world. Those interested in this project should contact me to indicate what other hegemonic terms and words need they think needs critical unpacking.

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[i] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-little-rock-arkansas-accepting-election-the-42nd-president-the-united-states

[ii] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-17-mn-3671-story.html

[iii] Jakob Huber (2024) ‘Introduction: the political philosophy of hope’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, p.877.

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/06/jesse-jackson-memorial-service-chicago

[v] Schlosser, J.A., 2013. “Hope, danger’s comforter”: Thucydides, hope, politics. The Journal of Politics, 75(1), p.169.

[vi] Scioli, A. and van den Heuvel, S.C. eds., 2026. The Oxford Compendium of Hope. Oxford University Press.

[vii] https://features.york.ac.uk/big-questions/politics-of-hope/

[viii] https://emersoncentral.com/texts/nature-addresses-lectures/lectures/the-conservative/

[ix] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr (1962) The Politics of Hope and The Bitter heritage, American Liberalism in the 1960s, Princeton University Press : Princeton

[x] Schlesinger Jr (1962), p.8.

[xi] Schlesinger Jr (1962), p.385.

[xii] Schlesinger, A.M. Jr (1998) The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, Norton : New York, p.146.

[xiii] Schlesinger Jr (1962) p.502.

[xiv] Schlesinger Jr (1962) p.502.

[xv] Schlesinger (1998) p.136.

[xvi] Mittleman, A. (2009( Hope In A Democratic Age p.15, Oxford University Press,p.262,

[xvii] Mittleman (1998) p.262

[xviii] Mittleman (1998) p.38