The Delusion of Hope

The phrase “audacity of hope”—the title of Barack Obama’s best-selling book—comes, as NBC’s Tim Russert reminded viewers of Tuesday’s Democratic debate, from a sermon by the Senator’s pastor back home, an alleged anti-Semite with an admiration for Louis Farrakhan. And it is a phrase that starry-eyed Obama supporters like to think describes their mission.

The junior Senator from Illinois indeed has inspired a religious following, especially among the young and other demographics susceptible to irrational surges of idealism. Even the previously disenchanted and disenfranchised, the party establishment as well as the grass-root fringes, have heeded the altar call, and have been born again in Hope.

Hope—a bright, if not entirely reasonable, optimism for the future, for individuals’ ability to “create change”—has become the rallying cry of a new generation of politics.

As one surveys the epicenter of this revival—the college campus—one clearly sees that Hope abounds. Audacity, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found. For nothing requires less courage than aping the dominant ideology at these bastions of political uniformity: this year, the year of Barack, that ideology is Hope.

In endorsing Obama, the Yale Daily News confidently observed that he “seemed genuine”: an Obama administration “promises a reassertion of the natural, American optimism” and “new reforms.” The force of such argument, apparently, does not require any specific examples, for “hope fills a depressed town.” And in a town like New Haven, that is all that is needed.

The Daily Princetonian, likewise, joined the choir, linking Obama’s “relative lack of experience” and “naivete in foreign affairs” with his “potential for healing the divisions of the nation and moving us forward to a better day.” The junior Senator “points us toward what is possible to achieve if we can unite in common cause.” His very words stir us to action, to forget the sobering reality of recent experience, to believe that anything, no matter how impossible, is possible.

Our own campus’s paper of record, The Crimson, also could not permit silence to drown out hope. Only Barack Obama, it opined, has the “vision required not only to be president, but to fundamentally alter the way our broken political system functions” and a singular “desire to see dramatic change in the political system.” Brimming with nostalgia for the 1970s, those halcyon years for campus radicals, The Crimson can only view the political landscape through rose-colored glasses.

Certainly it is understandable, if not forgivable, that college students seem particularly attracted to the promise of a better future, to “change” in general, to the unlimited capacity for man’s moral perfection. They read about such fancies in their social theory classes; political “science” teaches how to practice them. Administrators constantly advise their charges, in vapid aphorisms, to challenge authority, to question assumptions, to follow their dreams.

But this outlook, which its adherents often contrast with the cynicism of their elders, cannot hope to live up to expectations. The art of politics demands prudence—the rational faculty that determines, in a given situation, what is possible and practicable. Experience, habit, and keen observation help develop this faculty—an unadorned albeit indomitable hope is only a lazy substitute.

Aristotle with good reason observed that the young man is not a proper student of politics: his temperament is too rash and his experience too slight to make consistently sound judgments about the inexact science of politics. But our society consistently spurns such warnings, exalting “participation,” and ever devising new strategies to persuade the “youth” to vote. Barack Obama may have finally found one: appealing to the vanity of young age.

“Change” takes time; it requires patience, which our generation has little these days. For we live in an ever-globalizing world, where communication is instantaneous, where technology continues to erode the limitations of man’s natural capacities, and where politics is now everyone’s favorite reality show.

Barack Obama’s stripe of “hope” does not require any effort, any commitment: it demands only that close one’s eyes and ears to the difficult or uncomfortable realities with which one would rather not have to bother. Immediate gratification is the ethos of our age.

Barack Obama is light on both substance and experience, but such issues do not give the students of elite universities any pause—for his syrupy words more than satisfy their untrained and immature palates.

Christopher B. Lacaria ’09 is a history concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.