As the Right Rises, Hope Falls

Image - Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network

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Hope is not an uncommon word to be thrown around in politics. Every politician, activist, or organisation would claim that their ideas fundamentally hope for a better world. But not every idea told is rooted in hope, and some go actively against it.

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Zak Polanski, leader for the Greens party for England and Wales, has burst onto the political scene. His new campaign slogan ‘Make Hope Normal Again’ (link to his campaign, a speech link maybe) implies that hope has been distant in UK politics. He indirectly suggests that this is the effect of the rise of the right and Reform UK (link to where he has suggested this). A supporter of right-wing policies would disagree that their vision isn’t rooted in hope. They hope for a different sort of utopian world, but who's to say that this isn't hope?

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Conservatism, and by extension fascism, both play into the idea of tradition. Particularly in modern politics, voices of these two ideologies hope for a return to a previous world. For Reform UK, it is ‘takeback our borders,’ for Donald Trump it is ‘Make America Great Again.’ Both share the similar theme that to progress, we must return to the past. That the world that we have created has failed, and that we need to return to a previous date when everything was better.

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Their frustration is justified. The hope of a greater world has been let down again as we fall deeper into despair and our infrastructure crumbles. However, conservatism and fascism use this sense of frustration, mask it as hope, and try to stop any progression.

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For Ernst Bloch in his book ‘Principle of Hope,’ hope is what drives society forward. Hope sparks imagination, and this imagination allows for a better world to be created. He states that "imaginative ideas are not yet ones which are merely composed of existing material, in arbitrary fashion, but extend, in an anticipating way, existing material into the future possibilities of being different and better.” (Ernst Bloch. 1954. The Principle of Hope. Oxford Blackwell). Bloch perpetuates the idea that the imaginative ‘not yet’, is what will allow for the possibility of better. The ‘not yet’ defines society as a constantly changing landscape, where a utopian future is not the end goal, but the process of societal evolution. Hope is what provides humans with the tools to achieve that thinking, and therefore it is integral to hope for the ‘not yet’, to drive society forward.

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To Bloch, frustration is fundamentally the hope of the ‘not yet’ not coming to fruition. The working man feels frustrated because the hope they had in the political leader who was going to lower all their bills and double their bank account never materialised. This frustration leaves the man wishing to go back to a time where he had hope. This man must suffer in a state of hopelessness, where he is filled with nostalgic fantasies.

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The ‘not yet’ is totally foreign to right wing thought. The constant obsession of what has been defines their cynicism. The world can’t get better than what has come previously and that the ‘not yet’ is merely a fantasy. This way of thinking allows for them to capitalise on the frustration that the man feels, the sense of hopelessness they encounter being fuel for the right.

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You see this in our politics of today. Nigel Farage is pumping out anti-immigrant propaganda while the working man can’t afford next month's rent. This man’s hopelessness is then turned, not on the powers that control his material surroundings, but to Farage’s calls for us to ‘take our borders back.’ This man’s hopelessness, this man's frustration, is fuel to Farage. He can tell you that this problem arrived when the boats docked and he says that if we go back to a time when the migrants stayed at home, house prices will return to what they were. This was back when the man had hope, when he had the ability to imagine a better future.

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This message annihilates the idea of the ‘not yet.’ The man can no longer visualise the utopia, as the nostalgia of his past life promises a return of hope. But this isn’t hope, but merely the retraction of human development. The man turns cynical. The society he lives within can only go one way, and that is back.

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This is the antithesis of Blochian philosophy. As we lose our hope, we allow for society to move back and lose the progress we once celebrated. The vulnerable are targeted, the weak are disposed.

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It’s a slippery slope. Bloch’s philosophy tells us that we must remain hopeful of a better world. If we don’t, if we let cynicism step in, if we lose our ability to feel hope, then we can no longer progress. The final sentence of Bloch's ‘principle of hope’ states “the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.”

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Our hope is what changes lives, what drives us and our society forwards. Hopelessness, cynicism, frustration, they inhibit this, and they allow for bad actors to take charge. Hope is fundamental to a just society. It breaks the division among us and delivers the better world of the ‘not yet’.