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THE AUTHORITARIANS WANT YOUR HOPELESSNESS—DON’T GIVE IT TO THEM
 
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Emese Ilyés
September 17, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ This is how authoritarians operate: they flourish when the
population feels despair, turning even moments that could bring us
together into tools for separation. _

People gather in Houston as part of June's No Kings nationwide
demonstrations., Raquel Natalicchio/AP

 

This summer, hundreds of volunteers have taken up positions as
immigration court watchers at federal courthouses across the country.
They sit quietly with immigrants awaiting hearings, gently explaining
that masked ICE agents might detain them regardless of the outcome.
They collect vital information, like names, phone numbers, and
emergency contacts, becoming sometimes the only link between people
who, as Tim Murphy has written for the Marshall Project
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are “effectively disappeared” and the outside world. These
volunteers witness unspeakable brutality but must practice stoicism,
watching as people who showed up dutifully for routine hearings are
led away by masked agents. This is radical hope in action, refusing to
look away, showing up daily, practicing the discipline of resistance
when the world feels hopeless.

This is what hope looks like in 2025: not empty words to soothe aching
hearts, but clipboards and “know your rights” flyers tucked under
neighbors’ arms as they knock on doors, warning about escalating ICE
activity and building community defense networks
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It’s the daily practice of refusing the despair that authoritarians
need us to feel.

THE HOPELESSNESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

We’re eight months into watching an unabashed authoritarian takeover
unfold, eight months of norms and democratic institutions unraveling
before our eyes. Trump accepts bribes from foreign leaders while RFK
undermines public health science. The opposition’s inevitable
despair has always been part of the flood-the-zone strategy of the
right. And the Big Tech oligarchs who built the platforms where we
spend most of our days
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long ago resigned themselves to visions of hopeless futures for all of
us.

For themselves, they’re building something different entirely. Elon
Musk [[link removed]] has been explicit
about his plan: Mars colonization as a means to survive what he calls
an “inevitable” extinction event on Earth. While the rest of us
face an increasingly unlivable planet, SpaceX promises cities on Mars
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all the amenities, including iron foundries, pizza joints, you name
it.” These transhumanist tech oligarchs
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their escape routes over black-tie dinners with Trump
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the White House while watching the world burn with wine glasses in
hand.

Hopelessness makes money for tech platforms that profit from extreme
content and division. Tech platforms have built an outrage-for-profit
model that thrives on divisive content—a 2021 study
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leaning on political extremism were 67% more likely to be retweeted.
These algorithms keep us trapped in apps, generating more money for
oligarchs while keeping us perpetually outraged at each other. The
hopelessness this creates maintains exactly the political polarization
Trump needs to convince us we’re each other’s enemies instead of
our greatest hopes.

We live in a world now where the algorithms can suffocate us with
graphic images of public violence while barely acknowledging yet
another school shooting (as of September 10th, this was
the 47th school shooting
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When we witnessed a deeply divisive act of political violence as
right-wing political figure Charlie Kirk
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campus, rather than unifying us, Trump framed his response to further
intensify division
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evidence claiming the extreme left was to blame. This is how
authoritarians operate: they flourish when the population feels
hopeless, turning even moments that could bring us together into tools
for separation.

Trump peddles paranoia and fear because he knows how effective that is
in separating us from one another. Despite evidence to the
contrary—crime has been trending downward for decades
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tries to convince us that cities are dangerous and we should fear each
other. Using these lies, he further erodes democratic norms as he
militarizes our city streets responding to manufactured crises rather
than meeting the needs of the community
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Authoritarian takeover of democracy accelerates when the population
feels hopeless, which is exactly why we must refuse that trap.

CRITICAL HOPE VS. HOKEY HOPE

Education scholar Jeff Duncan-Andrade
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a crucial distinction between what he calls “critical hope” and
“hokey hope.” Hokey hope is what you might have expected from this
article’s title—the meaningless “thoughts and prayers” that
follow school shootings, the cruel lies about bootstraps and
persistence that ignore the barriers in the way of survival. As
Duncan-Andrade writes, hokey hope is actually the enemy of hope
because it sedates us with false comfort.

Critical hope, by contrast, demands commitment to active struggle.
It’s what author and organizer Mariame Kaba means when she says
”hope is a discipline
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According to Kaba hope isn’t an emotion. Hope is not optimism. The
hope that she has written about is a grounded hope that is practiced
every day. We actually practice it all the time.

Hope is something we generate, not something that settles on us like a
ray of sunshine. It’s grounded in the everyday and requires daily
practice. When neighbors organize mutual aid networks to ensure
community members know their constitutional rights, when communities
refuse to let ICE terrorize them in isolation, when organizations
mobilize to accompany people in court—this is hope being forged.

Kaba reminds us that hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness,
frustration, or anger—emotions that make total sense given our
circumstances. As she acknowledges, “in the world which we live in,
it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all
bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that
people are evil and bad at the bottom.” But radical hope is about
believing in the potential for transformation and change,
and _practicing_, _actioning_ that belief every single day. It’s
about being of the world and in the world, not escaping to Mars or
retreating into algorithmic bubbles designed to make us feel
powerless.

YOUR PRACTICE, OUR FUTURE

This is what I’ve been asking myself. How can I generate radical
hope in my life? What is my daily practice that is working toward
transformation? That’s what I want to ask you. How can you generate
radical hope in your life? Can you start a study and struggle
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friends? Can you gather people to walk door-to-door sharing
information about constitutional rights? Can you make sure people in
your life are registered to vote and engaged in local elections?

The authoritarians and tech oligarchs are counting on our despair.
They need us to believe transformation is impossible, that we should
accept their visions of hopeless futures while they plan their
escapes. Our radical hope—practiced daily, grounded in community,
committed to active struggle—is the antidote to their strategy.

Despair is both understandable and not an option. The choice to refuse
this hopeless vision of our future can be part of our strategy for the
world we’re fighting to build. What is your practice of hope? You
don’t need to feel hopeful to start, you need to start to generate
hope. Pick one concrete action: door-to-door canvassing, flyering,
voter registration drives, know-your-rights workshops, setting up a
table to share resources. Hope is what emerges when you show up. Start
now. Get others to join you.

_Emese Ilyés is a critical social psychologist and participatory
action researcher whose work examines community resistance and
collective survival in the face of authoritarianism. Her research
focuses on grassroots movements and mutual aid networks._

* Authoritarianism
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* Hopelessness
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* Struggle
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