The Case for Hope in an Exhausted America

Hope and optimism are not the same

This piece originally appeared in the March 25, 2026 edition of Glamour Magazine.

On Christmas Day, 1916, nearly a thousand people filed into Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol to mourn a thirty-year-old woman named Inez Milholland. She had been a suffragist, a lawyer, and one of the most electrifying public speakers of her generation. A month earlier, she had collapsed at a podium in Los Angeles while delivering a speech on behalf of women’s suffrage. Her last public words were a question directed at President Woodrow Wilson: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” She died on November 25, 1916.

At her memorial, the suffragist Maud Younger delivered a eulogy that contained a line I have not been able to stop thinking about. “No work for liberty can be lost,” she said. “It lives on in the hearts of the people, in their hopes, their aspirations, their activities. It becomes part of the life of the nation.”

I think about that line because I hear, constantly, from people who believe the opposite. They write to me in my DMs by the thousands. They say it at school board meetings. They whisper it to their spouses after the kids go to bed: I don’t think any of this matters anymore. The system is broken. Nothing I do will make a difference. I understand the impulse. I feel the weight of it myself.

We are living through a period of extraordinary political exhaustion. Trust in virtually every major American institution has fallen to historic lows. We struggle to talk to our own family members about the issues that matter most. Social media has trained us to experience every political development as either a catastrophe or a victory, with nothing in between. Many Americans have responded in the most human way possible: they have decided to stop caring.

I am here to argue that this is precisely the wrong response — and that hope, far from being naive, is the most rational and historically grounded stance available to us.

Let me be clear: I do not mean optimism. Optimism is the vague belief that things will probably work out. Hope is something more rigorous than that. Hope is the recognition that the future has not yet been finalized — and that we get a say in how the story ends. It is a claim about what is still possible, and it is a claim that American history validates again and again.

The abolitionists of the 1830s spoke against slavery when the institution was expanding and most white Americans considered it permanent. The labor organizers of the early twentieth century fought for the eight-hour workday when factory owners held enormous political power. The civil rights activists of the 1950s sat at lunch counters in a country where much of the population actively opposed their cause. In every one of these moments, the story looked like it was already written. It was not. None of these people acted because they were confident they would win. They acted because they understood that the ending was not yet decided — and they refused to let someone else write it for them.

1963 sit-in demonstration at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, MS

And here is the part we too often forget: it worked. Not perfectly. Not completely. Not without terrible cost. But the arcs of those movements bent toward the outcomes their participants fought for. The Thirteenth Amendment passed. The Fair Labor Standards Act became law. The Civil Rights Act was signed at a time when most Americans thought the government was pushing integration too fast. The lesson of American history is not that progress is inevitable. It is that progress is possible — but only when enough people decide to act as though it is.

So what does it look like to choose hope in 2026?

It looks like paying attention to the right things. Most of the decisions that directly affect your life — your children’s schools, your roads, your water, your local courts — are made by state legislators and school board officials whose names most Americans cannot recite. Your local government is where your voice actually carries weight. Learn who represents you. Show up to a meeting. It is less dramatic than posting online, and a hundred times more effective.

It looks like talking to people. Research consistently shows that the most powerful antidote to polarization is genuine conversation across lines of difference — not debate, but the simple act of asking someone you disagree with why they believe what they believe, and then actually listening.

And it looks like staying in the game. Vote in every election, including the ones nobody talks about. Support local journalism. Volunteer for something that has nothing to do with a political party. The most meaningful civic work in America has always been done by people who were not famous, not powerful, and not certain they would succeed.

Inez Milholland never had the chance to vote. She died four years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. But Maud Younger was right about her. No work for liberty can be lost. The words Milholland spoke, the crowds she moved — all of it lived on in the women who picked up her banner and carried it forward, who picketed the White House with her final question on their signs: How long must women wait for liberty?

The answer turned out to be four more years of sacrifice, struggle, and hope that must have felt, at times, completely irrational.

That is what hope is. It is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is the decision to do work that makes sense regardless of how it turns out, because no work for liberty — no act of citizenship, no conversation held in good faith, no vote cast in an off-year election — is ever truly lost. The Americans who came before us made that choice again and again, in times far darker than our own. We are not too broken, too divided, or too tired to do the same.

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