You may still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not: Radical hope in an age of hatred

Democracy, I've long argued, cannot survive without empathy. But empathy isn't merely a political necessity—it's the essential ingredient for any world worth inhabiting. Yet we live in an era of profound empathetic failure.

The contemporary moment doesn't simply tolerate hatred; it unleashes and legitimizes it. What begins as isolated incidents metastasizes into accepted norms of policy and institutional repression. Hate crimes spike across campuses and communities, morphing into legislation, Supreme Court briefs, and political platforms. The machinery of democracy itself becomes a vehicle for systematic dehumanization. Faced with such overwhelming systemic injustice, many feel paralyzed, trapped between futile resistance and complicit silence.

In these dark and disorienting times, individuals confront choices that extend beyond the familiar trinity of fight, flight, or surrender. Ashley Nickels—a scholar I've long admired—and her collaborator Camille Tinnin, writing from Kent State University, offer a fourth path. Yes, that Kent State, where bullets once shattered the illusion that state violence couldn't reach America's privileged spaces. Their location isn't coincidental; it's foundational to their argument.

Nickels and Tinnin propose what they call "radical hope."

Radical hope is a disciplined approach that combines imagination, resilience, and commitment to social transformation.

The concept isn't new. It emerges precisely in moments when existing paradigms collapse—when traditional ways of thinking and being no longer provide meaningful paths forward. But its application to our current crisis offers fresh insight into how communities might navigate seemingly impossible circumstances.

The Complexity of Survival

Nickels and Tinnin ground their analysis in Jonathan Lear's influential study of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Tribe. I admit, this is not a story I was familiar with. I encourage you to go down a rabbit hole and investigate a fascinating leader and his times.

Lear presents Plenty Coups as exemplifying "radical hope"—the capacity to imagine a good that remains currently incomprehensible. Rather than clinging to an irretrievable past or surrendering to despair, Plenty Coups supposedly embraced an open-ended form of hope that acknowledged rupture while still envisioning meaningful future. Yet this framing, while compelling, may oversimplify a far more complex story.

Plenty Coups navigated circumstances that demanded extraordinary pragmatic wisdom alongside visionary thinking. His approach to survival balanced restoration of his people's prominence in pre-white conflicts with the necessity of adapting to a Manifest Destiny explicitly seeking their destruction.

Baaishtashíile ammaaéhche iiwaa awássahcheewailuuk Ammaaéhche éwahkuulak baaawássahcheewiolak baleetáak - With what the whiteman knows he can oppress us. If we learn what he knows, then he can never oppress us again.

These words reveal a strategy more nuanced than either resistance or accommodation. Plenty Coups understood that survival required not just hope but tactical intelligence—the ability to learn from enemies without losing essential identity, to adapt without assimilating, to imagine futures that honored both continuity and necessary change.

The compromises he made served multiple purposes simultaneously: protecting his tribe, addressing historic grievances with traditional enemies, and recognizing that any sustainable future required navigating American expansion rather than simply opposing it. His willingness to educate, enfranchise, and elevate his people against assaults from both traditional enemies and Manifest Destiny reflected strategic thinking that transcended simple categories of collaboration or resistance. This raises provocative questions about the nature of radical hope itself. Can the pragmatic willingness to learn from oppressors while maintaining cultural integrity truly be considered "radical hope"? Or does it represent something more complex—a form of strategic visioning that refuses to separate hope from power analysis?

Perhaps the real lesson isn't that Plenty Coups embodied pure "radical hope," but that he demonstrated how hope and pragmatism must work together in circumstances where survival itself hangs in the balance. His story suggests that transformative vision requires not just the capacity to imagine better futures, but the strategic intelligence to create pathways toward those futures through existing power structures. This isn't merely about resilience in the face of hardship—though resilience certainly matters. It's about the creative capacity to sustain meaning and identity when the very foundations of your world have shifted, while simultaneously developing the tactical wisdom necessary to navigate hostile terrain. In our current moment—with rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and social fragmentation accelerating—many of us find ourselves in our own version of Plenty Coups' predicament.

The question becomes whether we can learn from his example without romanticizing either his choices or his circumstances.

Dimensions for Action

Despite these complexities surrounding their central example, Nickels and Tinnin identify four crucial dimensions that transform radical hope from abstract concept into actionable practice: envisioning beyond the present, collective resilience, moral anchoring, and sustained engagement.

Envisioning Beyond the Present requires disciplined imagination that transcends current limitations. This isn't daydreaming or wishful thinking, but the rigorous work of expanding possibilities beyond boundaries imposed by those who benefit from existing hierarchies. Hannah Arendt understood this as humanity's capacity for "natality"—our ability to initiate new beginnings even in the darkest circumstances.

Radical hope stakes claim to futures currently considered impossible, demanding that we think beyond the horizons that oppressive systems seek to impose on our collective imagination. Participatory visioning processes in post-conflict societies demonstrate this principle in action, creating spaces where communities can articulate shared aspirations and imagine pathways toward justice and renewal.

Collective Resilience transforms individual despair into shared agency through relational networks that sustain long-term efforts toward transformation. I am not sold on utilizing resilience as the anchoring word, but that is besides the point. The concept refers to a form of collective action combined with collective endurance. Superseding cultural, racial, and class boundaries. Activists don't simply endure governmental failure—they act to amplify residents' voices, distribute essential resources, and hold authorities accountable. Despair can be transformed into shared agency and actionable solutions.

This goes beyond mutual support, though care remains essential. Collective resilience involves building the institutional capacity necessary for sustained resistance and alternative creation. It requires developing what scholar Brandi Blessett describes as,

Non-traditional strategies to navigate the world, support each other, and advocate for ideas that empower other oppressed groups.

Moral Anchoring grounds hope in justice, equity, and human dignity, ensuring that transformative action remains aligned with ethical commitments rather than drifting into expediency or wishful thinking. Without moral foundations, hope can justify harmful compromises or collapse into mere sentiment. Caution, must be warranted, a caution I did not find in my reading of the article.

I find the best exploration of moral anchoring's promises and harms to come from Wendy Brown, who presents a compelling treatise on Weber and Nihilism. In brief, Brown argues that morality today is unanchored, resulting in a value crisis, and utilized on a whim; personalized, politicized and instrumentalized in her own words in an interview at The Nation:

Compressed to hash tags, bumper stickers, yard signs, ephemeral group identities or advertising bait… values lose their depth and endurance…their capacity to shape moral order.” Hence the decline, she continues, in legislative and popular commitments to substantive democratic debates about values, including the value of truth, and the rise of polemics and power politics in their stead.

Perhaps we have some work to do on this component of Radical Hope.

Sustained Engagement transforms hope from emotional state into what prison abolition organizer Mariame Kaba calls "a disciplined practice." This involves building alternative institutions that embody desired values while creating rituals and collective practices that provide emotional endurance for long-term struggle.

Mutual aid networks address immediate needs while fostering capacity for systemic change. Cooperative structures resist structural harm while creating sustainable alternatives. Shared meals, storytelling, and commemorations of progress create spaces for reflection and relational bonding that help activists navigate the emotional toll of advocacy work.

Beyond Simple Categories

There is both power and limitations to radical hope as a framework for understanding transformative action. Like Plenty Coups' story, therein lies a complexity of navigating between vision and pragmatism, between hope and strategic analysis. Political scientist Albert Hirschman identified three responses to institutional decline: exit, voice, or loyalty. Public administration scholars have added dissent as a fourth option. But radical hope transcends these categories entirely, insisting on building something genuinely new rather than accepting current realities or seeking return to imagined better past.

Yet this transcendence requires grappling honestly with power dynamics and strategic constraints that pure hopefulness might overlook. Plenty Coups' example suggests that transformative vision must be coupled with tactical intelligence—the capacity to work within existing systems while maintaining commitment to fundamental change.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of radical hope lies not in its optimism but in its refusal to separate vision from analysis, emotion from strategy, individual transformation from collective action. It demands that we hold multiple truths simultaneously: acknowledging the depth of our challenges while maintaining faith in our collective capacity to create pathways we cannot yet fully envision. The question isn't whether we can guarantee the survival of our current dreams, but whether we can sustain the practice of dreaming together, building together, hoping together—creating conditions where new dreams, better dreams, dreams we cannot yet imagine, might take root and grow.

Like Plenty Coups learning from his enemies while maintaining his people's essential identity, we must develop the capacity to work within existing systems while never losing sight of the transformed world we seek to create. This requires both the visionary imagination that radical hope celebrates and the strategic wisdom that ensures our vision remains grounded in effective action.

We may still be here tomorrow, and our dreams may not survive in their current form. But the practice of hope itself—disciplined, collectively grounded, strategically informed—creates space for new possibilities to emerge. Dreams rooted in justice rather than privilege, in connection rather than isolation, in transformation rather than mere restoration.