According to bestselling author and educator Sharon McMahon, we are living in a time of extreme political exhaustion. But instead of giving up, she suggests looking to history to see what is possible. Here, she makes the case for choosing hope.
On Christmas Day, 1916, nearly a thousand people filed into Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol to mourn a 30-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.
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For many women, staying calm isn’t an instinct or a personality trait. It’s a skill honed over a lifetime, cultivated in the countless moments when authority feels unpredictable and safety feels fragile.
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.
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.