A Carnival of Hope: Trump, Harris and the Death of Liberalism

How Byung-Chul Han's concept of hope can help us make sense of the election

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The US election is imminent, and we’re caught in a merry-go-round of fever-dream imagery. Donald Trump on Joe Rogan. Kamala Harris laughing with Beyonce and Eminem. Biden calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’, and Trump driving a garbage truck. The air is alive with madness, and the end is nigh.

I feel a strange agony watching US politics. The opposite of schadenfreude: I am lamenting another’s decline from a distance. A better word might be the Portuguese saudade; a deep, nostalgic longing for someone or something loved but painfully absent.

But what have we lost, and can we find it again?

I was contemplating this question in the shower when I noticed a bottle of environmentally friendly shampoo. It was the same brand I saw at an eco-conscious gathering I attended recently. Apparently, countercultural people buy this shampoo like this. As the water swirled around my feet, I felt doubly naked. Capitalism will happily take your rejection and sell it back to you. Don’t like extractive consumerism? No worries! We have a shampoo just for you.

Modern elections are no different. They are consumer culture’s attempt to sell the most sacred gift in the human soul back to us: hope. At the heart of every election is the promise that things will be new. In a polarised society like the US, this newness looks radically different depending on the tribe you belong to.

These tribes are no longer defined by ‘left’ or ‘right’, but by pro or anti-institutional. For those in the Trump insurgency, the political establishment represented by Kamala Harris is an existential threat. For progressives, the MAGA insurgency heralds the end of democracy. As a consumer, it doesn’t matter which you choose, as long as you choose.

Elections are increasingly defined by two awful choices, or as South Park put it during the 2004 election, an ultimatum between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. It’s no surprise that voter turnout has decreased globally since the 1990s, with one in four young people surveyed by the OECD reporting ‘no interest at all’ in politics.

At its heart, this is a problem of disconnection. We feel disconnected from elections partly because we are asked to choose not between ideas or people, but between products. The problem is, we really can’t connect authentically to products. As Joe Rogan repeatedly said in his interview with Trump, politicians don’t speak like normal human beings, and it’s one of the reasons Trump still holds such strong appeal to tens of millions.

However, like my shampoo, Trump is as much a product as the elites he’s supposedly fighting against. Don’t like soft-authoritarian corporate shills as politicians? No problem! Here’s an iconoclastic demagogue that subverts democracy. In consumer capitalism, you can have whatever you want, as long as you want something.

But everyone knows deep down that the system can’t deliver on what it’s selling, and that creates intense cultural dissonance. Politics as we know it can’t ever give us hope, and this lies at the heart of the crisis we’re facing.

To see why, we can look to Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han's new book The Spirit of Hope. Han argues that we live in a climate of fear that suits the ruling classes because it enforces conformity and prevents true thinking. He sees hope, in contrast, as a transcendent energy within the human spirit that can help us move forward.

Hope is not optimism or positive thinking. Hope is born of despair; it emerges from suffering and challenge and directs us toward novelty. As Han puts it, “Hope is a searching movement… that enters into the unknown, goes down untrodden paths… into ‘what-is-not-yet’.”

In contrast, politicians promise to classify and quantify the future, and this has nothing to do with hope. Instead, they’re selling what Han refers to as optimism. Optimism is defined by ‘sheer positivity’ that doesn’t accept suffering and open us to the unknown, but instead sees a fixed future ahead.

“For optimists, the nature of time is closure,” Han explains. “They do not know the future as an open space of possibility.”

Optimists want everything to be better. An egalitarian paradise. The mass deportation of illegal migrants. A saved democracy. It doesn’t matter what that fantasy is; what matters is that it’s closed and fixed because this is what the system can categorise and sell. Hope would destroy the system, because hope moves beyond categorisation and therefore makes the system obsolete. You can’t sell what you can’t define.

We yearn for hope. We need it so profoundly that we will gladly take its substitutes over its absence. We are tired of the Novelty Famine, tired of grievance politics and stuckness, and we need something truly new. The question then becomes, ‘who is offering more hope, Trump or Harris?’ It is the most important question in the world right now, but you may not like the answer.