A lot of people asked, and it's not surprising that they did, about how do you continue to be hopeful,

how do you continue to feel like there's worthwhile work to be done to change the world,

even as defeat does seem to be done to change the world even as defeat does seem to be like one of

the common conditions or experiences of being on the political left. How does one

remain hopeful? How does one continue to feel like there's useful

and necessary work to be done and get up every day and do it?

Well how would you answer the hope question as someone who's not religious?

Because my answer does lean on religion some. the hope question as someone who's not religious.

Because my answer does lean on religion some.

Well, I mean, I've written about this a few times,

including for you, Matt, about how defeat

and sort of the melancholy that accompanies defeat is something that left movements have a kind of intimate and perhaps too intimate familiarity with sometimes to the degree that feeling like we're defeated is the most comfortable and common experience and it's a kind of abdication of responsibility to actually change anything that sometimes the left, the really, you know, movement

left indulges in when they would prefer to be morally righteous and incapable of instantiating their morality in a world that

disdains them. You know it's better to rightiously lose than to win. I have

really complicated feelings about this because it is my experience that being on the left does require having some capacity for metabolizing defeat and somehow in many cases sort of transforming it into the will to keep

struggling. You know the classic formulation is Joe Hill saying upon being

executed don't mourn me organize I think the left often does

kind of turn mourning as a political demonstration into organizing I mean I think it's remarkable just as a labor history phenomenon,

how often the big general strikes of the 20th century

were started when, you know, there was a strike in a certain industry

there was violence against the strikers somebody got killed and then there was a

funeral procession organized the next day

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