Modern democratic politics have taken what could be called an 'optimistic turn'. This isn’t quite the "Yes we can!" optimism of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, or the generational optimism harnessed by Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election. Instead, it’s a paradoxical form of political optimism that holds an acute sense of threat (from beyond 'our' borders, or from malevolent agents among 'us') in tension with a kind of hyperbolic cheeriness, a non-anxious assurance that the future will be bright — that past greatness will be restored, that seemingly intractable problems will be solved without sacrifice, and that only the man at the helm can deliver this future.

We can see this style of optimism most brazenly in Donald Trump’s habitual boasts and hyperbolic warnings; or in Boris Johnson’s upbeat if vacuous descriptions of Britain’s post-Brexit future; or in Scott Morrison’s reassurances that our children "will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well."

To what extent, however, is this merely a form of ideological optimism — insofar as it sees the future as predicated on the continuation and extension of the certainties of the present (or nostalgia for the recently lost/stolen past) — and, as such, the antithesis of what can justly claim to be democratic hope?

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/is-optimism-d...

Did I just spew optimistically on the carpet?....