The despair at issue cannot be understood simply as a malady suffered by individuals enduring private nightmares. It is not simply a condition where, in the words of the great Leonard Cohen, “Everybody got this broken feeling like their father or their dog just died.” For no less an historical authority as Thomas Aquinas, despair was the vice opposed to the virtue of hope. For Aquinas and his heirs in the Christian tradition, hope is a gift of God given to sustain God’s people through the grim realities of earthly life in the expectation of God’s glory. For this reason, despair is the most grievous sin because it involves turning away from God. In Aquinas’s words, “hope withdraws us from evils and induces us to seek for good things, so that when hope is given up, men rush headlong into sin, and are drawn away from good works.”
Secular democrats take a page from the long tradition of Christian virtue and construe despair in a similar manner. As Jeffrey Stout argued in his insightful book Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America, despair is a temptation that leads democratic citizens away from their commitment to important virtues like liberty and justice. Like Aquinas, Stout conceives despair as a vice, a deformation of character fostered within specific social, political, and economic circumstances. It is the contrary of a hope that makes us willing to share the fortunes of democracy with those different from ourselves. It is the temptation to believe that the only way our kith and kin can get a fair deal is by dominating other people.
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