The past year has shaken our faith in institutions and, perhaps, in each other. If not already eviscerated, the Rule of Law is under attack. In this atmosphere of constant chaos, we have become numbed by the events of each day and the scope of unprecedented executive action. Yet, even in the face of growing autocracy and oligarchy, the Rule of Law can prevail.
“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” In the current moment, it is tempting to reach for hope as comfort, or to repeat familiar lines about resilience, unity, or the promise of American ideals—such as this one from Leonard Cohen. But as educator Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade warns, not all hope is created equal. The kind of hope that ignores suffering, that insists the Rule of Law will revive itself without action, is not hope at all. It is what he calls “hokey or “mythical hope,” a passive optimism that ultimately deepens despair. What this moment demands instead is “critical hope”: a form of hope grounded in struggle and action.
Americans are increasingly pessimistic about their futures and our country’s direction. That pessimism is not irrational; it is a response to the suffering produced by governmental systems that strip people of dignity and due process. To respond with platitudes about national strength or eventual progress would be to participate in the very false hope that obscures that suffering. Critical hope begins by rejecting that illusion. It insists that we look directly at injustice—not as an aberration, but as something embedded in our political and social structures. When officials attempt to justify violence by dehumanizing its victims, or when agencies disregard court orders with impunity, we are not witnessing isolated failures. We are observing what happens when power operates without accountability to the Rule of Law.
We can find light and hope in acts which have come across ideological lines. Many federal judges have followed their judicial oaths to enforce constitutional limits regardless of who appointed them. Earlier this year, Judge Patrick Schiltz (appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2006) found that overzealous Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis ignored or refused to follow almost 100 court decrees. At the same time, lawmakers across both parties attempted to curb additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security, asserting that the agency had demonstrated reckless overreach. More recently, bipartisan opposition has emerged against a slush fund for allies of the president, including those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th.
In response to questions about whether there is any limit to his power, President Trump recently asserted that his own morality is the only thing that can stop him. This underlines the urgency of the moment. We cannot succumb to thinking that “everything will be okay.” The Rule of Law can prevail, but only through sustained pressure.
This requires critical hope, painful honesty, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about American society and our own role within it. It means recognizing that outrage is not something to suppress, but something to channel. The anger many feel right now is not a problem requiring management. It is, in many ways, an appropriate response to injustice. The question is whether that outrage will dissipate into cynicism or transform into sustained action.
Critical hope is rooted in solidarity—the understanding that the suffering of others is not distant or abstract, but shared. It rejects the idea that democracy is maintained solely by institutions. Instead, it recognizes that those institutions are only as strong as the people willing to demand that they function justly. Here, the metaphor of light penetrating the “cracks” to provide hope is more than poetic. There are cracks in systems that appear immovable, but they do not appear on their own—nor do they widen without effort. They are made through protest, advocacy, organizing, litigation, and the refusal to submit.
There is nothing inevitable about justice prevailing. Justice is only a possibility, contingent on what we do next. If we settle for comfort, symbolic gestures, or the illusion that progress will unfold on its own, we will find ourselves deeper in despair. But if we pair our moral outrage with material action, honest reflection, and collective struggle, then even now, in the midst of fear and uncertainty, we can begin to build something more durable than optimism. Each of us who cares has a responsibility to act, in whatever space we can. Martin Luther King, Jr. popularized the phrase “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” We hope that may be true, but nothing is preordained.
We must acknowledge the exigence of the moment and act. In the words of James Baldwin, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Jay Blitzman is a retired Massachusetts Juvenile Court Judge and former Executive Director of Massachusetts Advocates for Children. Jay is a law school lecturer who consults on youth and criminal issues. Blitzman is a volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
Javier Irizarry is a Juris Doctor candidate at Boston College Law School in the class of 2027. Javier received his Bachelor's degree in Political Science and Spanish from Amherst College.
