D | DISAPPOINTMENT

Often shrugged off as a passing sense of dejection in a world that has let us down, “disappointment” might be the most intransigent concept that has shaped the modern democratic experiment. Rarely thought of as a political concept at all, let alone as a passion foundational to democracy, disappointment, Aishwary argues, returns us to a heightened state of loss; a sense of ending of a future and a world that barely moments ago seemed within grasp. From such a heightened state of crestfallen grief alone can we truthfully and responsibly think about the fragility of our democratic faith. 

In fact, disappointment can be an attribute only in a world where faith still lives. In that, it is radically different from the sense of desolation that fuels majoritarian politics today. Disappointment is the constant reminder of our intimacy with those who repeatedly fail us and whom we can still never disown or part from. Nothing comes remotely close to disappointment in capturing this pain a people must bear to keep democracy truly democratic and anti-majoritarian.

“After all, democracy is an experiment in human imperfection, as much ours as of those who overpower us, outnumber us. Only in democracy is one allowed to be disappointed in power (rather than live in fear of it). Only in democracy are you given the right to be disappointed in those you consider different from yourself, those who consider you their adversary, those who see you as their enemy. There is something about democracy alone that allows us to feel publicly disappointed and not be held in contempt or shame because we are feeling deflated.”

This disappointment is the province only of those who want to push the limits of hope and test the boundaries of our political imagination. They are audacious enough to know they might be disappointed in the end, and yet, fighting against history, they still give a woman, a daughter of immigrants, imperfect like them and yet as perfect as America will ever be, a shot at power. Disappointment is the province only of those who are able to embrace their anger at the misogynoir that dashes their hopes. Which is why they never quibble about the causes of their defeat. Disappointment does not wallow in defeat or whine about populism; it does not turn desolate in entitlement and preachy in its nihilism.

There is in Southern democracy a strain of militant disappointment, one that runs through the thought of Du Bois, King, Ambedkar, Baldwin, and most recently the Obamas, which stands as a bulwark against majoritarian preachers and their self-fulfilling defeatism. For these thinkers of the South, defeatism is simply an inability to muster the courage to be disappointed (again). From this majoritarian fear of defeat also appears the classic liberal disdain for Black voters and their choices (which are simply erased in all economic arguments about the results of the 2024 presidential election). Often, without irony, this disdain today speaks in 19th century socialist tones, barely even trying to conceal what Ta-Nehisi Coates has so acutely called America’s “fear of a Black President.”

This “liberalism of disappointment”, as Aishwary calls for, following Judith Shklar, shows grace: grace towards those on whose toil has been built the epic story of American affluence (and inequality), and who, despite their oppression by a system put constitutionally in place 250 years ago, still refuse—in an act of immovable faith—to choose white supremacy simply because they are disappointed in the free market. Their disappointment too has grace. A grace that must in turn compel us to pause in humility and concede that liberalism will always understand income inequality less viscerally than those Black Americans who—in MLK’s immortal words—“made cotton king” and in so doing built America as such. 

“I am disappointed in the lack of grace liberals have shown, many of them my friends,” Aishwary concedes, “towards America’s doggedly democratic Black electorate, instead choosing to turn immediately against them—and against the woman they saw as one of their own—in the name of economic progressivism. Baldwin would call this a lie, a sincere lie, but a lie nonetheless. The paradox is, “only in a democracy are we even allowed this right to disappointment, one that MLK once prophetically expressed in the “white moderate.” Faith appears in our political world through this democratic humility, from this openness to being disappointed, from the courage to not shun disappointment.

What does majoritarian disdain for Black grace do to our democratic future? And what must the liberalism of disappointment do to move past that disdainful, desolate vision? 

We begin a conversation on the relation between faith and disappointment in D | Disappointment.