Let's get together, get some land 
Raise our food, like the man 
Save our money like the mob 
Put up the factory on the job 
 -- James Brown, "Funky President" 

The hope that Cornel West wrote about in 1984 in ST 11 was not destined to become policy in 2008. The ones who practiced it, within and against the grain of every imposed contingency, always had a plan. In and out of the depths of Reaganism, against the backdrop and by way of a resuscitory irruption into politics that Jesse Jackson could be said to have both symbolized and quelled, something West indexes as black radicalism, which "hopes against hope . . . in order to survive in the deplorable present," asserts a metapolitical surrealism that sees and sees through the 

evidence of mass incapacity, cutting the despair it breeds. Exuberantly metacritical hope has always exceeded every immediate circumstance in its incalculably varied everyday enactments of the fugitive art of the impossible. This art is practiced on and over the edge of politics, beneath its ground, in animative and improvisatory decomposition of its inert body. It emerges as an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of positions, but also takes the form of embodied notation, study, score. Its encoded noise is hidden in plain sight from the ones who refuse to see and hear--even while placing under constant surveillance--the thing whose repressive imitation they call for and are. Now, a quarter century after West's analysis, and after an intervening iteration that had the nerve to call hope home while serially disavowing it and helping to extend and prepare its almost total eclipse, the remains of American politics exudes hope once again. Having seemingly lost its redoubled edge while settling in and for the carceral techniques of the possible, having thereby unwittingly become the privileged mode of expression of a kind of despair, hope appears now simply to be a matter of policy. Policy, on the other hand, now comes into view as no simple matter.