One political conversation with a gay friend that I’ll never forget occurred the night before Election Day in 2016, where my friend told me that he hoped Donald Trump would win so that “The Revolution” would finally happen. The idea, I suppose, was that Trump would make things so bad that it would finally wake up the proletariat of the world, and it would unite in the ultimate class war to overthrow the messed-up liberal world order, some ugliness would happen, and then we’d be living in a communist utopia.

Trump won the next day and, needless to say, the Revolution still hasn’t happened.

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This kind of cynicism — that the “system” is so bad that it’s beyond repair — is self-perpetuating and impervious to reality. One can point out that the U.S. government does a lot of things that are beneficial to a lot of people: like redistributing wealth through taxes and social spending, ensuring some income to the elderly and disabled, paying for millions of people’s (though not everyone’s) health care access, sending needed medications to impoverished people in other countries, funding public education. And the cheap and easy response is that there’s something morally wrong with pointing to the good things the system does, that celebrating the good means that one doesn’t care about the bad.

This is a way of disciplining people into a worldview. “You don’t care about the downtrodden if you point out that there are many people who are helped by collective action.”

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Another way this cynicism spreads is that it seems intellectual and smart, even when it’s the exact opposite, because it’s used as an excuse for incuriosity: Oh, you think that a good thing might happen because you actually understand how Congress works? Have you read into the details of the supposedly “good” bill they’re working on, and do you understand the bargains that had to be made to ultimately get it passed? You fool! I, an intellectual, assume axiomatically that people with any amount of power only support the interests of the wealthy elite, and therefore, I don’t need to read about the topic at all since all of Congress’ actions are by definition bad.

Cynicism is lazy and stupid, and it enables lazy and stupid people to think that they’re deep and smart.

I’m thinking about that now after reading a bit more about Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse who was gunned down by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis this past weekend while he was standing up for a woman getting assaulted by those agents. I never knew him, but just from the few details that have made it to the media so far, it’s pretty clear that this dude seemed honestly committed to his ideals.

A week before the government killed him, he was tackled to the ground while he was observing ICE agents, part of a larger network of Minneapolis residents who are looking out for their neighbors as they get terrorized by ICE (often just for the crime of being a person of color in public). These observers shout, blow whistles, share information online, and take any number of actions to document what could in the disappearing of a person without explanation or legal recourse.

For Pretti’s service, one week before he died, he had one of his ribs broken as he was tackled to the ground by five agents. One of the agents pushed his knee down on Pretti’s back.

“That day, he thought he was going to die,” an unnamed person told CNN.

In a week, he was back out there, helping people where he could.

It’s hard to imagine a less cynical stance. If someone doesn’t have hope for the future of humanity, why would they put themselves in harm’s way to help people they have never even met?

There are a lot of reasons why the populist, anti-establishment right is on the rise in liberal democracies, and one is that “liberalism” itself has won out as the dominant ideology in these countries. The rule of law, the promise of human rights, the democratic process… these ideals that people fought for centuries for are the baseline from which other political ideologies are measured.

And that not only makes classical liberal ideals a target for anyone cynical about the system, but it’s also why the “naive” people who support those ideals are the ones out there blowing whistles to protect their neighbors.

There are definitely reasons to be critical of the U.S. government. It’s a government with a history of enabling slavery, enacting genocide, denying the vast majority of its population equal rights, instituting religious oppression, and expanding material inequality.

But the response isn’t to throw away those ideals and say that they don’t matter. We’ve seen this past year what it looks like when powerful people don’t even have to pretend that they care about making America fulfill its promises — it’s ugly.

There’s something very satisfying about smashing the system — metaphorically throwing the birthday cake on the ground and expressing uncontrolled anger in the face of injustice. It’s a quick way to feel powerful while maintaining one’s own comfort.

But what ultimately creates positive change is placing a demand on the system to expand its protections and being willing to put one’s own privilege on the line to help others.

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