Yeah, “what does hope look like in the absence of progress?” is a question in its own right. Disentangling the sense that there is a world worth living for from the escalator of growth/development that progress thinking is based around. At the same time, recognising the institutional reality that our lives currently depend on systems that need that escalator to keep running. A politics of building, outside or around the edges or in the cracks, practices that reskill us and create resilience for being less dependent on those increasingly unreliable systems. I see this happening close to the ground, but harder to see how it translates to renewal or even just damage limitation on the larger scale of national politics, where the patterns you describe are all too evident. Maybe part of the answer is that larger scale becomes increasingly evidently a clown show (and often a tragedy played by clowns), while the real work increasingly goes on at the level of the “supersedure state” (as Chris Smaje calls it), the local improvised response to the failure of the larger systems to deliver.