The Undertow question

Recently I listened to a Marc Maron WTF podcast in which he interviewed Jeff Sharlet, the author of The Undertow, Scenes From a Slow Civil War. Maron asks Sharlet why he says it is a ‘hopeful book’, and Sharlet points out something I think is strange. He relates how he was in the town of Black River Falls Wisconsin (Sharlet notes this town is the setting for the book Wisconsin Death Trip but that’s beside the point I want to make) soon after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe Vs Wade. He saw kids there protesting, holding up signs saying ‘Your Misogyny Is Showing’, and one protestor in particular with her sign saying, ‘Fuck Off’. When he asks her, she says she means, ‘Fuck Off’ to all the older generation. To him, her parents, media, teachers, government, basically everyone who has let society take away her rights to her own body, and bring the USA to the brink of a civil war. Sharlet takes this anecdote as hopeful in that the protesters recognized society had failed them and were not expecting the older generation to fix it. They knew they were on their own. He says that recognition is, ‘a dark hope’. I have a hard time seeing that. That’s saying that the situation is so bad in the USA, that people giving up on society and creating something separate is positive. That they expect to have to create their own groups outside of existing society, rather than try to work within the broken system. A dark hope indeed.
Back in the early 1990’s, the USSR had failed, Germany was reunified, the economy was good, and I remember feeling that maybe the world was on a path to a wide peace under liberal democracy. But now here we are 30 years later, and there are terrible problems everywhere. That hope from the 1990’s did not happen. So, is Sharlet right? Does the fact that the young generation do not trust society and expect to work outside of it represent hope for the future? Sorry for the long question!