How to Use defeatism in a Sentence

defeatism

noun
  • We must not give in to defeatism. We must be optimistic.
  • Their take-your-medicine defeatism from just last month morphed into fast action.
    — Philip Elliott, Time, 29 Jan. 2026
  • Third, while defeatism is dire for voter turnout, so too can overconfidence.
    — Chris Stirewalt, Fox News, 20 Aug. 2018
  • Eleven days ago a ligament in his left knee sprained and a certain kind of Kansas fan may have gone defeatism.
    — Sam Mellinger, kansascity, 17 Mar. 2018
  • Schools should offer their student-athletes hope, not crushing defeatism year after year.
    — Andrew J. Campa, Glendale News-Press, 3 Nov. 2017
  • At its highest points, Carve provides an angry rejoinder to that kind of defeatism.
    — Colin Joyce, Pitchfork, 21 Apr. 2026
  • However, not everything is gloomy, and both Kyiv and the West should guard against defeatism.
    — Liana Fix, Foreign Affairs, 28 Nov. 2023
  • Getting the team to believe in itself, mainly when its history is one of defeat and defeatism, takes work.
    — John Baldoni, Forbes, 19 Dec. 2022
  • This could lead to defeatism, because the problem is perceived as being out of control and unsolvable.
    — Kate Aronoff, The New Republic, 10 Feb. 2020
  • Sam’s feelings of defeatism and applaud his ultimate success.
    — Globe Staff, BostonGlobe.com, 4 Jan. 2021
  • The teens in Parkland haven’t been part of the political discussion and don’t show that same defeatism.
    — Philip Bump, Washington Post, 19 Feb. 2018
  • But a culture of mass surveillance defeatism has helped to pave the way for increasingly invasive tech.
    — Eric Limer, Popular Mechanics, 10 Jan. 2018
  • Distress and defeatism from the narrative that absolutely no progress has been made around climate change are rampant.
    — Quora, Forbes, 16 June 2022
  • The film gives a clear nod to the nervousness that the women are experiencing, but never falls in the cracks of defeatism or melancholy.
    — The New Yorker, 24 Nov. 2021
  • McConnell’s defeatism is both a soporific for the Right and a stimulant for the Left.
    — Deroy Murdock, National Review, 10 July 2017
  • That task will be much harder if Americans approach the Middle East in a spirit of defeatism.
    — Walter Russell Mead, WSJ, 3 May 2021
  • The Grammys rubber-stamp this defeatism as another means of social division.
    — Armond White, National Review, 24 Mar. 2021
  • Defeating defeatism is at the heart of Kuma’s philosophy.
    — Michelle Kuo, The Dial, 14 Apr. 2026
  • Mejia said that if Maduro does win on Sunday, the opposition needs to redouble its efforts to build a broad coalition and push back against defeatism.
    — Jim Wyss and Antonio Maria Delgado, miamiherald, 18 May 2018
  • Its solution to the defeatism of our modern climate is the fantasy of the triumphant individual.
    — Yussef Cole, Wired, 18 Dec. 2021
  • Ella’s premature defeatism often alarmed Nina; shouldn’t a child have a childlike sense of justice, and a childlike optimism?
    — The New Yorker, 8 Nov. 2021
  • But at the same time, de Gaulle’s tale is a succinct account of France’s blindness and defeatism that bears similarities to the current crisis.
    — John R. MacArthur, Harper’s Magazine , 7 Dec. 2021
  • This state of mind is defeatism in disguise, capitulating to discord, disorder, and defeat without even joining the battle.
    — Karen Neff, Christian Science Monitor, 25 July 2025
  • If nothing is done, realism and defeatism—the two often travel together—could play decisively to the regime’s advantage.
    — Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, WSJ, 19 Oct. 2021
  • But there are differences between compromise and hypocrisy; between restraint and cowardice; between realism and defeatism.
    — Wal Van Lierop, Forbes, 25 Apr. 2022
  • But Newbury believes that this inevitable incumbency effect has been compounded by a sense of apathy and defeatism in the sector.
    — Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune Europe, 3 July 2024
  • The committee and its work were far from apolitical, and yet to dismiss the report as merely political would be a perilous act of resignation and defeatism.
    — David Remnick, The New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2022
  • Others might ask whether his focus on the small-scale politics of slum life are really just a guise of left-wing defeatism that has given up on the promise of revolutionary change that thrilled him in his youth.
    — Will Noah, The New York Review of Books, 3 Mar. 2020
  • For too long, extremists passing as mainstream have used cocktails of lies and fear laced with bigotry to lull Americans into a normalized and dangerous defeatism.
    — Doris Bittar, San Diego Union-Tribune, 1 Mar. 2022
  • Trump’s approach to TikTok and WeChat, like much of his foreign policy, is a gesture of defeatism camouflaged as strength.
    — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'defeatism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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