We are living through a period when many people who care about justice and democracy are exhausted, frightened, or unsure what their actions can accomplish. Paul Loeb’s The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, originally published two decades ago and substantially revised for a new edition, begins with a question that is especially difficult in such a moment: how do people keep acting when they have no guarantee that their efforts will succeed?

The book brings together more than seventy voices and stories, from the struggle against apartheid and resistance to fascism and dictatorship to the 2024 South Korean resistance to martial law, opposition to fossil-fuel projects, and more recent resistance to ICE raids. Across these accounts, Loeb returns to the ways that movements develop the capacity to act. The dramatic moments that look historic in retrospect are often preceded by years of relationship-building, political education, preparation, experimentation, and organizing. People learn to work with others, build coalitions, develop institutions, and recognize opportunities to put pressure on those in power.

That perspective raises questions that are useful for organizers now. How does an action become part of a durable movement rather than an isolated event? What kinds of relationships and preparation allow people to respond when a political crisis arrives? How can movements build broad coalitions while maintaining a sense of purpose? How does electoral work contribute to longer-term organizing? What does it mean to actually build leverage and countervailing power? And how do movements persist over the long term while remaining willing to question strategies that aren’t working?

Alexandria Shaner spoke with Paul Loeb about these questions, drawing on the examples in The Impossible and his own experience with social movements and civic organizing.

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Alexandria: The word “hope” can mean very different things. It can mean optimism that things will work out, a moral commitment to keep going, or a judgment that particular actions have a reasonable chance of producing change. In the book, you distinguish political hope from certainty about the future. You also argue that hope needs factual reasons behind it and has to be connected to concerted action. What do you mean by political hope, and how can organizers tell when hope is helping people act rather than simply making them feel better about a difficult situation?

Paul: We often use the words interchangeably, but I like how Vaclav Havel puts it: “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” This orientation recognizes that things may not always turn out the way we want them to, especially in the short term. But it also understands that history will only change through our actions. Havel’s own story exemplifies this. He and his compatriots circulated a petition to free a group of political prisoners jailed by the Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. People assumed that there was nothing they could do. Even many critics of the regime, like novelist Milan Kundera, mocked Havel’s efforts. Yet when the prisoners got out, they said that the solidarity of those who acted on their behalf allowed them to keep going. A few years after this campaign, the dictatorship fell, and Havel ended up being elected the country’s president. So it’s tempting, particularly in a context of attacks on justice like the present, to succumb to despair or resign ourselves to simply hoping that things will change. Havel’s concept of hope impels us to act whether or not we see an immediate victory, which I think is enormously useful.

Alexandria: One of the recurring lessons in the book is that the famous moment is rarely the beginning of a struggle. You write about Rosa Parks, for example, in the context of the years of organizing, political education, and relationships that preceded the Montgomery bus boycott. Why do you think movements so often remember individual heroes and dramatic moments while forgetting the less visible work that made those moments possible? What changes when we understand movements through that longer history?

Paul: We think of Rosa Parks as stepping out of nowhere into history when she took her stand on the bus. But she’d been active with the NAACP for a dozen years. She’d been the secretary of the organization and a mentor to the youth section. She’d taken trainings at the Highlander Center, an organizer school that’s still going to this day in Tennessee.

So it’s the opposite of acting alone, on an impulse. There were a whole host of folks who acted with her, like union organizer E.D. Nixon, who got an initially reluctant Martin Luther King involved, and Jo Ann Robinson, who taught English at the local Black College, Alabama State, and was key to organizing the bus boycott. Sometimes social movements erupt from a spontaneous spark, but those that succeed usually build on patient preceding work of relationship building and organizing.

The lone hero myth is inviting. Most of us have grown up with it and we’re all attracted to those people who seem more extraordinary than the rest of us. It’s one reason Super Hero movies are popular, even if it’s more often an ensemble these days. But it’s effectively disempowering, because it takes ordinary people out of the equation and it overlooks the connections that may be key to social change, like many of the Minneapolis relationships that got built between the George Floyd protests and the successful resistance to ICE.

Alexandria: That raises a related question about individual courage and collective action. A person can take a courageous stand without having a movement behind them, but many of the stories in your book show something developing after the initial act: other people join, relationships expand, organizations become involved, and a small action begins to affect the balance of forces. What should organizers be paying attention to if they want an action to help build a larger base of people who can act together?

Paul: It’s a few things. It’s really listening to the people you’re trying to engage or convince and not going in with preconceptions about what motivates them. It’s being willing to work with diverse people who don’t always share your assumptions. 

I love the Mary Pipher story, in The Impossible WIll Take a Little While. She and a few friends were hugely upset about the Keystone XL Pipeline coming through where they lived in Nebraska to bring Tar Sands oil from Alberta. But they didn’t know what to do because TransCanada, the company building Keystone, had all the money in the world and was spreading it all over Nebraska. Mary and her friends held a potluck to brainstorm ideas, and when they began organizing, they reached out to their immediate networks in Lincoln, which leans progressive, but also to people like Republican ranchers who opposed the pipeline because it was going to take land that had been in their family for generations. It was the combination of the two that prevailed. When TransCanada’s ad ran on the JumboTron at the University of Nebraska football game and 85,000 people booed, they knew they had a chance to win.

Alexandria: Your chapter on South Korea’s 2024 resistance to martial law is especially useful for thinking about preparation. People moved very quickly, but they were also drawing on existing networks, institutional knowledge, and earlier warnings about the government’s actions. Citizens protected legislators so they could vote, people encouraged soldiers to refuse or delay unlawful orders, and protesters kept organizing after the immediate crisis had passed. What did South Korean organizers and institutions already have in place that allowed them to respond so quickly? What can movements do before a crisis arrives to develop that kind of readiness?

Paul: One thing that preceded these events was extensive electoral organizing. The opposition had won the last parliamentary election and was blocking President Yoon’s power grabs. The legislators very much saw themselves as part of a movement. Unions that were part of their coalitions launched massive strikes in response to the attempted coup, and the response was spearheaded by all sorts of citizen groups that had sprung up in resistance to various dictatorships and would-be dictatorships. 

Culture also played a role. People talked about the historical memory of the 1980 Gwangju uprising and massacre, and how it inspired them to prevent another dictatorship. That doesn’t count the impact of movies like Parasite and Snowpiercer and the TV series The Squid Game, that dramatized the widening gaps of South Korea’s economy. Parasite director Bong Joon Ho was a radical student activist when he was in university.

Alexandria: Your examples also raise questions about coalitions. Movements often need to bring together people with different politics, experiences, and immediate interests. At the same time, there are real questions about what holds a coalition together and how much political clarity it can give up before it loses direction. What have you learned about building broad coalitions while maintaining a clear sense of what a movement is fighting for? Are there particular mistakes you have seen organizers make on either side of that tension?

Paul: Coalitions can be challenging. Dictators are generally defeated by the broadest possible coalitions, as was true in Hungary. The Keystone opposition, initiated by people who were more progressive, made lifesize cutouts of a rancher named Randy, who looked like John Wayne and refused to give up his family land to Keystone, with his words, “I will not be bullied,” and the slogan “We Stand With Randy.”

Focusing on small differences can be enormously destructive to movements that may face uphill odds altogether. As Alexei Navalny, who died in one of Putin’s Siberian prisons, wrote in his memoir, “While we were immersed in our petty squabbles to decide whom to label as belonging to which faction, and whether it was appropriate for us to be photographed in their company, we suddenly found ourselves living in a country where people were being thrown in prison for no reason or even murdered.” So you need to make room for people you don’t necessarily agree with on everything.

At the same time, not everyone who joins organizations acts in good faith. In my Vietnam-era student activism, our movements were enormously damaged by manipulative Marxist-Leninist sects. We see some of the same thing happening in the splits within DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), where some chapters, like New York City and Detroit, embody the best of progressive grassroots organizing, and have had a powerful impact. But others have been taken over by sectarian Leninist groups like ANSWER, whose stands have been echoed by some of DSA’s national leaders. And that same leadership refused to even endorse AOC in a recent election.

Alexandria: The book includes elections and conventional civic participation alongside protest, civil resistance, boycotts, institutional refusal, and other forms of collective action. From your perspective, what makes an action build power rather than simply express opposition? And how should organizers think about electoral work in relation to the longer work of building organizations, relationships, and collective capacity?

Paul: To me, actions build power if they create ongoing relationships. If you show up at a demonstration and that’s it, it still expresses a public stand and reminds people that they’re not alone, so it isn’t useless. But if everyone goes home it doesn’t build durable power. I’ve suggested that at the least, major events like No Kings use QR codes to invite people to connect to host organizations. But the coalitions really need to find ways to involve people day to day, build community, and find ways for people to integrate movement participation into their daily lives. Unions did this extensively when they were stronger, and ones like SEIU have continued that tradition. In the radical movements of a hundred years ago, you could participate in socialist summer camps, schools, marching bands, singing groups, etc. The community-building aspect is important. And you see some of it, for instance in local Indivisible chapters.

Electoral work is also critical, because the consequences are so huge, as we’re now seeing with Trump. That means that progressives need to drop any political purity tests and do everything they can to shift power toward the side that’s closest to reflecting their values. And volunteering matters hugely. In 2004, I was knocking on doors on Election Day in Seattle and got out three additional votes: one forgot it was Election Day, one needed a ride to the polls, and another didn’t know how to return an absentee ballot. After multiple recounts, my candidate won by 133 votes in a state of 6.2 million people. I realized that I’d gotten one fiftieth of the votes.

At the same time, how we organize electorally matters. If you can work to get out every potential voter, but do so by supporting direct conversations with voters, you have the possibility of building those durable connections. So directing resources towards organizations on the ground is far more valuable, to me, than supporting more ads, even for great candidates. And ideally, campaigns recognize the power of really engaging volunteers and then trying to keep them engaged, as Mamdani has done in New York City. 

Alexandria: At several points, you argue that movements need to be strategic even though they cannot know in advance what will work. You point to things like bringing in new allies, involving communities that have something at stake, understanding the institutions involved, and developing stories that can move people. I want to push a little further on the question of power. How should organizers think about leverage: who or what can actually be pressured, what an institution depends on, where a campaign might create a real cost for those in power, and how people can increase their own capacity to act? Do you think movements sometimes spend more time asking how to inspire participation than asking what that participation needs to accomplish?

Paul: Good question. I think if we engage people in ways that involve more than briefly showing up, but make them ongoing participants, then you have the chance of involving them in thinking through which institutions or individuals to target, and how. If you go back to Parks, they had those kinds of strategic discussions at Highlander Center and in the local NAACP chapter. They’d thought about approaches like the bus boycott before they initiated it in response to her arrest. 

Sometimes people do have an idea and it simply takes off, although even there, being able to engage existing infrastructure is a key accelerator. In February 2025, a Boston professor posted the idea of protests at Tesla dealerships on BlueSky. It got a modest 175 likes the first four months. Then actor Alex Winter, of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, picked up the idea, reposted it and created a website to facilitate it. It then got enough traction that major organizations, like Indivisible, began promoting it as well, Tesla’s net income dropped 61% from the year before, and Musk, at least temporarily withdrew from politics, though he’s spending again in the Midterms.

Alexandria: Your own experience includes work through national organizations, colleges, civic-engagement projects, and other established institutions, while many of the stories in the book center on grassroots movements. Professional advocacy organizations can provide important resources and expertise, but they can also shape what kinds of campaigns seem possible or where organizers direct their energy. How should grassroots movements relate to professional organizations and established institutions? What kinds of capacity need to remain rooted in the people and communities doing the organizing?

Paul: I have worked a lot in nonpartisan contexts, where I’ve worked to get institutions like colleges to engage their students in participating in our admittedly flawed democracy  in ways that engage all students, whatever their politics. Because colleges shouldn’t be taking partisan institutional stands, but they can give students intellectual and practical resources for participation. I genuinely believe that building that kind of civic infrastructure is important to a healthy society. At the same time, you need institutions that can advocate for communities, like grassroots groups. So the civic institutions make room for multiple political perspectives that are in accord with their missions, while the grassroots groups work to give voice to their communities. Both can play a role and need to respect the legitimacy of each others’ role.

Alexandria: You write about the importance of persistence because major changes often take much longer than people expect. But movements also need to learn from experience and change course when something isn’t working. How can organizers develop the patience required for a long struggle while still asking hard questions about their own strategy? What are some signs that a campaign is actually building power, even when it has not yet achieved its immediate goal?

Paul: Persistence is the core theme of The Impossible Will Take a Little While. There’s a reason its subtitle is Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times. One of my enormous frustrations is when I see people come into social movements and then cycle through and burn out. Or when people give up on critical causes because those causes don’t immediately prevail. I’m one of the long runners now, but even when I started out, I got so much strength from those who were older who’d been working for social change for years. The essays in The Impossible all explore different facets of the necessity and power of keeping on.

At the same time, as you say, persistence is essential, but not always enough. I know people, including some of the sectarians, who continue for years without ever questioning their approaches and end up damaging movements more than they contribute. To me, the signs of building power are primarily whether a movement is continually broadening its reach, bringing in new participants, respecting them enough to give them a voice, but also offering training contexts that help give them broader perspectives–not in any sense of indoctrination, but of exposing them to relevant history and helping them think about the choices activists have made that have worked or not worked. 

In terms of power, sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re winning. But one measure is whether movements are able to convince political or corporate leaders to undertake initiatives that benefit ordinary people, or to pull back damaging ones. That doesn’t necessarily mean changing everyone’s minds. Nothing’s going to redeem Steven Miller. But it does mean building enough countervailing institutions—whether engaged communities, as with the way Minnesota’s organizing built from the George Floyd protests through the ICE resistance, or more responsive local governments—that destructive institutions have to change some of their actions, and constructive policies and cultures begin to take root. That all sounds pretty general, but when I go to my local gym, one of the two largest in my 100,000-person Seattle neighborhood, and see a sticker that says “all are welcome except ICE,” I feel like we’re making some progress.

Alexandria: The new edition speaks directly to a period of democratic crisis, attacks on immigrants, climate disruption, growing inequality, and extraordinary concentrations of wealth and political power. For people who are already organizing and may be exhausted or discouraged, what do you hope they take from these stories? What practices, habits, or ways of thinking do you think are most important for people trying to build movements under these conditions?

Paul: The Impossible Will Take a Little While sold 125,000 copies in its earlier two editions, and thousands of people told me that it helped keep them going, both veteran activists and those newly involved. After Trump’s reelection, it was clear that we would be in for some very hard times, which has happened. So I felt like I needed to update the book to speak to these times and help give people the hope to stay engaged despite the even more challenging context. To me, the core lesson is that, as Howard Zinn constantly stressed, you never know when history will turn, but it only turns toward justice and democracy when people act with courage and persistence. 

The book began when I thought about all the people who most inspired me. I pulled together their stories so they’d inspire others. Precisely because so many of the stories give examples of action in the most difficult circumstances for causes that did eventually prevail, they give us strength to act in our own difficult time. Things are hard today. But I wouldn’t say they’re harder now than for Nelson Mandela and his fellow political prisoners when they were told they’d never leave Robben Island alive. Or Vaclav Havel and his compatriots facing down the Communist dictatorships. Or for the ordinary South Koreans who stopped their coup. Or the Norwegian teachers whose defiance of their Nazi occupiers then became an inspiration to Minneapolis ICE resisters. So their examples should give us hope. They give me hope as well.

At the same time, the book includes powerful poetry and stories by people like Pablo Neruda, Eduardo Galeano, Maya Angelou, Andrea Gibson, and Martin Espada, precisely because we also need images and visions that lift us out of the day to day, and help us see over the horizon. And reflections on how we can use nature, beauty, and imagination to help keep ourselves going. That also makes a difference and these are times when we and those we seek to engage need all the resources of strength we can gather.

Alexandria Shaner is a sailor, writer, and organizer. She is an editor of ZNetwork.org and active with Extinction Rebellion, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Food Not Bombs.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While and Soul of a Citizen, with nearly 300,000 in print between them, and a wholly updated edition of The Impossible out October 13.

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