How to Consistently Maintain Political Hope

Paul Rogat Loeb is the editor of The Impossible Will Take a Little While:Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, first published in 2004. The fully updated 2026 edition is available now from Basic Books. Below, he discusses how to consistently maintain political hope. People keep asking me how to sustain the hope and strength to stay involved. That’s why I pulled together the voices of writers who’d most inspired me in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, which I’ve just updated. In a slice from Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela writes of finding ways to resist during 27 years in a South African prison. Denied newspapers, he and his compatriots would watch for a guard to wrap his sandwich in one and discard it. They’d copy it in a tiny coded script on toilet paper, the only paper they had, and pass it cell to cell.In a story from The Green Boat, Mary Pipher describes how she and a half dozen Nebraska friends didn’t know how to challenge the massive corporate resources behind the Keystone XL Pipeline, so held a potluck and started reaching out to others, including a Republican rancher who became the campaign’s symbol. They stopped a pipeline that everyone assumed was a done ...