They survived the worst —and they have an urgent message for a shaken America

When I think about "the impossible," at least in terms of modern American politics, I think of stopping President Donald Trump's attempts to become a dictator. Thanks to his aggressive attempts to rig the 2026 midterm elections and Democrats' wimpy response to those efforts, countless concerned citizens suspect as I do that America's days as a democracy may soon end.

Yet if you visit theimpossible.org, you'll find a website promoting a book with an antidote to this despair.

In his book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While," longtime social justice activist Paul Loeb — whose career spans back to protesting the Vietnam War and opposing President Ronald Reagan's nuclear arms buildup — Loeb updates a text originally published in 2004 to inspire citizen activists. Spanning the entire globe, Loeb profiles individuals like Nelson Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and South Africa's first democratically elected president who was persecuted for opposing apartheid; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., another Nobel Peace Prize laureate who led the American civil rights movement; Václav Havel, a dissident playwright who eventually became the first president of the Czech Republic; and Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader who died in an Arctic prison.

Through these stories, Loeb argues that ordinary citizens can feel empowered even at a time that feels impossibly demoralizing.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity, context and length.

Hope in Trump's America.

ROZSA: First, you wrote in your book that "hope seems more beleaguered now than at any other point in my lifetime." What made you decide to update the book, and how did that sense of urgency shape the new voices that you added, such as Alexei Navalny [the critic of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin who mysteriously died], Jungmin Choi [from South Korea's lightstick protests] and Andrew Carter [who covered Chicago's anti-ICE protests]?

LOEB: Yeah, that's a really good question. So what happened was when Trump was reelected, I was like, God, people are rightly just demoralized, overwhelmed, scared, just feeling like things are gonna be terrible, which it turned out was true. [laughs] Sometimes you anticipate things and you overreact, and I don't think people's reaction once Trump was elected was an overreaction. It was accurate that things were really gonna get bad. And so I thought, well, I don't want people to give up, because if they give up, we're just really screwed. So I've got this book that's really helpful, but I think the last edition had come out in 2014. So it's an old book, and some of it, particularly the introductions, felt like they were kind of part of that time.

And so I asked the publisher, and she said, "We could try and get books in the stores now, but honestly, let's just really update it." And so I jumped in, and what I was trying to do was really do two things. One is keep stories that, to my mind, may be older stories, but they're really important ones. So understanding what it was like for Nelson Mandela to be in jail for 27 years and still find ways to resist — that doesn't date. I read that today, and something bad happens with Trump, and I'm like, okay, yeah, this is bad, but other people have gone through hard situations as well. Or in challenging the communist dictatorships in Czechoslovakia. So there's stories that are the same.

And then I thought, okay, well, what do I wanna add? And I wanted to add some that were just contemporary. So literally, Trump gets elected in November, and in December the South Korean president decides to become a dictator and starts a coup. Because the rules said that the parliament could overturn martial law, he sends the soldiers to the parliament to drag the parliamentarians out so they don't have a quorum and prevent them from blocking his martial law. And what happened is that thousands and thousands of ordinary South Koreans just surrounded the building, blocked the soldiers, and — because it was the middle of the night — helped the people in parliament who came in to vote on it climb over the walls.

You had soldiers doing things like — my favorite one is a bunch of them were deployed and they stopped for ramen noodles instead. [laughs] It's like, "Hey, we've got orders, but we're kind of hungry, let's stop for ramen noodles." And another one used bureaucratic rules and prohibited a military helicopter from taking off. The top generals were all with the coup, but the junior officers said, "You know what? We're gonna go, but we're gonna stay in the military buses. We're not gonna go over to the parliament." So you had this broad resistance, and then it continued. By the morning, they negated the coup, but then the call was to impeach President Yoon, and eventually — he's now been tried and is in prison, along with the officials who went along with the coup.

So I looked at that story and I thought, for sadly obvious reasons [laughs], this is a very relevant contemporary story. And so I just took quite a bit of time, looked around at who's writing about it. Finally found a piece in a great little online magazine called Waging Nonviolence. It was written right after the first days of it, so I worked with the author to update it. And that piece actually leads off the new edition after my introduction.

Navalny is interesting — you mentioned him — because at first glance, you wouldn't think that a story about somebody who died in Putin's prison was gonna be a good fit for a book on political hope. But a friend who works for a great activist organization kind of said exactly that to me. She said, "Look, I know this isn't gonna be obvious, but I just finished reading the book. If you read the book, it's gonna give you hope." And I did. And what was interesting there is — how to describe it? Navalny has this amazing strength of will, but also this gallows humor. So he's writing and he's in prison and he's saying, "Hey, somebody must have read George Orwell's 1984 and thought, 'Cool, guys, we could do something like this.'" And he's just, "Oh, there's somebody next to my bed all night waking me up. They're so concerned about my welfare and that I'm not gonna accidentally wander away." And so you read it and you feel this spirit fighting back. And when I ended up reading it, I was like, "Well, okay, this gives me courage to fight back." So that's an example.

There's a great poet who I'd never heard of, a young woman — she died last year of cancer — named Andrea Gibson. I live in Seattle, and I was watching this beautiful aerialist performance by the waterfront. And the background to it was this poem called "Just Say Yes." And I was like, "This just knocks me out. This is amazing. Let me look up this poem." It turned out she won a ton of huge awards, had an Apple documentary on her. But I didn't know her. I looked at her poem and I thought, this is great, because one of the things that I do in The Impossible Will Take a Little While is it's essays, but each major section also has a couple of poems, because somehow a really powerful poem can just take you to a different place and inspire you in a different way.

And so I did that. I could go on with all the pieces, but the goal was to find pieces that really spoke to the moment. And sometimes — another example — the piece that I found was not contemporary. We've seen all these assaults on colleges, high schools, what you can teach. Basically, we've got an administration that, like all dictatorial administrations, wants to control everything and wants to control what people learn, because if you control what they learn, that's gonna impact how they view the future. And my closest friend is Norwegian American, and he said, "What about the Norwegian teachers' resistance to the Nazis?" And I vaguely remembered it. And I thought, okay, let me go read about it. Let me try and find something.

And essentially, I ended up writing the piece myself, because there wasn't a single piece that worked. What you had is, when Germany occupied Norway during World War II, because the Norwegians were fellow Aryans, they sort of thought they would maybe go along with it and become allies. But they didn't. And so they ordered the teachers to join this organization that was modeled on Nazi organizations. The person running Norway — we now use the word "quisling" for a traitor, and it comes from this guy, Vidkun Quisling, who was the collaborator running Norway and had headed a Nazi organization in Norway before that. And they ordered all the youth to join the equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and they just laid out a whole program.

And the teachers said, "No, we're not gonna do that." And they're like, "Well, we have the guns, we're occupying your country, you're gonna do that." And the teachers just refused. First, they said you're gonna lose your pensions, you're gonna be fired. But if you fire all the teachers, then the kids have nowhere to go and they're just roaming around. And some of the parents were conscripted into German war work, so they had to stay home to look after the kids. So it disrupted that, and that didn't work. So they basically took them to concentration camps and forced labor camps — they called it "torture gymnastics," where they basically had to do various exercises in the snow. It was exhausting and brutal.

And they just refused. And the Nazis relented, and they basically ended up releasing all of them. And Quisling gave this just angry speech at a high school on the outskirts of Oslo where he said, "You teachers have ruined everything for me." And then he arrested the teachers who were there. And the ones who weren't there showed up the next day and said, "Well, you missed us. We gotta be arrested too." And basically, they abandoned the entire exercise. They still occupied Norway, but they stopped trying to enforce the Nazification of the schools. And I look at that, and it's really inspiring. There's sort of clear lessons for what happens when you actually resist, because we have colleges, we have high schools, we also have law firms and other organizations where the Trump folks basically said, "Cave to our will." Some of them did, others didn't.

And to me, there's just huge parallels. When you're told, "Oh, you can't do this," maybe one of the responses is, "Well, I'm sorry. We're gonna do this anyway." And the teachers signed a pledge saying that they would not violate their values and they would continue to teach the truth. So again, that was an example. What was it, 1943, something like that? So that's like 80 years ago. There's very few people who are alive even today from there. But boy, I was reading about it and watching people who researched it and writing about it, and it's like, that just feels like it's ripped from the headlines.

Stopping Trump from stealing the midterms.

ROZSA: Now I would like to discuss the midterm elections. President Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency, impose martial law, seize ballots and voting boxes, potentially use law enforcement such as ICE to intimidate voters, and engage in a number of other measures that would be downright dictatorial. What do you think people can do, drawing from the history that you discuss in your book, to stop this?

LOEB: Yeah. It's certainly been on my mind. I think it's been on everyone's mind who's paying attention, because he does want to be a dictator. This is no longer in doubt. So I think a number of things. One is, obviously, there's a lot of fights in the courts, and actually, we've won a lot of them, which is good. The lawyers and those organizations that are pushing that are really valuable, and more power to them. But that doesn't necessarily involve the rest of us. If they're gonna target the vote, they're gonna probably target it in the blue areas, which are the cities. And not just cities in blue states, but Houston and Dallas and Atlanta, as well as Detroit and all the other places, and smaller cities as well.

And so one of the things I think is really important to do is to work with elected officials — which ordinary citizens can do — and pressure to say, "Let's create a plan." Maybe what you need to do is to actually say, "We're gonna have our officials, and we even have our police force, out there protecting the vote. And if some Proud Boys show up, or ICE folks, they're gonna have a problem, because the law says that you have the right to vote." And I would even argue — I looked it up the other day — I think 11 states have state voting rights laws. The thing about a state voting rights law is that there's federal laws, but Trump can pardon people. Trump can't pardon people for violating a state law.

So it's setting up as many barriers as you can in advance against the disruption. And I think things like that are important. I think the election observers, the volunteering as poll workers, is really important, because you want people who actually know the rules and say, "I'm sorry, you are allowed to vote. Maybe you have to have a provisional ballot — probably not — but if you do, it's gonna get counted." All those kinds of things. So being involved — again, we don't have a lot of time, but getting what I'm gonna call the small-d democratic mechanisms of government involved on the side, overtly, of protecting voting rights, I think that matters. And that's something that ordinary citizens can pressure on, as well as just showing up.

And the other is swamping. I've got a piece that I've just sort of finished — I haven't quite decided where I'm gonna place it — just about the power of volunteering. Because one of the things that's true is that the cheating and the voter suppression make more difference in a close election. If the margin's big, there's just nothing they can do. It's like when people kicked out Viktor Orbán in Hungary. And I sort of talk about it in The Impossible Will Take a Little While. This was a while ago — it was like 2004. I spend a lot of time on election day. I volunteer and just, "Okay, where am I needed?" I'm just a foot soldier. So I volunteered. I live in Seattle.I was sent to one of our neighborhoods, knocked on a bunch of doors, got three people to vote. One person forgot it was election day. One person didn't know what to do with an absentee ballot that they'd had in the mail, and one needed a ride to the polls. So it was just your typical stuff — nothing to do with my knowledge of politics or experience or being a writer or any of that. Anybody else walking the same route would have had the same result. So I get three votes, and then it turns out — I was paying attention to the national stuff — that our governor's race was decided by 134 votes in a state of, I think it was, six million people. And I was like, "Whoa, I got one-fiftieth of the votes by myself." And if 50 fewer people had joined our side, it would have gone the other way. If 50 more on the other side had joined, it would have gone the other way.

And it was just this absolutely stark reminder that not only does your vote matter, but if you can spend a day or two days or a week or two weeks volunteering, you're going to get some other votes. And there's another U.S. Senate race I volunteered in that was decided by 2,000. A little bit bigger margin, but still, in a state that big, that's not a very big margin. So it's: how do you multiply your votes by knocking on doors, making phone calls, writing the volunteer letters and postcards, all that kind of stuff? And it does matter. And I was working on this, and I just looked up the data, because political scientists study this stuff, and there's actually data that basically says if you get — I think it's 100 contacts that you actually get through to — then you can get, I think it's three, I could look it up, three extra votes. So basically what I did was maybe a little bit above the normal, but it was basically in line with the results that happen when people knock on doors, make phone calls, and do the other stuff. Which is just, if enough people do it, then it changes the results.

To me, that's actually the most important thing, because if it can turn out the vote in large enough numbers, then it's much harder for the cheating — the voter suppression — to happen.

Courage versus cowardice.

ROZSA: You contrast the anticipatory obedience of law firms, universities, and corporations with ordinary people blowing whistles to warn neighbors about ICE agents. What separates those who stand up from those who fold?

LOEB: Yeah, good question. It was interesting, because the book has different sections and I do introductions, and that's from one of the introductions. In that particular section, I use Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and he has this quote — it's famous, and I don't think famous enough, to be honest — where he says that the silence of the good people — because there are all these ministers saying, "Oh, it's too early. Go slower. Don't make trouble" — the silence of the good people is more damaging than the Ku Klux Klanner and the White Citizens Council. And I thought about that a lot when I was writing that introduction, because, as you say, the law firms that caved, the universities that caved, those other institutions — and these are huge and powerful institutions. And I think they were so afraid of — I don't know their minds, because I don't know the people inside, but from what I read about it — protecting: "Oh, we've got to preserve the institution." And I contrast that with the Norwegian teachers, or with the people who are resisting ICE. Alex Pretti was a nurse, Renee Good was an artist and poet.

People worked as baristas, people worked as social workers — just regular people. And I think — I don't know. I was gonna say they have less to lose, but everybody has a lot to lose. And I think the difference is that you can make complicated arguments to justify an action, or you can act. And what you said made me think of a story I haven't thought of in decades. I had this friend who was a resister in Nazi Germany, and he got captured. He escaped when the Allies bombed his prison, and he went into the forest, and he ended up in the United States, lived in Madison, started — I think it was a seed company or something. And there was some money, and he was giving money to projects. I remember sitting down with him — I was trying to get money for a project on a book on the peace movement. And he said, "Well, we just bought another house and we're building that, and we haven't sold the other one. Things are really tight." And then he said, "You know what? This is just important. We're gonna do it. We're gonna help." And that was his attitude. It's like, yeah, you could think of all sorts of reasons. If you're in Nazi Germany, it's wiser to not speak out. But he just — you just have to do it.

So on some level, you're saying, well, what really, at root, allows somebody to say, "We're just gonna do it"? And I think what it is is that maybe you feel human empathy. One of the interesting things about the tech lords and the Trump folks is that they're overtly saying human empathy is a disease. [laughs] And many of them claim that they're people of strong Christian faith. I don't know how you knock the stuff about empathy out of the best of the New Testament. You'd lose an awful lot. But they're just saying, "Hey, we're not connected to our fellow human beings. We have no relationship."

ROZSA: I have to interject here, because while they talk about "suicidal empathy" when it refers to groups they dislike, they often demand empathy for themselves. Trump demands empathy over his false claims of elections being stolen. Musk demands empathy when he loses hundreds of millions or more in his net worth. These individuals don't really oppose empathy. They simply want to be very exclusive about who receives it.

LOEB: Yeah, that's a good point. They wanna sever connections with other human beings, I think, but have absolute allegiance and no questioning of themselves. Is it that you're not feeling my pain about having the election stolen from me? Maybe, but it may be more: I said the election was stolen. You have to believe it because it's true. If I say it, it's true, so fall in line. I don't know. You're right, because it is some of both. Well, it's interesting, because Vance got in a fight with the Pope — I think it was before the current Pope became the Pope — where he posted something about how you're supposed to look after your family, and then maybe a little further, but then you essentially stop; you have no responsibility beyond that. And the guy who is now Pope, Prevost, said, "No, you absolutely are not understanding that correctly. It extends far further."

So I think it really is: who do we have ties with? And clearly, the hope with Minneapolis from the Trump folks was, "Hey, it's mostly a white state. They're gonna just say, 'Hey, all right, get rid of these people, no big deal.'" And instead, people said — it's an old labor phrase — "An injury to one is an injury to all." And that's the base. I think if you have solidarity, that is the key of social change. It goes back to the British right-wing prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who said, "There's no such thing as society. There are only individual families. So all you have to do is look after your family." And I would say every movement for justice says exactly the opposite: that we are all tied together. And that, to me, is a fundamental choice. Because otherwise, the far extension of "there's no relationship" is, "Hey, we're gonna save humanity by going to Mars, and if you're left behind on Earth, you're just gonna die in a wasteland, but you've gotta give us everything we need so we get our rockets to Mars." Which is not something I would have anticipated being a mainstream political argument.

Empathy for the cruel.

ROZSA: The problem there with the Mars argument that I find is that it isn't just immoral, it's also illogical. Musk and his fanboys love to talk about how we're going to go to Mars, but aside from having rockets, which I don't even think can reach Mars, Musk hasn't done any of the legwork in terms of making sure that a human colony on Mars could survive, and even if they could survive, determining that the conditions are such that life would be desirable. There are thousands of variables that he has yet to contemplate.

But I want to talk about another theme in your book, one that I'm actually going to push back against a little. You warn against rooting for the suffering of people who voted for leaders you oppose, quoting Heather Booth as saying, "When we organize with love at the center, we win." I recently interviewed a cognitive scientist from the University of Bristol, Stephan Lewandowsky, and I asked him why so many Trump supporters derive a sadistic glee from owning the libs, or from hearing about immigrants or trans people suffering. And his response, I'm going to read to you now, was: "If you look at internet trolls and their personality profiles, you find that they score very high on what's called the dark triad of personality: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism." (I had to add the third one for him.) "The dark triad, that's what it's called. So we know that trolls take pleasure in trolling, which means getting other people upset." And he then speculated that Trump voters probably are motivated by similar factors. And then when I asked how they can demand sympathy for themselves, he responded, "Of course they want sympathy when they're in pain. It's just that they have no empathy to extend to other people." If we extend empathy to individuals who are motivated by these variables and who, on a systematic level, wish to withhold empathy from others, aren't we rewarding them? And by rewarding them, aren't we creating a culture where empathy more broadly will not be applied?

LOEB: It's a really good question. I guess I would distinguish. There's sort of different circles of power and complicity in what's happening now, in the destructive stuff. So you start with Trump and his folks, and then you go to the internet trolls and the MAGA activists, and then you go to the larger base of all the people who voted for him. And I confess that it's very hard to have empathy, sympathy, or anything else for those people at the top. They're just miserable human beings, and if they went to Mars, I'd be delighted. [laughs] Leave us alone. But the people who, from the anonymity of the web, are "Ah, gotcha, lib," and that kind of thing — they may be pretty messed-up human beings as well, and maybe some compassion. I think when I wrote that, I'm thinking more of just the very large — well, whatever the number is, the slight majority of the people who voted for Trump, many of whom now are just getting creamed by his decisions. Because of course they expected that he's gonna bring down prices, he's going to make things better, he's going to get rid of the competition and build American industrial bases — all the BS claims that he gave. And now they're getting creamed. The farmers — just killed by the tariffs. So I look at them, and there's sort of two ways to respond. And I would admit that in some moments I think, huh, that'll teach them.

I think many of us do that. "You thought he was gonna keep us out of wars; look at what we got now." But then I sort of step back, and I use this wonderful Alice Walker piece where she uses an ancient curse collected by Zora Neale Hurston — it was sort of collected folklore — like, their children will wither and their crops will starve. It's just bitter, bitter, bitter. And then she says, "Yeah, I'm really tempted, because maybe we mess things up. Maybe everybody just deserves to — let's start over with some other species." And then she says, on the other end, there are these moments of human courage, there's the richness.

It's interesting, I think two different people in the book mention fresh peaches. And as we're talking right now, the end of the season for peaches has just about happened [laughs], and then we're gonna have to wait a while. But man, there is nothing like a fresh peach. And that's a gift. So it takes us out of the bitterness, remembering, God, there's a world with fresh peaches in it. So I think for those trolls, it's not as if we have to sort of defer to them and spend our lives feeling sorry for them. But the notion that says, "All right, they've been prevailing; now we'll just stomp them" — I think it just leads into a trap.

Again, in the book, one of the closing sections, old and new version, is Desmond Tutu talking about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. And there you really did have a whole white population — with some super honorable, courageous exceptions — but the majority was super complicit in a brutal regime, which they derived in part from our brutal regime in the U.S., in segregation and Jim Crow. So how do you deal with that? What they did was they wanted to tell the story. So they said, basically, people would get amnestied for their participation in essentially human rights crimes under apartheid if they told the entire story, didn't hold back, really made it clear. And what it did is it brought the story to the surface. And it meant that the country, to some degree, grappled with its past — certainly in a way that we've never done, racially at least. And I think it had a beneficial effect. It's not to say South Africa's perfect, but if you ask how do you live together after a majority of the population is complicit in a moral — I think that helped. And he was suggesting it for Rwanda, where there had been those horrible massacres. So I don't think it's an easy question. But my sense is you've gotta, A, obviously live together with folks who you don't agree with politically. And you also have to not write huge swaths of people out of humanity, because I think that ends up feeding that kind of cycle.

And I'm not saying it's easy to do, because, my God, I've had those impulses, and I just look and I think, "Hey, good. They got creamed. They deserve it." But the "they got creamed" is probably not mostly the internet trolls. It's just these people who are trying to get by and voted — believed some lies, believed some propaganda. And they're really different from the Trumps and the Stephen Millers and those kinds of folks.

There's a quote from Abraham — the great rabbi and civil rights ally A.J. Heschel. He said, "We're not all equally guilty, but we are equally responsible." We all are responsible. We all have to do something, but some of us are more guilty and others of us aren't.