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I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

—Marge Piercy Idealism and Realism Service is the rent we pay for living.

It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

—Marian Wright Edelman Change Makers

One of the most persistent challenges I faced as a candidate was being perceived as a defender of the status quo, while my opponents in the primaries and the general election seized the sought-after mantle of “change.” The same thing happened to me in 2008. I never could figure out how to shake it.

Change might be the most powerful word in American politics. It’s also one of the hardest to define. In 1992 and 2008, change meant electing dynamic young leaders who promised hope and renewal. In 2016, it meant handing a lit match to a pyromaniac.

The yearning for change springs from deep in the character of our restless, questing, constantly-reinventing-itself country. That’s part of what makes America great. But we don’t always spend enough time thinking about what it takes to actually make the change we seek. Change is hard. That’s one reason we’re sometimes taken in by leaders who make it sound easy but don’t have any idea how to get anything done. Too often we fail to think big enough or act fast enough and let opportunities for change slip away. Or we don’t have the patience to see things through.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a change maker for most of my life. My journey took me from student-activist to citizen-advocate to politician–policy maker. Along the way, I never stopped searching for the right balance of idealism and realism. Sometimes I had to make painful compromises. But I’ve also had the great privilege of meeting people whose lives were healthier, freer, and fuller because of my work. Today, despite losing in 2016, I am more convinced than ever that driving progress in a big, raucous democracy like ours requires a mix of principle and pragmatism—plus a whole lot of persistence.

Nobody did more to help me understand this than Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and my first boss. When I met her in the spring of 1970, her accomplishments were already stunning. She was the first black woman to pass the bar exam in Mississippi, after having graduated from Yale Law School in 1963. She became a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP in Jackson and established a Head Start program for poor kids who desperately needed it. Marian worked with Dr. King and opened Bobby Kennedy’s eyes to the reality of poverty in America by taking him to tiny shacks in the Mississippi Delta and introducing him to children so hungry they were nearly catatonic.

Marian showed me what it takes to make real and lasting change. She gave me my start as an activist, held me to account as I grew into a national leader, and was there for me when things fell apart as a candidate.

I was in my early twenties when I met Marian, but I’d already spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to be an effective activist.

My parents—especially my mother—raised me and my brothers in the Methodist tradition of “faith in action.” At church, we were taught to be “doers of the word, not hearers only.” That meant stepping outside the pews, rolling up our sleeves, and doing “all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.” That credo, attributed to the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, inspired generations of Methodists to volunteer in hospitals, schools, and slums. For me, growing up in a comfortable middle-class suburb, it provided a sense of purpose and direction, pointing me toward a life of public service.

My activist faith was sharpened by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. In college and law school, my friends and I spent many long nights debating the morality and efficacy of civil disobedience, dodging the draft, and other forms of resistance. What would it take to end an unjust war in Vietnam, expand civil rights and women’s rights, and combat poverty and injustice? Should our goal be reform or revolution? Consensus or conflict? Should we protest or participate?

The “Left,” of which we considered ourselves a part, was divided. Radicals talked about revolution and believed conflict was the only way to drive change. Not surprisingly, I agreed more with the liberals who argued that the system had to be reformed from the inside. Partly it was a question of temperament—I’m a pragmatist by both nature and nurture—but I was also watching and learning as events swirled around me.

At Wellesley, I tried to find ways to push the college toward more progressive positions through negotiation rather than disruption. I ran for student government president in 1968 because I thought I could do a good job convincing college administrators to make changes that students wanted. My platform included adding students to faculty committees, recruiting more students and faculty of color, opening up the curriculum, and easing curfews and other social restrictions. I won and spent the next year trying to translate the demands of restive students into measurable change on campus.

That summer, I was in Chicago’s Grant Park when antiwar protests outside the Democratic National Convention turned into a melee that shocked the nation. My longtime close friend Betsy Ebeling and I narrowly missed being hit by a rock thrown by someone in the crowd behind us. Mayor Richard Daley’s police force was clearly more to blame for the violence than the kids in the park were. But the whole scene left me worried that the antiwar movement was causing a backlash that would help elect Richard Nixon and prolong the war. It was a terrifying, infuriating, exhilarating, and confusing time to be a young activist in America.

In May 1970, just a few days after four unarmed college student protesters were shot and killed by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, I spoke to the fiftieth anniversary convention of the League of Women Voters in Washington. The civic organization had invited me after my Wellesley graduation speech made national news the previous year. I wore a black armband in memory of the students who had been killed at Kent State. In my remarks, I tried to explain the tension so many young activists were feeling, wavering “back and forth between thinking that talk at this point was useless, and believing somehow that we had to continue using words.” This was a time when eighteen-year-old kids could be drafted to fight a war they believed was wrong but didn’t yet have the right to vote. Many of my peers were beside themselves with anger and despair. They had given up hope that progress was possible, at least through traditional means.

I had read an article in the Washington Post about League of Women Voters members holding a vigil on the steps of the Capitol to protest Nixon’s recent invasion of Cambodia. Nixon had promised to end the war and now seemed to be escalating it instead. I believed invading Cambodia was both immoral and illegal. But I knew not everyone in the audience wanted to hear this. That vigil at the Capitol was controversial, even internally. One member from Connecticut who had not participated was quoted by the Post as saying she didn’t believe in protests and was afraid the vigil would tar the league’s reputation. I thought that was absurd and said so. “Not to stand up and protest today against the forces of death is to be counted among them,” I said, using the kind of hypercharged language that was common back then, at least for student activists. “People—living, breathing, caring human beings—who have never been involved before must be now. The luxury of long-range deliberation and verbiage-laden analysis must be forgone in favor of action.”

Despite the hot (and verbiage-laden!) rhetoric, my idea of action wasn’t terribly radical. I urged league members to use their economic power—“Do you know what kind of activities the corporations that you invest in are engaged in? How much longer can we let corporations run us?”—and to help antiwar activists use the political system more effectively. I felt passionately that nobody could sit on the sidelines in a time of such upheaval.

Considering everything that was going on, my friends and I sometimes wondered whether going to Yale Law School was a morally defensible choice or if we were selling out. A few of our classmates were indeed there just to open the door to a big paycheck and the chance to defend corporations that exploited workers and consumers. But for many of us, our legal education was arming us with a powerful new weapon as activists. The law could seem arid and abstract in our classrooms and textbooks, but we cheered for crusading lawyers across the country who were driving change by challenging injustices in court. When I started volunteering at the New Haven Legal Services Clinic, I saw firsthand how the law could improve or harm lives. I still believed there was a place for protests—and I moderated a mass meeting at Yale where students voted for a campus strike after the Kent State shootings, in part because the male students couldn’t agree which of them should take charge—but more and more, I was coming to see how the system could be changed through hard work and reform.

All this crystalized for me when I went to work for Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund. She sent me to her home state of South Carolina to gather evidence for a lawsuit seeking to end the practice of incarcerating teenagers in jails with adults. A civil rights lawyer lent me his car, and I drove all over the state going to courthouses, meeting with parents of thirteen-, fourteen-, or fifteen-year-old boys who were stuck in jail with grown men who had committed serious felonies. It was eye-opening and outrageous.

Next, I went undercover—really!—in Dothan, Alabama, to expose segregated schools that were trying to evade integration. Posing as the young wife of a businessman who had just been transferred to the area, I visited the all-white private school that had just opened in town and received tax-exempt status. When I started asking questions about the student body and curriculum, I was assured that no black students would be enrolled. Marian used the evidence that I and other activists gathered in the field to pressure the Nixon administration to crack down on these so-called segregated academies. It was thrilling work because it felt meaningful and real. After years spent studying social justice from a distance, I was finally doing something.

Another early job for Marian was going door-to-door in a working-class Portuguese neighborhood in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to figure out why so many families were keeping their children out of school. One answer was that, in those days, most schools couldn’t accommodate children with disabilities, so those kids had no choice but to stay home. I’ll never forget meeting one young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school. But the wheelchair made it impossible. It seemed like it should be such a simple problem to solve.

This became a clarifying moment for me. I had been raised to believe in the power of reason, evidence, argument, and in the centrality of fairness and equality. As a campus liberal in the foment of the sixties, I took “consciousness raising” seriously. But talking about fairness alone wouldn’t get a ramp built for this girl’s wheelchair at the local public school. Raising public awareness would be necessary but not sufficient for changing school policies and hiring and training new staff to give students with disabilities an equal education. Instead of waiting for a revolution, the kind of change this girl needed was more likely to look like the sociologist Max Weber’s description of politics: “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” I felt ready to do it.

Under Marian’s leadership, we gathered data to document the scope of the problem. We wrote a report. We built a coalition of like-minded organizations. And we went to Washington to argue our case. It took until 1975, but the Children’s Defense Fund’s work eventually helped convince Congress to pass the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, requiring all public schools to make accommodations for students with disabilities.

This kind of work isn’t glamorous. But my experience with CDF convinced me that this is how you make real change in America: step by step, year by year, sometimes even door by door. You need to stir up public opinion and put pressure on political leaders. You have to shift policies and resources. And you need to win elections. You need to change hearts and change laws.

Although I never imagined running for office myself, I came to see partisan politics as the most viable route in a democracy for achieving significant and lasting progress. Then, as now, plenty of progressive activists preferred to stand apart from party politics. Some saw both Democrats and Republicans as corrupt and compromised. Others were discouraged by repeated defeats. It was soul crushing to watch Democrats lose every single presidential election between 1968 and 1988 except one. But despite it all, I was attracted to politics. Even when I grew disillusioned, I knew that winning elections was the key that could unlock the change our country needed. So I stuffed envelopes for Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire, registered voters for George McGovern in Texas, set up field offices for Jimmy Carter in Indiana, and enthusiastically supported my husband’s decision to run for office in Arkansas.

My identity as an advocate and activist remained important to me as I grew older. When I myself was lobbied and protested as a public official, it was a little like stepping through the looking glass. Whenever I grew frustrated, I’d remind myself how it felt to be on the other side of the table or out in the street with a sign and a megaphone. I’d been there. I knew that the activists giving me a hard time were doing their jobs, trying to drive progress and hold leaders accountable. That kind of pressure is not just important—it’s mission-critical for a healthy democracy. As FDR supposedly told a group of civil rights leaders, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now make me do it.”

Still, there was an inherent tension. Some activists and advocates saw their role as putting pressure on people in power, including allies, and they weren’t interested in compromise. They didn’t have to strike deals with Republicans or worry about winning elections. But I did. There are principles and values we should never compromise, but to be an effective leader in a democracy, you need flexible strategies and tactics, especially under difficult political conditions. I learned that the hard way during our battle for health care reform in the early nineties. Reluctance to compromise can bring about defeat. The forces opposed to change have it easier. They can just say no, again and again, and blame the other side when it doesn’t happen. If you want to get something done, you have to find a way to get to yes.

So I’ve never had much respect for activists who are willing to sit out elections, waste their votes, or tear down well-meaning allies rather than engage constructively. Making the perfect the enemy of the good is shortsighted and counterproductive. And when someone on the left starts talking about how there’s no difference between the two parties or that electing a right-wing Republican might somehow hasten “the revolution,” it’s just unfathomably wrong.