These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.

Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass.

Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.

Forgetting is everywhere. Take the Biden administration’s August announcement of a broad package of student loan relief. If you didn’t follow the history, you could believe that it was a gift from above rather than an achievement long fought for from below. If you did follow it, you would have remembered how student debt emerged as a focus in 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising. By raising up the voices of those crushed by debt and decrying the system that crushed them, it changed the national conversation.

Nevertheless as soon as Occupy began, pundits were asserting it was a failure, and when the Zuccotti Park presence in Lower Manhattan was violently broken up by police in November 2011, they declared that it was over. But even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading.

Occupy’s impact had just begun. It inspired other occupations far beyond New York City, some of them outside the United States. Across the country, police-accountability groups, solidarity organizing with foreclosure victims and the unhoused, and many other progressive projects emerged. Some of them lasted.

One of them was the Debt Collective, founded in 2012. It has successfully taken on all forms of debt – housing, medical and educational – and began to organize to abolish debt directly, campaign for debt abolition and legal changes, and draw public attention to the devastating cruelty of the system.

In 2015, the Debt Collective announced that a student debt strike it organized initiated “an ongoing campaign that has helped win changes to federal law and over $2bn in student debt abolition to date”. Activists made student debt a public issue and then part of the Biden campaign’s platform and that ultimately led to last month’s debt-relief measures.

The year the Debt Collective started its campaign, the supreme court recognized marriage equality as a constitutional right. The mayfly version would have seen that right as likewise handed down from above by the US supreme court, rather than built from below. But the court merely gave legal force to long-term campaigns that encouraged and built on broader shifts in acceptance and support of queer rights and inclusion. To see those shifts, you also have to remember what things were like beforehand.

Early in this country’s history, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the war of independence from the British throne was not the revolution; “the revolution was in the minds of the people and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 … before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” It’s an assertion that the crucial change came through culture, through beliefs and values, that the most important territory to take is in the imagination.

Once you create a new idea of what is possible and acceptable, the seeds are planted; once it becomes what the majority believes, you’ve created the conditions in which winning happens. It may be the least tangible, but most important, part of a campaign. Ideas are powerful and dangerous, as their enemies know, and everyone else often forgets.

One of the joys of being a tortoise is watching the slow journey of ideas from the margins to the center, seeing what is invisible, then deemed impossible, become widely accepted. The other day the Salt Lake City Tribune editors called for draining Lake Powell, the now failing reservoir created 60 years ago by Glen Canyon Dam, to make its beautiful canyonlands into a new national park. That was considered an outrageous idea 20 years ago. The city of Oakland just announced plans to return five acres of open space to its original Ohlone owners, an act modest in scale but huge as a sign of how Native American land rights have gained recognition. Barack Obama himself tweeted in support of the student debt relief he did not support as president.

If people are shortsighted about the past, so they are about the future – a lot of complaining about the incompleteness of the student loan reform and cancellation was met with the Debt Collective’s vow that they were far from done.

That nearly all change is incremental and even a comprehensive victory usually has intermediary steps preceding it is one of the things that disappears in the short view. Imperfect and frustrating though those steps may be, they can still lead us to our destination. We can’t reach the summit without climbing the mountain.

Perhaps some of this is built into the news system, which tends to report on events as sudden ruptures rather than the consequence of long-term forces. More of it may come from the attachment to the idea of revolution, of everything changing overnight, though it’s no longer sensible, if it ever was, to believe regime change can change everything – and the long revolutions around gender, nature, race and the rest in our time have been incremental and largely cultural in means even as they produce concrete ends as changed laws, policies and finance.

Perhaps the problem is embedded in the very word news, as in new. In the sense that everything has a history, nothing is entirely new. (Even mayflies can live for a year or two as underwater larvae before they emerge into the air for their few days of winged life.) I have been a witness and sometimes a participant to change and I’ve seen so many versions of people fail to see change, believe change is impossible, walk away prematurely, dismiss those who are trying because of this lack of perspective.

So far as I can tell, the mayfly view is of a perpetual present in which the order of things is largely immutable. Martin Luther King Jr memorably said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

You can argue about how it bends – we’ve certainly seen it bend other ways of late – and how to bend it. But you have to stick around for that long view to see it bend at all. Conservatives have been recognized for their long-term strategy, building power from the ground up, taking over local government, winning state races to take over state legislatures to control redistricting to gerrymander their way to minority power in the federal government, bending democracy into something worse. Happily, they’re not the only ones with tenacity.

The examples are everywhere. In 2020, after 31 years of organizing, the coalition of ranchers, Native Nevadans and other rural people who came together as Great Basin Water Network finally defeated Las Vegas’s attempt to extract the water from one of the driest places on the continent. The plan would have taken 58bn gallons of water annually from eastern Nevada, devastating wildlife and rural communities. As Eric Siegel’s report in High Country News put summarized it, “the Vegas Pipeline, had it succeeded, threatened to make a dust bowl of 305 springs, 112 miles of streams, 8,000 acres of wetlands and 191,000 acres of shrubland habitat, almost all of it on public lands.”

Siegel quoted the Ely Shoshone tribal elder Delaine Spilsbury, who declared: “Never give up the ship. Never. That’s the kind of feeling that I think most of us had. Just do the best we can and let’s make something happen, even if it does take forever.”

It didn’t take forever but it took decades. For much of that time it would have been easy to look at the struggle and conclude that it was doomed or losing because it hadn’t won. You could say the same of many other campaigns, including the student-led movement to get Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels, which took 10 years to reach victory in 2021. As my friend Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective remarked to me when I congratulated her, “We’re all losers until we win.”

Another of my friends, Joe Lamb, is a poet and arborist who sports a T-shirt that says: “70 is young for a tree.” In a recent essay about the epic tree-planting program that was part of the New Deal’s effort to stop the erosion that produced the Dust Bowl, he wrote, “We need to remember that we can learn from and repeat the successes of our past.” It was a gorgeous revision of the old “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”

There are past victories you want to repeat, or build on, or learn from. Which is why understanding how they unfold is so essential, recognizing that an oak was once an acorn and then a spindly sapling, remembering this law was once a radical idea and then a campaign. That means seeing the world like a tortoise, not a mayfly.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses