Don't know about despair, but if you're talking about so called "activity of small steps", you might lose if the government does enough big steps often enough to more than negate your activity. I.e. you're trying for months to get a specific regulation passed, and while that regulation gets watered down to have enough holes those in power exploit all available opportunities, reducing the quality of life of electorate, so you end up in arguably worse situation than when you started.

Steps can't be too small, and in practice that could mean they have to be pretty large. Here the opposite approach - attacking root causes - can become more productive.