I agree with this essay, but I think opponents will characterize it semi-ingenuously as "your cause isn't as important as the civil rights movement" and insist that, yes it is.
I think the strongest part of the argument is about how the civil rights movement had *soft national majority support* but was *structurally shut out locally* and so the protests raised the salience of the issue to an electorate that was *already softly on the side of the protestors* and *prepared to deliver change within the existing political system*. The points are all there in Matt's essay, but I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing this with somebody who didn't believe in incrementalism because I think they'll read other parts of the essay as "[your cause] is NBD compared to the civil rights movement".
Matt is a great writer and I would love to be able to point people to writing on this theme that was squarely aimed at persuading people who right now are all-in on the civil-rights framework of political change, while carefully avoiding any stray arguments that would give them an excuse to dismiss the whole thing.
>> Beyond that, we’re just not talking about a good and evil showdown where a huge share of the population has been disenfranchised>>
I would argue that animal welfare sounds in this, having both obviously higher utilitarian stakes based on pure numbers and magnitude of mistreatment, and pure and total disenfranchisement of its moral patients.
That doesn’t necessarily change the instrumental calculus laid out by Matt if you take the US political system as a binding constraint, but I do think claiming there aren’t analogous causes seems too glib.
I think it’s really important to emphasize this difference between then and now. Most of the civil rights leaders lacked King’s pizazz. They were really comfortable with the reality of making deals in proverbial smoke filled back rooms. A lot of their efforts were geared toward securing a seat at the table and moving on from that position.
It's also worth noting that the 1950's Civil Rights Movement benefitted hugely from a more disproportionate state capacity between the Federal government and the rest of society than has existed before or since. The central picture that should come to mind is the one linked below.
Put it this way: ICE has better claims to be acting on democratically-passed laws than Eisenhower did in the Little Rock crisis. And everyone would have been appalled if Trump treated the resistance to ICE as harshly as Eisenhower treated the resistance to integration - I can't image that sending active-duty troops to Minneapolis to suppress anti-ICE protests would have been well received.
MY’s point about movement discipline should not be understated. The civil rights movement was highly disciplined and strategic under MLK Jr, and the part of it that people point to that we all like (freedom rides, sit ins, marches) were from the early to mid 1960.
In the late 1960s, MLK Jr was assassinated, and the movement became much less disciplined, much more influenced by more radical groups, like the Black Panthers, pushing more radical ideas (black nationalism) and strategies. In 1968 there was mass rioting. Ultimately, this later movement was far less successful in scoring large legislative wins. It was successful in a few areas: school breakfast program, national attention to sickle cell disease, and establishing black studies programs in universities. However, it wasn’t nearly as successful as the previous incarnation of the civil rights movement in getting groundbreaking civil rights legislation passed, like the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.
People nowadays point back to the civil rights movement of the early sixties and to MLK Jr as their example of a moral crusade to be inspired by. Many current activists movements, however, are much more reflective of the less disciplined movement of the late 1960s. Black Lives Matter protests devolved into mass rioting, like the 1968 protests did. Many of the ideological basis of the contemporary progressive movement comes from the university programs developed in the Black Panther era. And nowadays, you have progressive activists standing in solidarity with militant foreign organizations, just as they did starting in the late 1960s, but not before (e.g Black Panthers siding Palestinian terrorist organizations such as the PLO and PFLP and Latin American guerilla groups).
To me this is the root of the matter. It may or may not be that this or that tactic is a good idea on this or that issue today. Maybe Yglesias is wrong and we really should be emulating the civil rights movement. But that means being incredibly focused on discipline in organization and in optics. Activists were trained to display insane resilience in the face of physical violence because nonviolent civil disobedience was good optics. Like, a big chunk of the theory of the case is that people will look at completely innocent black and white Americans being mistreated and say "this isn't right and the government should intervene."
That's before getting into the actual organizing and politics of the thing. But point being that there was a focus on how you come across that is itself derided as right-wing today by self-styled activists--and as you say, that's the legacy of the New Left, not King.
The comparison between the progressive topic du jour and the civil rights movement also drives me crazy because it sort of obviates the need to develop a theory of mind for people who disagree with you. This seems to me to be a major source of a lot of progressive infighting.
One factor which I think is neglected is that medical knowledge around germ theory and the spread of cholera and malaria, reduced the contact taboo, everywhere in the world (apart from Northern India). Segregated water fountains come from a culture where the outgroup might have hookwork or cholera, so in the absence of knowing how they spread you wouldn't want to have any contact with them. In the 1960s such an idea seemed laughably backwards.
Another major factor that shaped mid-century America was the Cold War. America wasn’t just facing a moral fight at home, but also an international one against the spread of authoritarian communism, under regimes that had murdered millions of people.
Activists were able to connect these two things. How could America take the moral high grounds on the international stage when there was this huge minority that didn’t enjoy basic civil rights at home? They could frame their struggle as in concert with foreign policy goals, rather than different priorities you had to balance.
One interesting fact omitted from today's piece is the party line vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Matt just can't bring himself to give a nod toward Republicans--yesterday's Republicans, not MAGA. Bottom line, no Republicans, no Civil Rights Act.
I was in the 8th grade when MLK was murdered. That August, we moved to Shelby County TN to a navy base just outside Memphis. My high school was integrated because of the large navy population but there was still an all black high school not five miles away. That school and ours were merged 3 years later.
My memory is that most kids wanted to get along and have fun. We didn't really get The Big Picture.
A white kid was unlikely to know that a black kid's parents couldn't vote or walk into a store or a restaurant.
“Taking the dynamics of midcentury civil rights politics seriously really just overwhelmingly generates the conclusion that the leaders and activists involved are heroes who deserve our admiration but whose specific tactics almost certainly shouldn’t be copied.” But I’d argue that SOME of their tactics/instincts are still relevant and should be copied. The civil rights movement wasn’t throwing soup on beloved paintings. They weren’t attacking infrastructure that had no direct relationship to their cause. Attention plays were tightly targeted and with an eye to obtaining attention AND sympathy from outside observers, not just attention.
How was civil rights more urgent than Gaza? The IDF kills Palestinians far more efficiently than the KKK ever killed Black people. Palestinians have no meaningful franchise: Gaza isn't a democracy at all, and the West Bank is a failed state. If everyone between the river and the sea voted for a single parliament, a moderate government would form and the anti-miscegenation laws would evaporate.
The only decent answer is that Israel matters less because it's a foreign country. Yet we fund their war machine, and we've been dragged into their stupid
I don't recall black people repeatedly attacking the white population or walking away from deals that would give them some autonomy or calling for the genocide of white people en masse.
Sinn Fein repeatedly used guerilla tactics. Yet the Catholics of Northern Ireland were never subjected to the same intensity of violence as Gaza. The brits sort of had a conscience. The israelis don’t.
Ditto Basque and Catalan separatists, ditto Quebec nationalists, all of whom have use guerilla tactics.
It takes a particularly delusional person to act like a long running foreign supported insurgency and military occupation in a distant land parallels the U.S. civil rights movement or structures of southern segregation.
It’s even more strange to claim that the civil rights movements should have had less moral salience during the 1950s and 1960s when compared to Gaza. It really throws proximity to the wind. It also really disregards similar human tragedies in Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Xinjiang, North Korea, etc. What about the destruction of USAID?
The theory of non-violent resistance as formualated by the Indian Independence movement and transposed to the US Civil Rights movement, is that violence prevokes retaliatory violence, and the weaker side is simply going to get crushed. Non-violence resistance exposes the moral failure of the oppressor. Would non-violence work for the Palestinians? Idk, but violent resistance clearly isn't working well for them.
Non violence movements work in part because they are foils to violent movements. The issue with Palestinians is that irredentism and the financial incentives of leaders led them into a strategic box. After the second intifada they got Israel to withdraw from Gaza but empowered the worst hardliners on the Israeli side.
In a world without the suicide bombing, you have free(er) movement of Palestinians in Israel for work, education, and commerce. You have normalization of social relations. Suicide bombing put up walls and segregation. That makes dehumanization and violence easier.
the logic that 1500 murders can justify 60,000, plus the decimation of density populated cities, only hold if some groups are more important than others
This is really strange coming from a man who says society has no obligation to the handicapped and disabled. Really strange coming from a man who asserts that a single penny of his tax dollars going to support these persons is a gross injustice committed against him.
Clearly you hold some groups as more important than others. You again rejected the idea that human lives have inherent value this week, so why are you making moral appeals that rely on such notions?
So the 3,000 or so deaths at Pearl Harbor didn't justify our entry into WWII? We can see similar scenes to Gaza in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, or Hamburg. It's war, there's nothing pretty about it, but Hamas instigated it...again.
Great piece. If I’m reading Matt correctly, the key difference with the civil rights movement was that even at the beginning of the movement, the persuasion part was already done. Northern whites in 1955 already believed segregation was bad. All that remained (I say that like it was easy and of course it wasn’t) was to get this issue prioritized to the top, but you didn’t need to change many minds in the north. But that certainly isn’t what happened with many other issues like interracial and gay marriage nor does it seem the current situation for trans rights. I’m not exactly sure where I would put climate change- I think if you really pushed most normies they would admit that climate change isn’t great but I do think climate activists seriously underestimated how much of the electorate was as concerned about the issue as they were, with more persuasion needing to happen.
Gay Marriage and Civil Rights were fairly simple in that they just required a specific law change, you can't pass a law against Climate Change, it requires lots if complicated decisions and calculations.
The Civil Rights Movement peaked in 1964, which was 62 years ago.
The Affirmative Action Era began in 1969, which was 57 years ago (or two generations past).
I'm a 67 year old Californian and I have zero empathy for Jim Crow, which strikes me as a weird, Hindu-like caste system that gives me the creeps. (Separate drinking fountains? Really?)
But Jim Crow and Emmett Till also seem colossally irrelevant today other than in the most antiquarian sense.
My childhood was dominated by sports heroes of all races, such as at age 9 in 1968, 58 years ago, watching OJ Simpson rush for 238 yards at the L.A. Coliseum.
The biggest issue with accepting this analysis (which is correct) is that there are a number of issues where advocates genuinely believe the moral stakes are similar to the civil rights movement, but where the other factors are different and so the tactics still don't work. And no one is really ok with pursuing tasks of extreme moral urgency with the incremental approach that Matt (correctly) brings to YIMBYism. But, as the right demonstrated with abortion, it's the only way to do it.
I've posted this before, but due to its relevance to what Matt's saying here I want to say it against.
The civil rights movement accomplished so much so fast because it benefited from a perfect storm of circumstance: the Nazis giving racism a bad name, the Cold War need to look good to the nonwhite world, a Supreme Court liberal enough to issue Brown, a new communications media that allowed/forced people to literally see segregationist brutality, a leader as charismatic as King. That very success fooled generations of liberals and leftists into believing that if only we were dedicated enough, uncompromising enough, militant enough, life could be like that all the time.
Except of course the civil rights under MLK was highly pragmatic and disciplined, not militant and uncompromising, with a focused mission. Contemporary leftists who are uncompromising and militant are taking inspiration from the post- MLK Jr movement, which was much less successful at getting widespread civil rights legislation passed.
The Trump movement made a lot of people feel liberated to say "Racism is perfectly normal and I'm sick and tired of being told I should feel ashamed of it."
I don’t know the extent to which this is effective or matters, but there also has been a movement to name things that keep society functioning well like showing up on time and working hard “racism.”
I think a lot of people- again, how many is an open question- looked at what things like BLM were trying to do and said “look if being on time to shit and getting a job done well is white supremacy, I guess white supremacy is awesome” instead of “I guess we’ll let people show up 2 hours late for their warehouse shift”
I pick this because it showed up in training materials at a lot of normie corporations, but I think the starkest example is probably attitudes towards policing.
Also previous Civil Rights movements had been unlucky, there was probably a majority of Congress in favour of Civil Rights for most of the period from the 1870s till the 1950s, it was certainly popular amongst political, economic and cultural elites. The movement had persuaded people they were right 80 years before, the failing was always political bravery.
One important thing about the drive for Civil Rights is that most people involved saw it is a key issue, with voting and desegregation they assumed economic and social racial inequality would be significantly reduced within a generation. In the end the income and wealth gap between Blacks and Whites didn't decrease at all between 1965 and the present day, though the health gap has significantly reduced.
The figures I have from 1967 to 2015 show the situation worsening for example the 80th percentile of Black worker earned 69% as much as the 80th percentile of White worker in 1967 and earned 67% as much in 2015.
The homicide deaths gap grew from 8 to 1 to 10 to 1 during the Black Lives Matter era. The black vs. white traffic fatalities gap grew from equal to considerably bigger during the Ferguson Effect and Floyd Effect era.
I agree with this essay, but I think opponents will characterize it semi-ingenuously as "your cause isn't as important as the civil rights movement" and insist that, yes it is.
I think the strongest part of the argument is about how the civil rights movement had *soft national majority support* but was *structurally shut out locally* and so the protests raised the salience of the issue to an electorate that was *already softly on the side of the protestors* and *prepared to deliver change within the existing political system*. The points are all there in Matt's essay, but I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing this with somebody who didn't believe in incrementalism because I think they'll read other parts of the essay as "[your cause] is NBD compared to the civil rights movement".
Matt is a great writer and I would love to be able to point people to writing on this theme that was squarely aimed at persuading people who right now are all-in on the civil-rights framework of political change, while carefully avoiding any stray arguments that would give them an excuse to dismiss the whole thing.
>> Beyond that, we’re just not talking about a good and evil showdown where a huge share of the population has been disenfranchised>>
I would argue that animal welfare sounds in this, having both obviously higher utilitarian stakes based on pure numbers and magnitude of mistreatment, and pure and total disenfranchisement of its moral patients.
That doesn’t necessarily change the instrumental calculus laid out by Matt if you take the US political system as a binding constraint, but I do think claiming there aren’t analogous causes seems too glib.
I think it’s really important to emphasize this difference between then and now. Most of the civil rights leaders lacked King’s pizazz. They were really comfortable with the reality of making deals in proverbial smoke filled back rooms. A lot of their efforts were geared toward securing a seat at the table and moving on from that position.
It's also worth noting that the 1950's Civil Rights Movement benefitted hugely from a more disproportionate state capacity between the Federal government and the rest of society than has existed before or since. The central picture that should come to mind is the one linked below.
Put it this way: ICE has better claims to be acting on democratically-passed laws than Eisenhower did in the Little Rock crisis. And everyone would have been appalled if Trump treated the resistance to ICE as harshly as Eisenhower treated the resistance to integration - I can't image that sending active-duty troops to Minneapolis to suppress anti-ICE protests would have been well received.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57cf18ae6b8f5ba693497e1a/1506274962802-Z4LI2MHHB5H6WR10914A/AP_617605800438.jpg?format=1500w
MY’s point about movement discipline should not be understated. The civil rights movement was highly disciplined and strategic under MLK Jr, and the part of it that people point to that we all like (freedom rides, sit ins, marches) were from the early to mid 1960.
In the late 1960s, MLK Jr was assassinated, and the movement became much less disciplined, much more influenced by more radical groups, like the Black Panthers, pushing more radical ideas (black nationalism) and strategies. In 1968 there was mass rioting. Ultimately, this later movement was far less successful in scoring large legislative wins. It was successful in a few areas: school breakfast program, national attention to sickle cell disease, and establishing black studies programs in universities. However, it wasn’t nearly as successful as the previous incarnation of the civil rights movement in getting groundbreaking civil rights legislation passed, like the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.
People nowadays point back to the civil rights movement of the early sixties and to MLK Jr as their example of a moral crusade to be inspired by. Many current activists movements, however, are much more reflective of the less disciplined movement of the late 1960s. Black Lives Matter protests devolved into mass rioting, like the 1968 protests did. Many of the ideological basis of the contemporary progressive movement comes from the university programs developed in the Black Panther era. And nowadays, you have progressive activists standing in solidarity with militant foreign organizations, just as they did starting in the late 1960s, but not before (e.g Black Panthers siding Palestinian terrorist organizations such as the PLO and PFLP and Latin American guerilla groups).
To me this is the root of the matter. It may or may not be that this or that tactic is a good idea on this or that issue today. Maybe Yglesias is wrong and we really should be emulating the civil rights movement. But that means being incredibly focused on discipline in organization and in optics. Activists were trained to display insane resilience in the face of physical violence because nonviolent civil disobedience was good optics. Like, a big chunk of the theory of the case is that people will look at completely innocent black and white Americans being mistreated and say "this isn't right and the government should intervene."
That's before getting into the actual organizing and politics of the thing. But point being that there was a focus on how you come across that is itself derided as right-wing today by self-styled activists--and as you say, that's the legacy of the New Left, not King.
The comparison between the progressive topic du jour and the civil rights movement also drives me crazy because it sort of obviates the need to develop a theory of mind for people who disagree with you. This seems to me to be a major source of a lot of progressive infighting.
One factor which I think is neglected is that medical knowledge around germ theory and the spread of cholera and malaria, reduced the contact taboo, everywhere in the world (apart from Northern India). Segregated water fountains come from a culture where the outgroup might have hookwork or cholera, so in the absence of knowing how they spread you wouldn't want to have any contact with them. In the 1960s such an idea seemed laughably backwards.
Another major factor that shaped mid-century America was the Cold War. America wasn’t just facing a moral fight at home, but also an international one against the spread of authoritarian communism, under regimes that had murdered millions of people.
Activists were able to connect these two things. How could America take the moral high grounds on the international stage when there was this huge minority that didn’t enjoy basic civil rights at home? They could frame their struggle as in concert with foreign policy goals, rather than different priorities you had to balance.
One interesting fact omitted from today's piece is the party line vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Matt just can't bring himself to give a nod toward Republicans--yesterday's Republicans, not MAGA. Bottom line, no Republicans, no Civil Rights Act.
I was in the 8th grade when MLK was murdered. That August, we moved to Shelby County TN to a navy base just outside Memphis. My high school was integrated because of the large navy population but there was still an all black high school not five miles away. That school and ours were merged 3 years later.
My memory is that most kids wanted to get along and have fun. We didn't really get The Big Picture.
A white kid was unlikely to know that a black kid's parents couldn't vote or walk into a store or a restaurant.
“Taking the dynamics of midcentury civil rights politics seriously really just overwhelmingly generates the conclusion that the leaders and activists involved are heroes who deserve our admiration but whose specific tactics almost certainly shouldn’t be copied.” But I’d argue that SOME of their tactics/instincts are still relevant and should be copied. The civil rights movement wasn’t throwing soup on beloved paintings. They weren’t attacking infrastructure that had no direct relationship to their cause. Attention plays were tightly targeted and with an eye to obtaining attention AND sympathy from outside observers, not just attention.
How was civil rights more urgent than Gaza? The IDF kills Palestinians far more efficiently than the KKK ever killed Black people. Palestinians have no meaningful franchise: Gaza isn't a democracy at all, and the West Bank is a failed state. If everyone between the river and the sea voted for a single parliament, a moderate government would form and the anti-miscegenation laws would evaporate.
The only decent answer is that Israel matters less because it's a foreign country. Yet we fund their war machine, and we've been dragged into their stupid
I don't recall black people repeatedly attacking the white population or walking away from deals that would give them some autonomy or calling for the genocide of white people en masse.
Sinn Fein repeatedly used guerilla tactics. Yet the Catholics of Northern Ireland were never subjected to the same intensity of violence as Gaza. The brits sort of had a conscience. The israelis don’t.
Ditto Basque and Catalan separatists, ditto Quebec nationalists, all of whom have use guerilla tactics.
It takes a particularly delusional person to act like a long running foreign supported insurgency and military occupation in a distant land parallels the U.S. civil rights movement or structures of southern segregation.
It’s even more strange to claim that the civil rights movements should have had less moral salience during the 1950s and 1960s when compared to Gaza. It really throws proximity to the wind. It also really disregards similar human tragedies in Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Xinjiang, North Korea, etc. What about the destruction of USAID?
The theory of non-violent resistance as formualated by the Indian Independence movement and transposed to the US Civil Rights movement, is that violence prevokes retaliatory violence, and the weaker side is simply going to get crushed. Non-violence resistance exposes the moral failure of the oppressor. Would non-violence work for the Palestinians? Idk, but violent resistance clearly isn't working well for them.
Only a minority of palestinians are engaged in anti zionist violence. Most are merely receiving collective punishment
Non violence movements work in part because they are foils to violent movements. The issue with Palestinians is that irredentism and the financial incentives of leaders led them into a strategic box. After the second intifada they got Israel to withdraw from Gaza but empowered the worst hardliners on the Israeli side.
In a world without the suicide bombing, you have free(er) movement of Palestinians in Israel for work, education, and commerce. You have normalization of social relations. Suicide bombing put up walls and segregation. That makes dehumanization and violence easier.
the logic that 1500 murders can justify 60,000, plus the decimation of density populated cities, only hold if some groups are more important than others
This is really strange coming from a man who says society has no obligation to the handicapped and disabled. Really strange coming from a man who asserts that a single penny of his tax dollars going to support these persons is a gross injustice committed against him.
Clearly you hold some groups as more important than others. You again rejected the idea that human lives have inherent value this week, so why are you making moral appeals that rely on such notions?
So the 3,000 or so deaths at Pearl Harbor didn't justify our entry into WWII? We can see similar scenes to Gaza in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, or Hamburg. It's war, there's nothing pretty about it, but Hamas instigated it...again.
Great piece. If I’m reading Matt correctly, the key difference with the civil rights movement was that even at the beginning of the movement, the persuasion part was already done. Northern whites in 1955 already believed segregation was bad. All that remained (I say that like it was easy and of course it wasn’t) was to get this issue prioritized to the top, but you didn’t need to change many minds in the north. But that certainly isn’t what happened with many other issues like interracial and gay marriage nor does it seem the current situation for trans rights. I’m not exactly sure where I would put climate change- I think if you really pushed most normies they would admit that climate change isn’t great but I do think climate activists seriously underestimated how much of the electorate was as concerned about the issue as they were, with more persuasion needing to happen.
Gay Marriage and Civil Rights were fairly simple in that they just required a specific law change, you can't pass a law against Climate Change, it requires lots if complicated decisions and calculations.
Indeed.
Emmett Till was murdered 71 years ago in 1955.
The Civil Rights Movement peaked in 1964, which was 62 years ago.
The Affirmative Action Era began in 1969, which was 57 years ago (or two generations past).
I'm a 67 year old Californian and I have zero empathy for Jim Crow, which strikes me as a weird, Hindu-like caste system that gives me the creeps. (Separate drinking fountains? Really?)
But Jim Crow and Emmett Till also seem colossally irrelevant today other than in the most antiquarian sense.
My childhood was dominated by sports heroes of all races, such as at age 9 in 1968, 58 years ago, watching OJ Simpson rush for 238 yards at the L.A. Coliseum.
But we live in an era of antiquarianism.
This was not on my Horseshoe Theory bingo card for today. (Freddie's always the Free centre square.)
I'm a 1960s San Fernando Valley sports and movie fan who worshipped OJ, Wilt, and the like.
The biggest issue with accepting this analysis (which is correct) is that there are a number of issues where advocates genuinely believe the moral stakes are similar to the civil rights movement, but where the other factors are different and so the tactics still don't work. And no one is really ok with pursuing tasks of extreme moral urgency with the incremental approach that Matt (correctly) brings to YIMBYism. But, as the right demonstrated with abortion, it's the only way to do it.
That's certainly the biggest *obstacle* to promoting effective incrementalism, but I took this analysis to be confronting that resistance head-on.
What's Matt doing if not laying out a series of arguments any of us could use to defuse the impatient demands of politically-minded friends?
> And no one is really ok with pursuing tasks of extreme moral urgency with the incremental approach
If the incremental approach is the most effective, then they ought to be.
I've posted this before, but due to its relevance to what Matt's saying here I want to say it against.
The civil rights movement accomplished so much so fast because it benefited from a perfect storm of circumstance: the Nazis giving racism a bad name, the Cold War need to look good to the nonwhite world, a Supreme Court liberal enough to issue Brown, a new communications media that allowed/forced people to literally see segregationist brutality, a leader as charismatic as King. That very success fooled generations of liberals and leftists into believing that if only we were dedicated enough, uncompromising enough, militant enough, life could be like that all the time.
Except of course the civil rights under MLK was highly pragmatic and disciplined, not militant and uncompromising, with a focused mission. Contemporary leftists who are uncompromising and militant are taking inspiration from the post- MLK Jr movement, which was much less successful at getting widespread civil rights legislation passed.
"The Nazis giving racism a bad name" is such a funny line and, as we move further away from WWII in our collective memory, I feel it is sadly true.
The Trump movement made a lot of people feel liberated to say "Racism is perfectly normal and I'm sick and tired of being told I should feel ashamed of it."
I don’t know the extent to which this is effective or matters, but there also has been a movement to name things that keep society functioning well like showing up on time and working hard “racism.”
I think a lot of people- again, how many is an open question- looked at what things like BLM were trying to do and said “look if being on time to shit and getting a job done well is white supremacy, I guess white supremacy is awesome” instead of “I guess we’ll let people show up 2 hours late for their warehouse shift”
I pick this because it showed up in training materials at a lot of normie corporations, but I think the starkest example is probably attitudes towards policing.
Also previous Civil Rights movements had been unlucky, there was probably a majority of Congress in favour of Civil Rights for most of the period from the 1870s till the 1950s, it was certainly popular amongst political, economic and cultural elites. The movement had persuaded people they were right 80 years before, the failing was always political bravery.
Again, of course, not against.
One important thing about the drive for Civil Rights is that most people involved saw it is a key issue, with voting and desegregation they assumed economic and social racial inequality would be significantly reduced within a generation. In the end the income and wealth gap between Blacks and Whites didn't decrease at all between 1965 and the present day, though the health gap has significantly reduced.
They did converge and then the convergence stagnated in the 1980s.
Gavin Wright’s Sharing the Prize really discusses how civil rights broke a bad social equilibrium that wasted human potential.
One area of research is why this convergence stagnated (I have my hypotheses but those are tangential to this comment.)
The figures I have from 1967 to 2015 show the situation worsening for example the 80th percentile of Black worker earned 69% as much as the 80th percentile of White worker in 1967 and earned 67% as much in 2015.
The homicide deaths gap grew from 8 to 1 to 10 to 1 during the Black Lives Matter era. The black vs. white traffic fatalities gap grew from equal to considerably bigger during the Ferguson Effect and Floyd Effect era.
Heckuva job, BLM!