C. G. Estabrook quoted:
>CHOMSKY: It's not as bleak as I thought it was forty years ago. In fact,
>what I've insisted over and over again, and I think is true, is that the
>effect of the popular activism of the last forty years has been to make
>the country a much more civilized place.
-We're so used to thinking that we're powerless and that everything's -getting worse, but I think NC's right here. I think you could add -that race relations, relations between men and women, tolerance of -sexual minorities, child-rearing practices, and lots of other aspects -of daily life are better too.
Absolutely-- the fact that we have regular discussions of and investigations of police brutality and racial profiling, however haphazard and disappointing, is an advance from days when they just happened without comment because they were accepted part of daily life.
Harry Boyte wrote about the "Backyard Revolution" that happened in the 1970s when a mass of new organizations sprung to life to make major advances in a whole array of areas of life. Reaganism made some regression in those gains but most survived. As conservatives bemoan, they could cut the budgets of some agencies and restrain their reach, but they had very little success in completely killing almost any agencies or programs enacted in previous decades. And others continue to be enacted, from Family and Medical Leave to the ADA to Motor Voter to Hope Scholarships to Americorps.
The largest regression has been in the mass loss of unions as a percentage of the workforce, which means far fewer people have access to workplace remedies not mediated by the government. So the gains in government protections of certain rights has been counterbalanced (and some argue related) to the loss of protections of rights through unions.
-- Nathan