(A comment that grew much too long.)
After the first sentence, Pointless Anti-Establishmentarianism is more or less wrong.
The Civil Rights Movement against Jim Crow predated the 1960s. The first major judicial decision came in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Ed. Implementing it proceeded slowly and then in fits and stops for decades. And today can hardly be characterized as complete.
Legislatively, there was the weak tea of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Then the robust Civil Rights Act of 1964. Following that there was the Voting Rights Act of 1965
and Civil Rights Act of 1968. As with Brown v. Board of Ed, implementation and enforcement of this legislation was slow and possibly no more than halfway towards the intent as the racists and the elites who benefit from racialized politics and economics found less overt ways to skirt the laws. And a Supreme Court that over the years has chip away at and watered down much of the primary civil rights and secondary implementation and enforcement legislation.
The “women’s liberation movement” could be dated to 1966 with the founding of the National Organization for Women, NOW. A year later it endorsed Alice Paul’s 1923 Equal Rights Amendment. Few Americans were more than dimly aware of this effort until 1970. But once they were Congress, uncharacteristically, moved quickly and passed the ERA in 1972. A giant half-step.
The jerkwads in Virginia never ratified it but Texas did. The jerkwads in Illinois failed to ratify it but Indiana did. Didn’t even come close to ratification by the deadlines of March 22, 1979 or extension to June 30, 1982 in Georgia and Arkansas. (I have this vague recollection of Governors from these two states during this period that went on to higher national office. We could have had Frank Church in 1976 (Idaho had ratified it) and Tom Harkin in 1992.) Even McGovern’s home state of South Dakota ratified it in 1973 (later sort of rescinded). The ERA died; therefore, did not succeed.
With regard to “keeping the country out of pointless unwinnable wars,” it was the “unwinnable” thingy that finally got the US out of Vietnam in 1975. Didn’t stop the covert wars, Afghanistan for Carter, and Reagan in covert defiance of the Boland Amendment. Reagan did win Grenada and GHW Bush did beat Iraq for the benefit of the Kuwait monarchy. And where was the anti-Vietnam War activist in 2002 when the question of another pointless war was put before the nation? Right there with his clueless predecessor from 1964. And the female, liberal icon (one-time resident of Arkansas) and can’t lose 2016 POTUS candidate? Ahead of John Kerry:
Democrats seem to be exhibiting a wee bit of hypocrisy or historical amnesia in holding all the GOP political, journalist, and other jerkwads that created “Messopotamia” while promoting our own jerkwads.
The “anti-establishment” Conservative Movement most certainly does want to become the establishment. Just saying no today is but a strategy to gain more power tomorrow and then implement their agenda. From the left it looks as if they are regressive, but from their position it’s progressive. Undoing all of what they label as 20th Century failures. Odd that they can’t see all the heavy lifting being done for them by Democratic neo-liberal-cons. Evidence of the power of marketing.
