this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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Those boomers actually did enact a lot of change, just not nearly as much as they thought they would. The America of the 50's was fascist as fuck. The US just used to invade any country they wanted to. The US was an apartheid state. As hard as it is to believe, it's better now. That's why Trumpists want to go back to the 50's. Those boomers did a lot, they just didn't go far enough.
Liberalism adapted. The income gap reached the lowest point in US history in the 70's. The US government gave in to a bunch of their demands, like getting out of Vietnam. At the same time Nixon, who won the election by coup, created the drug war to target his political opposition.
If you pay attention, you'll notice a pattern in US politics. They split the moderates from the radicals (for example, by small concessions) and then arrest or kill the most radical elements. Nixon started it and it ramped up significantly under Reagan. It's continued to where we are today, with the right pushing hard and liberals defining their whole platform as "at least we're not the right."
So the lesson is not that they didn't do anything, it's that you have to go all the fucking way or you'll lose more ground than you gained. The lesson is that if you don't protect your generation's most radically leftist elements, your generation will ultimately be seen as reactionary. A lot of those boomers are still with us, and still radical.