science

She and her coauthors speculate that framing hardships today as civil rights violations evokes comparisons with the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, which makes contemporary problems appear less significant and therefore less worthy of government action. [...] Surveys were conducted in 2016 and 2019...

Six to nine years ago, it was easy to make the case that virtually everything had improved since the 1960s and that evoking that era made modern issues look relatively minor in comparison. But now we have federal agents rounding people up en masse and shipping them off to foreign prisons without a hearing—there are at least some dimensions of the current situation where a comparison with the 1960s accentuates how serious things have become.