The perception of past social movements vs. present-day social movements

[thefuturemesozoic]

Around Christmas time, lots of people watch It's a Wonderful Life, seeing it as a traditional Christmas movie. Around the time it was filmed, however, the FBI thought that it might be Communist propaganda. If a similar movie was made today, I wonder what people would think. Would many Americans not wonder why these out-of-touch, elitist Hollywood liberals always have to demonize hard-working business owners, stoking division and resentment? They would complain that the movie was an advertisement for socialism, just as people once complained that It's a Wonderful Life was Communist propaganda.

And I could say something similar about movements for social change. In Martin Luther King's time, many whites felt that Negros were asking for too much too fast. Martin Luther King once wrote, "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.'" MLK is retrospectively seen as a hero. His call for change and his methods are universally seen as having been justified, although, at the time, people were saying that civil rights legislation was Communism and that it was antithetical to our conception of states' rights. Abolitionists are retrospectively seen as having been justified in pushing for change, although, at the time, defenders of slavery felt that they alone understood the Constitution and what was needed for our economy to work. Yesterday's conservatives are almost universally seen as having been wrong in clinging to the status quo, yet many Americans seem to believe that our country is perfect just the way it is, or at least that any more change would make things worse. They see any further efforts for social change as being anti-American and destructive to the country. They say, "why don't you leave if you hate America so much?" or "what about those of us who like it the way it is and don't want things to change?" And so I see people saying that liberals never build anything and only destroy. That is true by definition if any change is seen as destruction.