Time for paranoia. Sometimes we liberals present ourselves as free of fantasy and paranoia and paranoid fantasies. But really we have all that stuff. Unlike conservatives, we temper it. However, here are a couple of thoughts that follow me when I’ve loosed the reins of reason.
Weakening the unions began about the time minorities and women came into the work place. That made it easier to recruit White males into the conservative anti-union effort
The cost of college began its precipitous rise (can something rise “precipitously” or is that an oxymoron?) when minorities and women began entering higher education in large numbers. I paid $56 dollars for an eighteen hour semester at Arizona State University in 1959. My wife paid $17 a semester at the junior college.
Is there a connection between weakening the unions, making college pricier and the entry of minorities and women? Is it a blind cultural reaction (because most American conservatives of the latter half of the 20th century are what I would call reactionaries, not real conservatives) to the breaking of a taboo? Do White men feel their status threatened when they have to participate on an equal level with minorities and women? (Let’s be clear: the word “minority” means mainly Black, Hispanic, Native American and perhaps Asian in this context it is not referring to Catholics, Croatians, Lebanese, etc. Jews occupy such a special place in Western society I’ve left them out for the moment, but their history in American academe is fascinating and illustrative).