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I think to be fair, during the actual civil rights era these weren't considered easy questions to answer. We went from 4% of polled Americans supporting interracial marriage in 1959, to 94% today. The argument is that it was only because a small and annoying minority of 4% argued their point in the marketplace of ideas that support for interracial marriage can be so high today. MLK Jr. was one of the most hated men in America, and considered a dangerous radical.
Certainly, for any civil rights struggle there would have once been a time when the average American wouldn't have accepted that the thing under discussion was an easy question, even if we look back and see it as a no brainer.
I think it goes without saying that if trans activists "win", then in 40 years it will be just as "obvious" that they were right to most people.
‘Her’ argument is arc-of-history triumphalism, but am I the only one who notices that arc-of-history triumphalism is by nature an inapplicable argument even if you accept the underlying frame? Opposing interracial marriage is verboten today because 94% of the population supports it, and this wasn’t something anyone could have predicted in 1965.
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Counter-example: pro-abortion activists "won" in 1973, but the thing they won remained just as controversial as ever for the next fifty years.
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It goes without saying because it's tautological. No one will see them as having won, unless most people agree with them.
I agree with you he made a mistake by saying the moral questions of the past were easy even back then, but the rhetorical trick he pointed out is real. It goes more like: people like you objected to civil rights, but almost everybody including you is now on board with them, therefore you should now support X without objection, because it's just a question of time before we all realize this is the Right Side of History. Being correct is assumed, and the necessity to argue their case is rejected.
The issue is that there are also plenty of horrors that we have carried out in the name of progress, and it also wasn't obvious at the time how horrifying they're going to be. I'd have no issue with the process of us living and learning, if it wasn't for the obvious difference in how these things are remembered. Horrors against progressivism are enshrined in history as things we must Never Forget, lest we repeat past mistakes. Horrors of progressivism are either outright forgotten, swept under nervous coughs, covered up with "well, we had good intentions", or pinned on a different ideology.
And today that's how we see transphobes! Coincidence?
Bingo.
Consider that state-enforced eugenics used to be a progressive policy. Just following the science!!
Alcohol prohibition too. That gets a little muddled (protestants/evangelicals and progressives working together??) but consider how progressives call for bans on trans fats and sugary drinks nowadays.
Progressive policies often win the day, but not always. And they usually write their failures so they do not get attributed to their ideology and they write their successes to seem inevitable.
This adds an extra layer of fallacy by pretending opponents of progressive policies all either changed their mind or ended up on the wrong side of history, even if the issues ARE comparable.
This is one reason why, as a progressive, I believe that a strong and vibrant conservative movement is not just desirable but necessary for progressivism to succeed. Progressivism is supposed to be about progress (I think the term has been mostly redefined due to use by its own proponents to mean something else in recent years), and progress isn't the same thing as change - for change to be progress, it has to be forward in some meaningful way, in this context something like better. Anyone is going to have the bias that the change they want will accomplish something better than before, and so progressives can't be trusted to accurately assess whether the changes we're calling for is actually progress or just change that we genuinely believe is good. So we need people to argue and fight against us so that the strongest, most correct changes are the ones that stand up to scrutiny and are actually implemented, while the weakest, most misguided changes get trashed. It's highly imperfect and messy, but that's the best way I can see for us to even make a sort of attempt at achieving actual progress rather than merely change that I've convinced myself is progress.
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