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I am really not sure I understand your argument. First, you say that you define competency not "in regards to passing good legislation, but literal competency as politicians" but you immediate example is LBJ, because of the legislation he passed. Your next example is Nixon, but because he got himself elected. An important skill for a politician, certainly, but where is your evidence that politicians were any better at that than now?
Then you talk about MLK and Stokely Charmichael, who were if course nongovernmental officials. And what, exactly did Stokely Carmichael accomplish, other than alienating a huge chunk of would-be supporters (spectacularly poor politics)? And, of course, he moved to Ghana in 1968, so he was a major political figure for about 4 years, tops (his first mention in the NYT was in 1964, and he didn't become head of SNCC until 1966).
Later, you say, "Unless we get a Nixon or LBJ, I really don't see any huge changes in how this country is governed" but neither LBJ nor Nixon made huge changes in how the country is governed. You certainty provide no evidence that they did.
LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act
An article on how it changed how the country is governed:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
Hanania is on my "how was this guy ever taken seriously" list. I could halfway understand how there could be a Hananian school of thought, but he seems to be primarily popular with reactionary types talking your ear off about the Cathedral, and how politics is downstream from culture, and somehow the idea they like the most from this guy is that wokeness is the culture catching up to the Civil Rights Act. I cannot understand how people don't see the contradiction between these ideas.
I don't see the inconsistency. It seems entirely plausible to me that politics can be based off of cultural concerns, but those cultural concerns are themselves influenced by the institutional landscape which is itself shaped by past politics? Influence can flow in more than one direction, and through more than one mechanism.
Under that framing "[cultural phenomenon] is [act of law]" is at best hugely reductive, but in the specific case of the CRA I believe it's a contradiction. If the government was staffed with fanatical meritocrats there's nothing in the CRA that could prevent them from interpreting the law in a racially neutral way, and some pomo-AltRighters could probably interpret it to be anti-black or at least anti-jewish the same way it's being interpreted as anti-white today. If wokeness was the CRA none of that should be possible.
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