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McCarthyism took ground, but that's the other reason I'm using it as an example. I'm neither expecting nor asking 2rafa to come up with hypotheticals where 'racist' or 'sexist' stops being an insult in 90% of contexts and clear examples are tolerated anywhere near positions of real power, where the assumptions of social justice aren't treated as a fundamental facet of reality, or where the US stops being explicitly hostile towards racist and formerly-racist regimes.
((Hell, I don't even want a lot of that by its strict definition. And, of course, 'racist' is only useful as a description for what the SJW movement targets as a caconym, in the triple sense that the net is wider to catch entire other 'sins', that it's narrower in excluding a lot of SJW racism, and that it's fine-enough mesh to catch a lot of things that aren't actually in any of those categories by any reasonable definition.))
I'm just wondering when people stop getting fired for minor acts, or being to slow to report those suspected; where we don't see criminal investigation or massive civil liability coincidentally pointed at the politically unacceptable; where the FBI does not take con membership as cause for investigation. Where one-in-two people don't undergo
loyalty review'sensitivity training', where we don't see weaponization of the IRS, of the Veteran's Affairs office, of Social Security benefits, where no rando is highlighted by national politicians by name and by photograph for public humiliation.((And, again, a lot of what's targeted today has less in common with actual-racism or sexism or homophobia or whatever as McCarthy's Army hearings did with communism.))
These aren't goals, they're just weapons, and they're weapons that were placed fully out of McCarthyist hands by people who told us they were too dangerous for anyone to access.
Win/lose might be meaningful for discussing movements in terms of their longer-term impact, and far more important than who's remembered as a jerk, but it doesn't really say as much for the conditions of the war itself. Yet those conditions matter in their own rights: a recurring claim is that since we've seen those weapons set down in the past, they'll be set down here.
Those weapons will not disappear. They just aren't used in times of peace when dominion over the culture is unquestioned.
The 90s were not peaceful because people had grown weary of the quarrels of yore, they were peaceful because only one side was powerful and they didn't feel threatened.
I don't think that's a terribly good model -- McCarthyism's weapons were put down in the late-1950s/early-1960s, which is not exactly where I'd say conservatives felt unthreatened by communists -- but even supposing it's true, what does the equivalent look like today? When, if ever, does the modern social justice movement not feel threatened? When will they feel as their dominion over the culture is unquestioned?
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The later 90's were peaceful because one side had just made a run at power ("Political Correctness") and been repulsed. As it turns out, they were regrouping, and now they have achieved victory and are in the "mop-up and occupation" phase.
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