My view: the Great Awokening is over, but, by default, will be back even worse in 20 years. This cycle has already happened twice, with the 60s/70s New Left and 90s PC. Each time, some of the worst excesses are undone but nowhere near enough to reverse the previous wave.
What I think causes the ~20 year cycle is the education system; the natural result of paying attention in school is to be an insane leftist.
Every major conflict in US history, and most in world history, is taught as left vs right (sometimes "reformers" vs conservatives"), with the left always winning, always being in the right, and always vindicated by history. It's very simple to extrapolate from that!
Each generation tries leftism, sees it fail disastrously (crime, welfare, immigration), and partly backs off, but this experience *isn't* transmitted intergenerationally, and then a new generation whose knowledge of past conflicts comes from school grows up.
(When I was growing up, I never understood why Reagan was so popular; hadn't he been racist and mean to the gays and poors? I had to read right-wing literature from the 60s/70s/80s to understand what he was fighting; my guess is <1% of people do this.)
Then there's a ratchet: every year institutions get browner, more female, less Protestant, and more temporally distant from the world before the 60s revolution; at this point we're several generations in. So the "leftist waterline" keeps rising.
Things that only fringe Communists believed in 1960 are now mainstream beliefs... in the Republican Party, and would be considered incurably reactionary within the Democrats.
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