It's funny, (well, not funny) because the social issues are the ones where the toothpaste doesn't go back in the bottle. Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
So the top 1% will benefit economically from the right being in power, but the rest will spend the rest of their lives mad about whatever the current social change is, regardless of who's in power.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is remarkably naive. I wish you were right, but this sentiment isn't optimism; it's complacency.
Progress seems to only go in the right direction on social issues, because people are very good at developing reasons why the social views they happen to hold are the objectively correct ones. As any advocate will talk your ears off about, open borders used to be the consensus position, until 150 years of immigration restrictions convinced people that it's not realistic to just let anyone move wherever they'd like.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is 100% false and naive. History is profoundly reversible. There is no such thing as guaranteed progress.
So-called "acceptance" of homosexuality is a very recent phenomenon but in no way mainstream. Even in the liberal progressive Bay Area you can get gay bashed quite easily (including in the Castro!).
Voting rights for women? Basically just turned 100 years old in the United States and already in the process of getting rolled back via the SAVE act.
Don't assume that any of the liberal trends we've seen in the last 150 years are here to stay. America is an interesting historical exception and anomaly -- by no means how humanity has done business for the majority of its existence.