Are you implying that we believe that “Communists” were responsible for the changes in America and that none of these things would have been done had conservatives been able to stop them?
Sounds rather like a friend of mine, who claimed to be a free thinking Christian, yet was obviously a Socialist.
Alas, Jillian, you and I have disagreed over some things, but just a few. 
Doug, what I think is needed is localized resistance to the Left, the Woke Agenda and ESG in business and TSEL in education. Our national and state elected leaders did not begin to fight back soon enough and grandly enough, and all this mess has filtered down to counties.
Local LEOs and local county government and local school boards are where change that will affect people in their everyday lives may be a last guardian against the Left. Certainly, state and federal offices are important, but what we have seen so far has been local fighting back.
Hoping here for a tsunami wave of Conservatives elected in 2022, so the Left knows we are serious.
No, I must have worded it poorly. Communists supported Black rights and female equality, but they were not the cause of these changes. They would have occurred in any case. They’re part of the logic of ‘bourgeois society’, best expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
Some people apparently over-rate the influence of the Communists (and other Marxists). You can’t have it both ways, though.
And as for the conservative support for female equality and Black rights … perhaps I didn’t see it at the time, which is quite possible. Let’s leave aside votes for the Civil Rights Acts, which were supported by most Republican congress-critters and opposed by a lot of Southern Democrats (who were generally conservative and who went over to the GOP later).
Were there articles written in National Review, or books published by conservatives, in the 1920s- 1960s, in favor of these changes? Give me some titles or references.
By the way, I do NOT blame conservatives for not being … conservative… on these issues. Conservatism is a disposition, not an ideology. In the past, liberals looked for injustices in society and agitated for government action to correct them. Consevatives resisted the expansion of government powers, and for good reason. (We can now see what was wrong about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – here is a good essay about it:
[ Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law ] Not sure I agree with it all, I’m still thinking about it.)
By the way, this fellow, Richard Hanania is an absolutely first-class thinker. Everyone should read every one of his essays.
Anyway, it’s just a fact that things that we accept nowadays, like female equality and Black rights, were things that were fought for most vociferously by the Left. (Yes, if we want to expand on that statement, it can be qualified in various ways. For example, female equality was most advanced, around the beginning of the 20th Century, in what are now the ‘Redoubt states’ of the MidWest and West. I’m not sure why this was so.(But see: How the West Was Won: Competition, Mobilization, and Women’s Enfranchisement in the United States | The Journal of Politics: Vol 80, No 2) … and its notable that the two major Womens’ Suffrage organizations in 1884 endorsed the Republican candidate for president.
But really, modern conservatism in the US only begins in the 1950s. So if there is any evidence for conservatives spearheading the fight for Black rights in that period or later, I would be glad to know about. (I already know about Goldwater and his integration of the National Guard in 1948.)
Jeanne – read the piece by Richard Hanania in my next reply, entitled. He addresses that question directly, and brilliantly.
Oh yes. For collectors of political arcana, there are only two instances that I know of where the Left or part of it went against its ‘normal’ positions (the Left out-of-power, I mean).
I believe that in Spain in the early 1930’s, there was a movement to extend the vote to women, who did not have it there at that time (it’s more complicated than that, see the link). Spain was highly polarized between Left and Right, and would break down into civil war just a couple of years later. Conservatives supported their right to vote, the Left, or a part of it, opposed it at that time … why? Because both sides believed that women would vote, in their majority, for conservatives.[Women's suffrage in the Spanish Second Republic period - Wikipedia]
And as for equal rights, etc for racial minorities. This has always been a position of the Left, except for a while, when a radical Guevarist guerilla group in Sri Lanka, the ‘JVP’, was explicitly Sinhala-chauvinist. (As most people here no doubt know, Sri Lanka is blessed with diversity, having a Buddhist Sinhala majority and a Hindu Tamil minority, speaking different languages as well as following different superstitions.)
Yes, Doug, you’re right about how the Left used Civil Rights as a way to expand government, which they did with the Civil Rights Act.
Its a good example of how the Left hijacks every good cause and then exploits it as a tool for their agenda. In the process, the cause, and society, are undermined and damaged.