during the Vietnam War.
A good deal of the antiwar activism was centered on college and university campuses, and Reagan in particular targeted university students and faculties as hotbeds of progressive organizing and the kind of critical thinking that is so antithetical to the right. Many working class Americans, particularly whites, had fought in or otherwise participated in World War II, and saw Vietnam in the same terms of good--us--versus evil--the Commies. When the left questioned that framework there was a visceral reaction among working class whites, especially men, who equated opposition to the war with a lack of patriotism. The right eagerly picked up on this and milked it for all it was worth.
Add to that the Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights--sometimes reluctant, often half-hearted--but LBJ and Hubert Humphrey and the Kennedys went far beyond what southern whites were willing to do in acknowledging the need to fight systemic racism. LBJ, signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, talked about how this one act alone would lose Democrats the support of southern whites--and not only southern whites--for several generations. Follow that with the evolving acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, which lots of people--working class and otherwise--can't abide, and here we are.
Add to all this the right's decades long campaign to co-opt the media--print, broadcast, and now social--which means the left is often shut out of any chance to reach people and make its actual point of view heard. It was clear to conservatives in the 1960s that the media--like college campuses--had to be made to toe the line, or else demonized so that they lost all credibility. The concentration of media in the hands of a few large corporations has meant the end of the ability of the left to reach tens of millions of people.
Finally, the left, and labor in particular, has been the victim of its own success. Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, safety regulations for the workplace, a forty hour work week, the exponential growth of the middle class under the post war GI Bill, all have blunted the perceived need for organized labor. It's only now, when all these are under increasing attack from the right, that many people are finally waking up to the reality of American politics.
My opinion, for what it's worth, on how we got to where we are today.
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