thats leftism not liberalism, being a liberal means smaller government and fewer controls on the people. leftism is bigger government and full on communism as California wants.
Well, that's the thing: liberalism does not mean smaller government. For the favorite example of this, did government get smaller, or larger because of civil rights? Does stopping the mayor and his sons and cousins who are all the important heads of industry in the town from colluding to divvy up profits in the town between them take a bigger government or smaller government?
Lots of liberalism involves centralizing and enlarging government power. Its how you can have a "liberal" absolute monarch, because he spends his rule stamping on the petty aristocracy and forcing conformity to broader standards. Or in modern days the EU and UN are not inherently anti liberal even though both have explicit goals of building larger states.
It one of the issues I have with modern liberals/libertarians, since they often pay lip service to the idea of local government, but in any situation where the central power can claim to be making things more liberal they often seem to default to increasing liberalism at the expense of local rule. Hell, I really don't know where the line of local rule is. It seems an underdeveloped part of the philosophy, at least as its preached now.
On the MLK issue, while he is an interesting in the Christ like treatment he gets, in that he's Christ who comes down on order of Augustus to preach that Emperor worship is a core part of Judaism. He may have lead the church and his people in a bad direction, but basically every mainstream denomination seems to have eagerly jumped to follow, to the mainstreams seeming steady doom. But, if the conservatives lost to the left in the 1920-40s as some say, we can hardly blame MLK for being leftist while leading a leftist country and church.
And the "I have a dream" lays out a very appealing vision, which at least to me isn't as immediately cringey as what's put forward in John Lennon's "Imagine", and it doesn't immediately fall apart as what happens when you ask a communist to explain anything specific about their economic program. "Don't be bigoted to Black people" seems to be way more possible than "work for free" or "we will decide every petty business decision by having everyone in the company vote on it".
Now, seeing what's happening now in the US and South Africa, that dream seems to be dying, and it was not nearly as achievable is it was hoped. Maybe were just reaching the 1960s compared to the 1920s regarding communism where communisms problems were not as blindingly obvious to people until people had tried to implement communism for 40 years, so maybe were reaching the same point on the civil right's program. 2010 Is about where I was starting to hear more relatively mainstream questioning of civil rights in general.
Sure, people complained earlier. The Goldwater campaign was partially about that, but, well, he was also crushed. To whatever degree Goldwater was right, no one was willing to listen to him at that point, so it was mute.
Any issues that did come up, the busing controversy, the 90s riots, complaints about inner city culture or affirmative action, generally were criticized as either a sign the civil rights project was incomplete, or that it had gone to far on this particular issue. An excess of an otherwise good program. Its only really since the 2010s that criticism and doubt has started to go so far as to doubt the program in its entirety and question its fundamental assumptions.
Maybe around the time of Ferguson in 2014 was when I really started to see things rolling? Where, after reelecting a black president, and finding out that wasn't enough, you had wonderings if anything would ever be enough? Maybe there was a similar dawning realization in the USSR during the 60s: once everyone has spent their entire lives sacrificing for communism, and seemingly not getting any closer to true communism, one starts to worry that true communism was never going to happen, and all your sacrifice for it was meaningless and pointless.
