> I later learned that a term exists for this phenomenon—the March of Dimes syndrome—and that the tendency affects many other movements, too. Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?<p>Because the very cultural change that makes things better, makes the remaining bad stuff less socially acceptable.<p>By the time gay marriage was a hotly debated political topic in the US, things were already better for gay people than they had been a few decades earlier, so why was it a hot topic when things were better, rather than when things were worse? Because when things were much worse, there was a general consensus that being gay was wrong, and so it wasn't a topic worthy of much debate. Once society became relatively more accepting and there were actually two popular sides, then it became a hot button issue.<p>Sure, things are better in the US for black people than they were several decades ago, but the threshold for what's an acceptable level of discrimination has also changed. Right after the Civil War, just "well they're not slaves anymore" was a huge improvement over the prior status quo, but that hardly meant that things were actually good.