I don't know about more courage. Look at how many people in Washington State lost their jobs due to being accused of Communist involvement in the Canwell hearings in the 1940's. The mere accusation was enough to cause people to be fired and blacklisted, setbacks from which they would never recover fully.

I think less things change than everyone likes to think. We were just living in a more protected time after the McCarthy approach was deemed to be Un-American. The cycle is swinging back the other way, and it will be perhaps a few decades before it recovers (if it does).

The real danger from where I sit is actually that for things to recover we need a vibrant middle class. We need people like John Caughlan (my mother's uncle) who went to Harvard but then dedicated his life to fighting for the politically persecuted to an extent he was even kicked out of the ACLU for defending the unpopular (the ACLU later apologized and gave him their William O Douglas Award). You can't have that if everyone comes out of college with crushing student debt and you can't have that if small businesses and self-employment becomes prohibitively regulated. The economic and political realities are unfortunately intertwined in a way that makes me pessimistic sometimes.