The desegregation of southern schools, mandated by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), presented a dilemma for national politicians of both parties. “If presidents felt they should speak up, or act to enforce court rulings,” a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1969, “they risked offending conservatives, segregationists, and the South. If they wanted to sit tight, they invited the wrath of liberals.” Even presidents who were capable of acting in other areas of civil rights were content to assume a low profile on school desegregation, assign responsibility for this area of policymaking to subordinates, and enforce it only under external pressure, usually from the federal courts.

Within two years of the triumphal, if belated, passage of the 1949 Housing Act, America's public housing program was on the defensive, reeling from an onslaught of local opposition. Progressives had hoped to build 135,000 units of public housing a year, but were soon met with a furious backlash. Afraid of government competition, the National Association of Home Builders and the U.S. Savings and Loan League mobilized local opposition by sending out “kits” to their members with prepackaged ads for local newspapers reading “Can you afford to pay somebody else's rent?” The result was an avalanche of local referenda, and voters across the country blocked new construction. In California, Proposition 10 made all new projects contingent on local referenda, and Los Angeles voters threw out their mayor over his support for public housing. In other cities, such as Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, race played a major role in thwarting local housing authority plans. Despite a massive postwar housing shortage and a well-argued set of progressive ideals, public housing supporters struggled to keep their program alive in the early 1950s. The election of 1952—with Republicans capturing the presidency, the House, and the Senate for the first time since 1930—meant the prospects for the survival of public housing looked bleak at best.

Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood's most prominent political activists, devoted much of his time to the Screen Actors Guild. Throughout the course of Heston's long acting career, the guild shifted its policy emphasis on several occasions. During the 1960s, when Heston served on the executive board, the guild adhered to its traditional strategy of focusing on wages, benefits, and working conditions. At that point, Heston took a moderate approach toward guild business, often showing his willingness to compromise. In the 1970s, the guild leadership was captured by more “liberal” actors who wished to expand the union's activities into social and political channels not directly related to the job of acting. In the 1980s, the guild's leadership became even more militantly liberal. The resulting policy shifts provoked a reaction from Heston and a number of other conservative actors. It quickly became evident that Heston was no longer willing to compromise; he began to take an ideological, hard-line approach to guild matters. He not only led the conservatives in a successful campaign to return the guild to its original policy focus, but he also shaped federal labor policy with his efforts. Convinced that safety mechanisms were needed to protect guild members from a politically active board in the future, Heston advocated federal policies that would allow union members to withhold part of their dues if they disagreed with the political activities undertaken by union leadership.

During the 1980s and 1990s in countries across the globe, new populist protest movements and radical political organizations emerged to challenge traditional parties, ruling elites, and professional politicians, and even long-standing social norms. The revolts against politics-as-usual have arisen from many kinds of social groupings and from diverse points on the political spectrum. Through the 1980s, in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and North America, populist discontent erupted intermittently. But the end of the Cold War, particularly in Europe, unleashed a torrent of popular movements and political parties opposed to what the discontented perceived as the corruption and deceitfulness of the political classes and their corporate patrons. Some protest movements promoted more democracy, pluralism, and economic opportunity; some expressed intolerance, bigotry, and xenophobic nationalism.