More and more Americans, in fact, were beginning to look at politics as Martin Luther King did—and as Barry Goldwater, Michael Harrington, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, and Betty Friedan did—as a theater of morality, of absolutes. “You’re either for us or you’re against us,” a right-wing Orange County electronics executive told Time. “There’s no middle ground anymore.” Even moderates were becoming militant; they militated against extremism. “The mediator needs to become a gladiator,” University of California president Clark Kerr said in a Harvard lecture published as an influential book, The
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