“These hypersensitive past years” is a description that would be at home with the sweatily pious conservative commentators who call progressive activists “snowflakes”; a way of pathologizing and thereby intellectually minimizing the effect of the political movements of the 1960s, when Didion’s essays were published. It’s a way of making the struggles for racial and economic justice seem like an epidemic of “hypersensitivity”—which, as we know, is precisely how many people in our country still view these ongoing struggles.
