To claim that the activists were strong is pretty absurd. The activists failed for approximately a century, in a regime that did a very good job of returning to the status quo ante bellum, died repeatedly while I don't recall hearing of very many KKKers ever dying, and a partial victory at some point in some small town shows that they're 'strong'?
This might be a radical suggestion, but who holds power does change over time. Especially over as long a period as a century. It can also hardly be disputed that gaining stronger allies or your allies being more interested in helping you makes you stronger.
Quite obviously Universalism was not completely done with tolerating racism in the 19th century. Note how Eugenics came into fashion among Progressives in the 1900s and how support Eugenics correlated with racialist ideas. And in the 19th century actual democracy (elected officials) on the state level had much more teeth than the 1960s according to Moldbugs model and my own study of US history. He notes in other writing that rule by the civil service which we have today is preferable to the mob politics and spolis system.
Desegregation in the United States was very much not the will of electorate of the Southern States. If populism had more strength I would have expected the activists to have been defeated for a while longer.
Reminds me of the over-application of 'revealed preferences' and the dormitive fallacy: 'who are the strong? Those who win. How do you win? Be the strong.' Well, uh, OK, if you think that's anything but word games, I'll leave you to it then.
It is not a word game, rather a very firm admonishment to make use of a very handy heuristic. Humans love claiming they are the underdog. Winners write history. Yet the truth is underdogs don't tend to win. Of people claiming to have been underdogs who have won, I'd argue it prudent to expect most of them to be overdogs either consciously crafting a deceiving or rationalizing self-flattering image.
So you agree that the cause of civil rights started out as the underdog, and only gained power gradually with time until it had enough power to challenge the established law and change it. How does this differ from the standard Progressive narrative? (other than, perhaps, insisting pedantically that once the cause is strong enough to win, it shouldn't be called the underdog any more?)
Re your last paragraph, it is true that if a winner writing history says "we were the underdog, and despite that we won quickly and decisively", this should be susp...
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html
Summary: Moldbug on the Aaron Schwartz affair. Power is a very real thing with real consequences for activists, yet many people don't understand the nature of power in modern times. People like Noam Chomsky get great fame doing bad epistomology about who has power, and as a result do great harm to idealistic nerds who don't read between the lines to selectively target their attacks at weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT).
Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't. If your worldview has the underdog somehow systematically beating the overdog, your epistemology is simply wrong - in the same way, and to the same extent, as a geocentrist who has to keep adding epicycles to account for anomalous observations.
This means that activists like King, Schwartz, and Assange are only effective in bullying the weak, not standing up to the strong (despite conventional narratives that misassign strengths to institutions). When such activists stop following the script, and naively use the same tactics to attack strong institutions, reality reasserts itself quite forcefully: