To restate what Brian wrote, in five times as many words:
I think it's easy (and *usually* reasonable) to say, This thing that's
happening now, and the backlash against it, is just like such-and-such a thing
that happened 100 years ago, and all that fuss turned out to be very silly.
So,
Dave, I am with you and Brian on this one, so I hope this doesn't come
across as merely scholastic. It is not about same vs different, but about
difference-in-sameness or the other way round.
There was a rather sterile episode in economic anthropology along these
lines known as the
