cial movements. While both the civil rights movement and the women’s movement might both seem to superficially conform to the ‘governmental support clause’ of Costain’s political process paradigm, this is certainly not the case with all movements. For example, a movement that is particularly hostile towards the government (or seeks to negatively influence the actions of the government) would probably find the government to be fairly unreceptive to their views. This type of negativity would remove the step of governmental support from the equation because it would be exceedingly illogical for the government to support a group that was fundamentally against it. Thus, when analyzing a movement that takes a stand against the direct actions of the federal government, we would clearly not expect the emergence of the movement to be preceded by governmental support for its cause. The anti-war movement represents one of the more significant and widespread social movements of the twentieth century. The government, however, had little interest in the facilitation of the movement’s goals for world peace and an end to the Vietnam War. Because of this, I must argue that government facilitation and support of movements is not necessarily the primary requirement for the formation of all social movements. Instead, I believe that a movement can have a profound impact by inciting the sympathies of large sections of the American populace—this is what most contemporary social movements tend to do. It is likely that this type of sympathetic identification is also a fairly modern phenomenon, and has resulted primarily from the advent of sophisticated forms of mass media (particularly television news programs that reach a large sector of the population). Indeed, it is the sympathetic response of people to profound cases of injustice that seems to place government in the oftentimes-uncomfortable position of having ...
