system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I believe the western countries are socially liberal only because of a higher material standard of living and not some sort of higher enlightenment on the part of the citizens, CMV

I see it quite often, living in the western world and consuming western media, this attitude of latent superiority over the "backwards bigoted people with Wrong™ beliefs", be they the Muslims with their treatment of women or the older generations with their treatment of gays, I'm talking about this idea that people have, to use a hyperbole, ascended to some sort of objectively higher plane of existence by virtue of the civil rights movement.

I disagree with this whole premise, I believe that the trend of social progressivism that occurred during the 20th century was a by-product of improving standards of living during that time, and not wholly a deliberate effort on the part of the masses. While there were definitely people pushing the civil rights movement for women, blacks, gays and the rest it seems to me that the reason these have caught on is less to do with people becoming more educated in the relevant fields and more to do with the standard of living improving for people enough that they simply occupy themselves with something else and don't bother exerting energy to follow these political trends, opting to just roll with it.

The reason I feel this way is because I see a direct link between poverty and discrimination. We can of course account for different cultures like those of Islamic countries, but even in westernized regions there appears to be a clear relationship between the two. The most conservative parts of the United States are those with the highest poverty levels (the bible belt), the most socially liberal parts of the EU are those with the best safety nets for the population. Furthermore, due to the economic crisis it appears that the trend is reversing, with attitudes to immigration worsening and some countries outright acquiring Neo-Nazi movements.  

If this is the case, can it really be said that the civil rights movement is an inherent part of western society, or is social progressivism just another aquired luxury of first-world living?

**TL;DR: I believe the social liberal trend in the west isn't so much an ideology in itself but the absence of any conservative counter-ideology, with people becoming accepting of gays and the like because of material comfort-induced indifference rather than an informed conviction. Ergo, I believe that if the average standards of living in the west deteriorate things may very well go backwards on the civil rights front.**
gpt
It isn't that the standard of living is higher, it's that education is better. Poverty does not correlate with bigotry because being poor causes you to be bigoted, it correlates with bigotry because the poor are less likely to be well educated. You will find that the actual causal relationship is between education and bigotry, not wealth and a lack of it.