No, I said left-wing takeover, not liberal or conservative, you well know that definitions of liberal and conservative and how closely tied either is to a given party vary a lot. Left and right are dem and GOP, currently lib and con are basically Dem and GOP, this has not always been the case and realistically most of the time the GOP existed it was the more liberal party. That changed after the civil rights movement, as you well know.
Indeed I do, and as I say, that was less a takeover by the left than abandonment by the right. Which is true of a great deal; by the time Reconstruction ended the Republicans were well on the way to being the conservative and Democrats the liberal party. The only real exceptions there was segregation, but the Corrupt Bargain of 1876 made it an issue on which both parties were in fairly solid agreement. There were individual exceptions among Republicans from time to time, but for the most part both parties left it alone; meanwhile Democrats embraced things like the Grange, Free Silver, labor, suffrage etc. and Republicans generally watched mutely or resisted. The one exception is a debatable one; Prohibition was "liberal" in the sense of being a change from the norm, but not really more liberating; on the other hand, Dems ran hot and cold on that one (Al Smith and FDR, for example. )

For good or ill, I think he was committed to being dispassionate, which may have hurt him as much generally as it did in this instance. Remember, up until the days of Clinton and Obama Democrats had distressing tendency to come of as wonkish, and thought a firm grasp of policy should make having the charisma of a damp sponge irrelevant. Unfortunately politics remains, in a very real sense, a popularity contest, so charisma is indispensable; were that not the case Nixon would've mopped the floor with JFK whether I like it or not.

No, because the courts are the proper place to handle criminal acts. Part of civil disobedience, almost invariably, is deliberately breaking a law because enforcing it will demonstrate its absurdity. If you think a given criminal act shouldn't be criminal it's natural to advocate it be committed openly, and just as natural to expect prosecution in a court of law. If prosecuting a criminal act makes the law look stupid, whose fault is that?

Local autonomy often means some very stupid things can be enacted on a local level with a relatively small number of people supporting them. Put another way, in small areas with (relatively) small populations it's easier for a fringe movement to gain a majority, but the left isn't threatening anything like that on a national level. The fringe right very much is, and has been for some time.

Most people have forgotten how bad the abuses got before government regulation and reform was instituted; people don't pay tribute to Wilson for ending child labor today, but the truth is both he and TR were instrumental in doing so. So it's something of a red herring to say garment industry workers aren't locked into factories that will kill them all if a fire breaks out; it's true, but only because when that ACTUALLY HAPPENED laws were passed to prevent it. There are far fewer abuses NOW because the left agitated for their reform THEN. The suggestion by some (and I'm not pointing a finger at you here) that those abuses were made up out of whole cloth and the reforms should thus be removed makes some of us very nervous because we know better. Obviously there's a limit to how much government regulation is needed, and that's a lot of why I'm a socialist rather than a full blown communist (another large part of the reason is that I don't trust anyone, state or private entity, with complete control. ) Again, what we're debating is where to strike the balance, but in doing so we're talking about some form of socialism rather than pure capitalism OR communism.