I don't claim there was a single ideology underpinning the reasons for the calls for social change. I'm saying that there are usually people (radicals, progressives) calling for social change, and others (conservatives) warning against it, and the rhetoric employed is similar throughout history (e.g. "if you only asked for a little less", or "the previous demands were reasonable, but the new ones are excessive"). That's understandable, as conservatives throughout history sometimes don't like to appear -- possibly even to themselves -- as the enemies of progress so they claim to be in favour of "reasonable progress," but whatever it is that the progressives currently call for is unreasonable; of course, a generation later, the story repeats. Ideas like women's suffrage were deemed outright preposterous, risible, and too silly to seriously consider; in fact, it took actual acts of terror by feminist activists and a world war to get them the vote.

So if you want to compare current demands to previous ones in order to explain the reaction to them, I'm saying that you should also compare current reactions to previous ones. "Previous demands were reasonable, but now they've really crossed a line," has been pretty much the conservative refrain going back millenia to the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome. All of this is why I reject talk of "excess." It's just how conservatives speak of social change for millenia. You can say that you agree or disagree with some policy, but the "this is too much" line is just a cliché.