Nowadays they seem to deal more in narratives.
Tbh this comes across as related to the typical conservative argument that racism is over because we elected a black man president. That's not really what you're talking about, is it?
Yes. I don't, right now, see racist policies.
> and never resume?
Why does that matter? Can't a new institution form to fix the problem if it comes up again?
If society goes through (for example) 100 years of a totally racist-policy-free existence, why on earth would you argue that the institutions founded to oppose racist policies continue existing for that 100 years?
The way it applies to companies, we can state that <whatever>-ism is solved because we reached some metric. So I'm not sure we can close up shop on an <ism> issue after winning some policy or reaching some type of measurable threshold.
That said, what I'm really hearing in this conversation isn't actually that the -ism institutions need to go away. What I'm really hearing is that some folks are very fatigued and tired of being inundated with the -ism dialogue and the demand to spend any energy on it at all. This seems to be significantly true for the people not affected by a particular ism.
And on the side of the -isms, folks are saying, "We absolutely do not feel heard, you're not hearing us about my particular -ism! You can't ignore the badness of the -ism. listen to me! I will step up my activism!"
The reality of the matter is that the -isms aren't going to go away and change is going to be a generational process. For example, every significant founding woman of woman's suffrage died of natural causes (old age), and none of them got to see womens' voting rights pass in their lifetime. Now that women voting isn't even a question of debate and very obvious, no one is really debating in earnest whether women should be allowed to vote or not. That's just a ridiculous thing to consider.
If you want a metric for a measurable threshold of when the ism-issue should go away, it's when we reach a point where the ism-issue has reached a point of saturation where it's plain and obvious and has enough societal inertia not to be challenged. And if people decide to revive something like whether women should be allowed to vote, trust that there will be an opposing force that rises up to fight that.
The pandora's box of the internet and social media is that much of the learned-helplessness to accept that an -ism-issue is here to stay can actually be rallied against, and that change can come about from it. So I would expect that this is the new reality we live with. One can either fight for or against the ism, or ignore it and focus on their interest of choice.
Where are you going with this?
I mean, do any of those institutions formed solely for feminism (for example) actually have a metric for when they will be done?
Did they actually draw a line in the sand, saying "When we reach this point, we will dismantle the institution because at this point we will, happily, no longer be necessary?"
Because to all of us watching, they don't have a "done" metric. They don't have a goal, which when reached, will cause their existence to be unnecessary.
Their primary goal isn't "fighting for $whatever", it's to ensure the continued existence of the institution.
Sane people don't work that way - they have a goal in their mind, and once that is achieved they move on to a new goal.