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Notes -
Well, since we're being blunt...
The first issue with the whole "the past was not better" argument is that we cannot trust progressives to admit it, if it was. The entire legitimacy of progressivism rests on things getting better, so mentioning even stagnation gets them antsy, let alone a decline. Not even a partial concession is possible, nor an acknowledgement of a trade off, because if some things got better while others got worse, some people might be prone to ask "was it really worth it?". Indeed, for a defense of modern culture there's scarcely a mention of anything you find good about it.
The second problem is that the entire argument boils down to an extremely flattening equivocation: there was cultures war before, there is culture war now, culture war = culture war => things aren't worse.
As someone who also lived through the 90's I can tell you there was a marked difference between the discourse of today and back then. Back then progressives were pushing for race blindness and harmony, now they're pushing for centering race as an identity and racial conflict. Now, you can point out that harmony was not achieved at the time - muh Rodney King riots etc. - that does not detract that it was explicitly what progressives were fighting for, and now they are explicitly fighting for racial conflict. That looks like a decline to me.
As fun as it is to point at conservatives of yesteryear handwringing over trivial things, and smugly point out that society has not fallen apart, I'm not sure you can actually look at how things have developed and declare that nothing has gotten worse. Sure, back in the 90's conservatives were losing their minds over on-screen titties, and while the world has not literally ended, the rampant sexualization in media got so bad that young audiences of all people are saying it's getting a bit much for them, which to me is a clear sign something has gone terribly wrong.
We could go over the issues this way, though I'm not sure how convincing either of us will find it, and you maybe right we'll have impassioned arguments in the 2050's how not-quite-so-terrible the 2020's were, but that doesn't mean people arguing it will be wrong.
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