I’d choose the 1950’s to go back to, if I could. Of course, I would want all the bad parts to be gone, though.
I like some things from the 50s too. Too bad it’s so hard to combine the good things of different times. Many good things are closely connected with bad things, though. I believe Emerson calls that the “law of compensation”.
Still, it should be possible to improve things a bit with a judicious combination of the virtues of different times. That — along with technological advances — could make things much better. (Getting enough people to agree on which are the good ones, though, is the problem.)
You’d go crazy in the 1950s for lack of one thing - FR.You had a good president, mostly, but Congress was bad, and “the media” was awful - the nominal definition of “McCarthyism” is one thing, the reality was quite different.
In 1954 critic Leslie Fiedler captured the essence of “McCarthyism”: “From one end of the country to another rings the cry, ‘I am cowed! I am afraid to speak out!’, and the even louder response, ‘Look, he is cowed! He is afraid to speak out!’” - Ann Coulter, TreasonThere were three television networks, and maybe four TV stations in Philadelphia. Not even a Fox News, let alone a Rush Limbaugh. As to the political parties, the Democrats weren’t uniformly quite as bad as now. But in those pre-Kemp/Roth days every Republican was a RINO who fought for lower spending - then fought for higher taxes to balance the budgetifwhen they lost. And SCOTUS was loaded with FDR appointments.But at least, patriotism among Democrats was a thing back then. And illegitimacy (relatively speaking) wasn’t. And high schools had 30 seconds of prayer daily, and baccalaureate services at graduation time.
And, lest we forget, there was the draft . . .
But the bottom line is that wishing to be in a different time is actually ingratitude for what you have now. And ingratitude is actually
The Key to Unhappiness - Denis Prager (5½ minutes, but a jewel)