What you remember is a media that was pro-American. Sure, America was different, but it wasn't necessarily better. Racism was common. Women were second class citizens - they couldn't get professional jobs, buy houses or cars, and dared not report rapes. Discrimination against many ethnic groups was common - Italians, Poles, Chinese, etc.
Abortions still happened, but in back alleys. Addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill were locked in prisons or state hospitals.
There were Communists actively working to subvert the US gov't. And there were crooks in office.
We didn't read about all of that in the papers, or see it on tv, but it was there.
We can't solve problems without facing up to them. Of course, right now, we can't even agree on what the problems are.
All ages have their problems. In some ways blacks are worse off now in consequence of Johnson's Great Society fraud than they were in the first half of the 20th Century. Despite the racism, black families were more or less healthy and intact. Harlem was flourishing and safe.
Feminists are perplexed to discover today that many women are giving up on the "freedom to achieve" outside the home and are returning to the role of homebound mothers. It isn't a bad, repressive, or unfulfilling life simply because it involves changing diapers in lieu of climbing the corporate ladder or filing appellate briefs.
It's been trending that way since he penned America Alone, I think, and the election didn't help.
There are a couple of different issues on the plate here. First is the notion that Bush or any other President is solely responsible for the size of government. The Executive is actually mostly a cheerleader in matters fiscal, and the lengths to which any President has to go to get "his" budget passed is a case in point. Another case in point is the fact that Ronald Reagan also ran on a small-government platform and was really quite sincere about it as evidenced in his contemporary writings. And government grew.
The real difficulty is that the purse strings, and hence the size of government, are held in Congress by people with a vested interest in getting government to do something for their constituents, with the stakes being the primary ones for any politician - their re-elections. There are a lot - a majority, I think - of good reasons for placing this power in that organ but cutting the size of government takes a distant rear seat because of it. The question is simply whether the voters will accept less in the way of federal programs in their direction in the interest of cutting the size of government, and it takes a brave and potentially suicidal politician to try to accomplish that.
The voters have to force the issue by electing officials who are conservative in this area in practice. This past election we didn't do that. For those conservatives who are sitting back in self-satisfaction telling themselves that they just taught the government a lesson, they're right, but it was the wrong lesson.
The second issue revolves around a pervasive feeling that we've lost the war in Iraq that has very little to do with any actual events on the ground. The media have framed this election as a referendum on Iraq and the radicals within the Democratic party have cooperated by resuming their old role of a stern parent shaking a finger at a wicked America that has grown too big for its boots, much to the delight of our enemies. If now Syria and Iran and North Korea are emboldened it is at the prospect of having allies in Congress more interested in humbling their own country than in governing.
An awful lot of people felt similarly that our "loss" in Vietnam was the end of the Cold War with the Soviets reigning victorious, only to be bitterly disappointed when events proved otherwise. Many of those same people are behind the current deliberately contrived malaise with respect to Iraq. They'll be wrong this time too - but the Vietnamese people payed a terrible price last time and the Iraqis look to this time. Not the happiest position from their point of view, but hey, the Dems feel good about themselves just as they did in '75.
Steyn seems dark because I think he sees the possibility of the war being fought closer to our shores by enemies growing in numbers and in the power of their weapons, and on behalf of a Western culture that has essentially refused to fight when the prospects of victory are high, to paraphrase Churchill, and so are faced with fighting when the prospects of defeat are growing. That tends to sober one.
A society can take that analyzing of problems to an extreme and everything is turned into a problem, offense, and a syndrome--which is the state of affairs we are in now. And we all know how people with a leftie mindset want to solve societal problems, offenses, and syndromes real and imagined--more government. See post above regarding the nursery rhyme police in England. The leftists here and abroad have set up a society where many people are no longer in intact families. Single mommy has to work and child has very little to no daddy influence and maybe very little or decent mommy influence. Child doesn't flourish and his options are limited. He might turn to illegal activities. He's a burden on society. How do we solve this growing burden on society? More government programs and solutions. It's a horrible downward cycle, and I think Mark Steyn believes that it might be very hard if not impossible to overcome when coupled with external and internal enemies who are anticipating and/or plotting your demise.