The Folly of "Golden Age" Dreams

In his book By the Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts paints a picture of a not-so-recent American past—the 1980s and 1990s—that was a veritable golden age. He invokes—from a political ad, of all things—a time when “beautiful” and “young” couples got married, when the gender of those same people was always men and women, which those marriages always occurred in churches surrounded by a loving community, when those same beautiful young people always looked upon American life with pride and wonder. The children of that same golden era always looked upon Old Glory with reverence. “Today,” Roberts concludes, “the ad looks like a lost dispatch from a foreign country.” The inference, then, is that America really was once this idea.