Admiral Kirk said this about America of 1986 (STIV:TVH)
What may he have had in mind?
Right wing extremism? Religious fundamentalists? People who don’t want to use store reward cards?
Give it your best shot! Or, be serious.
Well, we still use money. Bones would say we’re one step above bone knives and leeches as far as medicine is concerned. Whenever they went into the past, they had to worry about being caught, arrested, interrogated and shot by The Man.
And, by 1986, the mini-skirt was out of fashion.
Besides, 1986? That’s so 25 years ago.
I have to assume he was talking about hard-core fans of TV’s Hello, Larry.
because in any quasi-realistic scenario, someone from two hundred years in the future just showing up would stick out so obviously to cause widespread panic. just imagine if you could go back to 1812. Every thing about you- the way you talk, the way you act, the clothes you’re wearing, your possessions- would be so horribly out of place that everyone you encounter would at best be highly suspicious.
They didn’t have any transparent aluminum, either.
But considering the increasing speed of cultural change since the 19th century, much of what someone from the Star Trek era would see would be comparatively primitive to begin with.
Nuclear war. The Cold War was still going strong in 1986.
They were in San Francisco. 
The producers even had doubles spend weeks walking around the city in Starfleet uniforms and never got a 2nd glace from people.
Plus you gotta watch out, or you get caught in one of them automatic rice-pickers.
Noooooooooo. That was the Age of Gorbachev: Perestroika, Glasnost, and all that! Recomember? :dubious:
Primitive: Television. Internal combustion engines. Fast food places. Multiplex cinemas. Street crime. The cash-and-image–based political system. The quality of education. Loud and dissonant music. Street people. Police armed with deadly weapons. The automobile death toll. Drug abuse. Public ignorance and apathy. Young people’s role models. Slaughterhouses. Poor manners. Rudeness. The prison system.
Shall I go on?
What wasn’t/isn’t primitive about our society, compared to the 23rd century?
Did’nt Tuvok say something the same about the Voyager crew when they went there?
We raise animals for slaughter, so we can eat their meat! We use stimulants such as caffeine. Some of us still smoke tobacco, and a lot of us drink actual alcohol! :eek: There are many places where criminals are put to death! We are still bickering amongst ourseves instead of working together to further humankind’s cause.
What about paranoid?
A lot of people drink alcohol in the 23rd and 24th centuries, too. Chateau Picard, Saurian brandy, Romulan ale, the green stuff Scotty is fond of. I don’t know if alcoholism has been eliminated by the 23rd century, but they don’t seem to find drinking to be a primitive vice. You would often find a few of the crew members enjoying some rounds in a planetside bar or in a tribble-infested space station. Even with the introduction of synthehol, Guinan kept a fully loaded bar in Ten-Forward.
What about douchebags with room-temperature IQs? :dubious:
What does that have to do with the OP?? 
Y’all are giving great answers for our 1986, but in the Trek universe, 1986 was during the build-up to the Eugenics Wars and only a few decades off from World War III.
Well, y’know that principle historical event on the planet Earth in the year nineteen eighty-seven? It was the invention of clozapine. Cleared the paranoia right up.
There was one of the later Trek shows (DS9, I think) where the crew went back to our time, and the team doctor was baffled that “A lot of these people are walking around with curable diseases”. “Well, you’ve got to remember that their medical technology is a lot more primitive than ours.” “No, I know that, I mean curable with their technology.”
So apparently, lack of universal health care is one of the points.
Kirk and company had been there in the 1960s. Watching Gary Seven prevent a possible accidental nuclear war. And watching Roberta Lincoln and Isis mud wrestle. He had also been there during the Great Depression to make sure some do gooder lady dies so as to prevent a worse tragedy than what WWII actually was.
Also, to them (including that charming Negress), the 20th century wasn’t that far removed from the American Civil War and all its causes, so maybe a big part of it was lumping together various aspects of pre first contact history. How many average people now really know the difference between events or the culture of the 16th or 17th centuries?
Thinking of diseases and health care, what about the AIDS crisis? AIDS wasn’t curable in the 1980s (or now), but there was plenty of ignorance and paranoia about the disease* in the mid '80s and the US government and medical community didn’t deal well with the crisis. I assume this all would have been particularly obvious in a city with a large gay population like San Francisco.
*I was a kid in the '80s, but I remember people saying things like how you shouldn’t eat at such and such a restaurant because some of the waiters were gay and you could get AIDS and die.