I guess everyone misses when they were a kid to teen at some point. Look at several Twilight Zone episodes, where Rod Sterling gives a rose tinted view of the 30s, when he grew up. He was smart enough to know as a whole the 30s were a bad time for everyone, but at the same time, for him personally, they were good. I guess, besides the objective facts about Trump and America becoming a joke, that’s what I’m trying to express. No time is perfect, but if it was happy for you, it was happy for you. In the 90s, my family was intact, my parents were younger and healthier, my grandma was alive, we had more money, my dog was still alive, the music I love (rock and grunge) was fashionable…Everyone has their own personal utopia. It is a shame we cannot replicate the past, redoing the good and removing the bad.
Almost everything is better now. The economy is better, high GDP, lower unemployment. Crime was twice as high, in a country that had 60 million fewer people they were 5-7 thousand fewer murders a year. There were more teen pregnancies, more abortions, more divorces. AIDS was still killing people. The US had troops in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti. Clinton was just as anti illegal immigration as Trump he just talked differently, his administration bragged about tripling the number of deportations, increasing border patrol personnel by 46%, and cracking down on asylum seekers and immigrants on welfare. Race relations were worse with the hysteria over the fake epidemic of black church burnings mirroring today’s hysteria over the fake epidemic of cop shootings. Social media did not exist which is a great way to keep up with relatives and old friends in different cities and breaking news. The quality of television is much higher than it has every been before and there is so much more of it. Music is currently awful but it has never been easier to get access to the great music of the past. Movies are much worse but the great movies of the past are also easier than ever to get.
Worldwide poverty is down a huge amount and its attendant horrors a consequently down as well,
Were the 90s better? Hmm… The music was better anyway. 
I think that you’re overestimating social animus in the 90s. I think that racial problems have been exacerbated by the Internet. There were racist groups, but they tended to be more localized-militia groups buying land in the middle of nowhere rather than the more ubiquitous type we have now. This isn’t to say that there weren’t racial issues, the LA riots were in the 90s after all, but I don’t recall the virulent counter-protests by racist groups then. I actually see much more casual racism by white people today. It used to be more hidden. I never recall going to barbecues or dinners and ever hearing racial comments in the 90s and now you’ll hear them from time to time. Anti-immigrant sentiment wasn’t even close to what it is today and anti-Muslim sentiment was nearly non-existent. The primary racial dividing line was between black people and everyone else as opposed to every racial grouping on an island unto themselves that we see now.
Anti-gay sentiment was much more ubiquitous and much more casual. I don’t think the 90s were some sort of hellscape for homosexuals, but it’s certainly much better today.
Anti-religious sentiment today is through the roof. In the 90s, religion was pretty ubiquitous still and negative religious thoughts tended to be along the lines of ‘It’s boring’ or ‘It’s out of touch’ or possibly ‘It’s weird’ With the exception of Jewish people who always seem to be on the short end of the hate stick, there wasn’t a lot of religious hatred in the US between any religious groupings. We were watching the rise of ecumenism and it was really going mainstream. Religious hate crimes were decreasing. Now though, it seems that every year religious hate crimes increase and the dialogue between religious and anti-religious groups has become dehumanizing and hateful in ways that it wasn’t 20 years ago.
As for the general outlook, things were much rosier in the 90s. Americans still saw themselves as the lone superpower, there was a great deal of hope that the world was democratizing and that ‘freedom’ however one chose to define it was going to be the main feature of government in the 21st century. We hadn’t yet absorbed the rise of China and the third world seeing the utility of authoritarian state capitalism. We didn’t anticipate the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terror groups. Obviously they were around, but we saw them as small, fringe groups capable of the random attack here or there, but certainly something that our law enforcement could contain easily and not much of a match for the only remaining superpower. I don’t think that most people anticipated the importance of carbon emissions. Environmental groups were still combating things like PM2.5, over-urbanization, aerosols, AMD and acid rain. Carbon was still relatively low on the priority of things. We were certainly less polarized, though the polarization had begun with the rise of the Contract with America, Bill Clinton being unable to keep it in his pants and the beginning of conservative talk radio, but the polarization was still in its infancy. Shoot, California went red as recently as 1988 and in 1992 and 1996, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Louisiana were all blue states. It was still common to have politically mixed marriages and community lines that weren’t drawn by your political affiliation. We were still able to talk about specific policies and break ranks with our party and you don’t see that now (You could say things like “I like that Clinton did X, but I don’t care for Y.” rather than “I am a Democrat/Republican, so everything that Trump/Obama does/did is right/wrong simply by his doing it.” I think the latter attitude is much, much more common today.)
Economically, things were different. Wages were lower, but not significantly so especially for the people at the bottom. Housing costs were much more reasonable. In 1999, a buddy and I paid 450 a month including all utilities for a three bedroom slum home in a college town. I live in that same town today and just looked up that house on Zillow and they divided it into two units going for 2300 a month total no utilities. Wages haven’t gone up 5 times between then and now. The last time that house sold, it sold for 230 thousand. The people who bought it in 1996 paid 60 thousand for it and as far as I can tell from driving past it, no upgrades have been done. It still looks like slum student housing, only now they get a heck of a lot more out of it. I can remember in 2000 I worked part time for 8 bucks an hour while in school and made 7000 dollars for the year. I was able to live independently on 7 grand. It wasn’t all daisies and happiness and things were tight, but I wasn’t starving and I could go to the movies and buy DVDs and I even had enough for cable and internet and paid for my books and even some of my fees. My daughter is 20 and makes 8.75 an hour 18 years later (No, I wasn’t a deadbeat Dad for those doing the math, we adopted her as a teenager.) and there is zero chance she could afford to live on her own like I did. Absolutely none. She has to work 115 hours just to afford her school books. Her car insurance is half of my rent and she’s only making .75 cents more an hour. If she lived in the same slum that I did, she’d have to work 137 hours a month (not including taxes) to afford the place. That’s a full-time job just to afford rent! No idea how she would eat and actually get to her job and having electricity and heat is simply out of the question. For people just starting out or who don’t have a degree, things are way worse.
I notice you didn’t mention the negative treatment or dialog towards atheists 20 years ago, only on the difference in negative treatment towards religion.
That sounds right. College, itself, is much more expensive, too. Tuition and fees is about 4.4x what it was at my school when I started in the late '90s. Combined with, as you mention, salaries not going up nearly as much.
Sure, there were 2 anti-atheist hate crimes in 1996 (and that’s a typical number for the 90s). There were 6 in 2016 (also typical - the small n though doesn’t help us judge too much.)
Anecdotally, I would say that dialog towards atheists was much better in the 90s. Let’s not pretend there was any love between atheists and theists, but from the theist side, the dialog within their groups tended to be about ‘lost souls’ and ‘misguided people.’ The dialog in the last decade of theists toward atheists has much more become about ‘enemies of the faith’ and ‘bigots’ and ‘hatemongers.’
Well, that depends. Things are certainly better for me, personally, than they were in the 90’s. Cause that was my twenties and I was a total screwup back then. My life was pretty much crap til the mid aughts, then things started to ramp up at a fairly rapid pace. That’s me, personally though.
I don’t like the way technology has changed some things, but if i HAVE to have social media in or order to have all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips, I’ll take it.
Politically, yes, I do think about politics a lot more than I did back then, and I wish I didn’t. If IMDB message boards still existed I’d probably be able to put my blinders on in movies and ignore it. I am trying to reconcile the real fact that no, Trump is NOT the center of the universe, does not control everything, and chill a little more. This board does not help in that area though, lol.
My family has always been dysfunctional, on both ends, but in the 90s everyone sort of papered over the underlying issues and got VERY well along because everyone had kids. It’s hard to explain but basically there was an illusory peace which was pleasant. Like everyone buried the hatchet for the sake of the kids. Now, we’re adults, no one talks, there’s great animosity and brokeness. But for the entirety of the 90s everyone sort of was able to tolerate each other for the greater good. Hard to explain.
Also, life here in NYC was much more livable. I am renting a single room for 700 a month. In the 90s, my parents paid 800 a month for an entire first floor of a house as well as exclusive use of the driveway and backyard and basement.
Sticker prices (which at many schools the majority of students don’t pay*) are high because people are choosing to attend schools with high sticker prices. Less expensive options are available for the price-sensitive.
*A low or medium-income family does far better at a top school today than in the 90s. I’m not not aware of any schools having blanket waivers for family contributions back then.
Mine was the lower tier commuter college, not one of the big two state unis, and not a private.
EDIT: Scholarships also require higher grades/scores for lesser award amounts (relative to tuition, not actual dollars) at the only two schools I remember the scholarships for.
The original question was about the US, though; that some respondents are eliding that bit doesn’t mean they’re not taking it into consideration.
I certainly didn’t see less sexism or less racism or less xenophobia. Right this minute, the bigots have both a big flashlight aimed at them from the people who reject their behavior and a big bullhorn they feel free to shout through, but back then there were just as many and they were just as mean. The double difference is that, first, a lot of that behavior wasn’t pointed out as unacceptable and second (which wouldn’t even be “needed” if the first hadn’t come into being), those who incur it are feeling perfectly comfortable shouting that those of us who don’t accept it are just a bunch of whiny wimps.