I mean, okay, but their lives are still better than in 1965.
Income growth for the bottom 50% didn't stop until 1980 and there's been a few other things that are better than 1965 (like most things for disabled or non-white or female or LGBT individuals...)
Like... There hasn't been the threat of nuclear Holocaust for the last 25 years, that's a pretty big improvement over 1965.
It's just weird for people to be willing to say "yes, that time period when no one other than non-LGBT, white, fully abled men had rights and there was a legitimate threat of me dying in nuclear hellfire each day would be better for people like me."
Well first off, very few people even remember what the 60s were like.
Second while you and I care about Civil Rights issues the most (and I suspect that like me you are a Democrat mostly because of the Civil Rights issues) your average voter, even non-deplorable ones, are going to care First and foremost about their own wellbeing in how they interpret the world.
To put it another way I'm going to give you a hypothetical:
Let's say that we have someone who, was doing fairly well from 2006-2015, then in 2016 they lost their job, their marriage, and their mental stability due to changes in their personal life. Do you really expect such a person to automatically say "Yes the world is better than it was 5 years ago" Or do you expect that their own experience is going to make them instead say "no the world is much worse than it was 5 years ago"?
Yes, OVERALL things have improved, but that doesn't mean that every life has indivually improved. Some people ended up losing their jobs and social circle and are left wondering what the fuck they are supposed to do.
Plus I have to wonder what the median income and minimum were in the 1960s when you adjust for inflation.
Actual question: Why do these people have, and continue to have children if they think life is worse now than it was for them and that it'll only get worse in the future? That's pretty cruel.
Forgive me as I laugh at the idea of people that have been truly suffering voting against their direct interests of improving their quality of life. Sadly this isn't new. No one is going to deny that millions of Americans have struggled in some ways keeping up with quality of life standards in the pats few decades as the economy has shifted away from manufacturing, but to seriously try to say that things are objectively worse than 50 years ago is silly.
But whether something is better or worse than it was before is usually a pretty subjective question.
And unless you are asking someone whose job involves something far bigger than themselves, how their own personal world has been doing is going to inevitably affect their answer to the question "Is the world better or worse?"
