the demoralization of America

There is an essay entitled "Decline and Blumenthal" in the collection With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays, by Joseph Epstein (who is one of the most brilliant essay writers of modern times), in which he accurately sums up the mood of modern America:

The pervasive feeling of decline and fall I have been attempting to describe is at bottom about demoralization.  In good part, I believe, this demoralization is owing to the loss of belief in progress.  The United States has always been a country whose underlying assumption has been that or progress - progress unstinting and unrelieved.  I did better than my father, and my children will do better than I -- this was the operating assumption.  It no longer operates very successfully.  For the first time, one hears talk of the downward mobility of children...

Walking the streets of any large American city today one meets with the demented and with the hostile young, lending everything a heavy tone of sadness and menace.  When I was last in Baltimore, a city I have always greatly liked, my overriding impression was that the whole place could use a paint job.  I have begun a quiet campaign to change the sobriquet of New York from the Big Apple to the more fitting the Big Crazy, after the Big Easy, which New Orleans is called.  On the Chicago El one bright Saturday morning I rode from the Loop with a carload of young, my guess is unmarried, mothers, youth-gang members, two men selling newspapers to help the homeless, and a thin, middle-aged transvestite who, I do believe, winked at me as he departed the train at Clark and Division.  One the Howard-Jackson line, it was a A Train, but in such company the strains of Duke Ellington were not to be heard.

The collection was published close to 30 years ago and I don't have the original date of publication of this particular essay in front of me, but it seems to me that what was true then is not only still true now, but is many times worse.