"We have experienced multiple golden ages, and they have not all looked alike"

Yuval Levin says that both conservatives and liberals look back at the two decades that followed World War II as a "golden age" our nation should try to return to. But, he says, that is not where American greatness really is:

There is much to mourn in the passing of that era, to be sure: The searing experiences of the Depression and the war had united Americans as perhaps nothing had done since the American Revolution, and the war and its aftermath (with all of our global competitors having burned each other’s economies to the ground while ours alone stood strong) made possible a series of economic booms that launched into being a broad middle class unlike anything the world had ever seen. Social trust, and faith in government, reached unprecedented heights, while a liberal but generally capacious and tolerant political consensus kept the temperature of our politics unusually low (except when it came to the question of race).

The result was the America of the 1950s and early ’60s: Marriage and childbearing rates were high, religious practice was strong, employment was generally plentiful and rewarding, and crime was low. It was a time of cultural cohesion, economic dynamism, and government activism all at once, and thus a time that both liberals and conservatives can look back to with approval....

All these descriptions of that era are a bit selective, of course, but they are not false. This was an America unlike any that had existed before the immediate postwar years, and unlike any we can expect to see again anytime soon. The left wants to re-create that America by re-creating the activist state and the powerful labor unions that characterized it, but this stands to make economic dynamism very difficult. The right wants to re-create it by re-creating the economic dynamism it achieved, but this stands to make social cohesion very difficult....

The fact is that the America of the immediate postwar years was made possible by an utterly unrepeatable set of circumstances, and setting out to re-create it is not a constructive objective for public policy. What we need to do, instead, is seek for ways to achieve broadly shared prosperity and cultural vitality today—to balance cohesion and dynamism in our own time, which is a time of great tension and change.

That this is hardly the first era of tension and change in our history...should send us looking for guidance in eras prior to the postwar golden age....In other times—in periods of social tension, economic upheaval, mass immigration, and cultural transformation—America’s founding virtues have been under immense strain. But time and again, we have found our way to national revival—cultural, moral, religious, social, political, and economic. We have experienced multiple golden ages, and they have not all looked alike.

Perhaps it is this extraordinary capacity for the renewal of our founding virtues, rather than the particular strength we possessed 50 years ago, that really makes America exceptional.

In Levin's review of Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart.