YES, THERE REALLY WERE THE "GOOD OLD DAYS"

It was when the wingnuts were still on the margin in American society and could not pollute the world of ideas. From The Liberal Imagination, page iv, (1950) by Lionel Trilling:

"In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."