You know, that's just one hell of a good question. It's one that the red pill types have been asking for decades. What worked for you? After all, the young people never tasted greater freedom, the middle aged people are wrestling with the fact that they really don't want their teenagers getting away with what they used to get away with, and the old folks want to be protected and looked after a bit after years of dealing with all the rewards and risks of freedom.
In some ways society does get better. People do have a point when they don't just want to go back in time to when racism was rampant, America's reaction to world events was to wait and see until it was too late to properly prepare for the challenges, and medical science couldn't even tame polio, for example. And yet, I think history can both provide stories of what more freedom was like and how people dealt with the perceived problems with it.
I think the best way to sell it is to say here's the good deal your parents had, and right here is where we screwed ourselves out of that good deal, so why wouldn't we fix it? Either it's a case of they had a good deal except for this, they created a cure worse than the disease, let's do it this way instead; or they had a better deal, it worked, let's go back to it now!
