In my experience, people who repeatedly say things intimating that the world has taken a radical turn, are showing their age.
However there has been a major switch. World War II put a lot of money in a lot of peoples pockets. It built a supercharged middle class. It reduced poverty. Not enough, it still remained, especially along lines of color.
The lie is that entitlement programs somehow turned a poorer class into rabble-rousers. That couldn't be further from the truth. The wealth created by the WWII lasted so long that the "middle classes", and I include most of what people like to call "upper middle class," actually are the ones that thought they were entitled.
With Viet Nam, they stopped sending their sons, and started "hiring" others to fight their wars. Social responsibility was reduce to limited ecological awareness and clothing drives. Nobody bothered to look what was going on around the world, the sheer butchery even in the past twenty-something years is unbelievable. But it has been kept localized; out of the United States. Since the Soviets are gone we need a new enemy. But that is another story.
What is being discussed in this thread lately is a real concern. People die in Boston, the country wants to kick some other country or organization's a$$; a whole school full of children get blown apart and nobody gives a good godammn. The change that you mention is the radicalization of us all. And with a buy into dogma at any level, as always, conceptualizations of reality become over simplified. So they can fit into nice neat packages. And that is what most scares me.
That more and more individuals take on the cloak of righteousness, and stay in the shadows of impersonalization. Those among us are fostered by staying unengaged from anything that will provide a solution. They are bolstered by the mental illness that is all around us, and at the same time we go off tromping for the bad guy organization that doesn't really exist, because we fail to see that with all of our attitudes, we are the bad guys.