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I mean, you're right. In the far future, trends might reverse. Absolutely nothing lasts forever — but neither do we. It seems like we are heading into a dark age, which we might emerge from eventually, but does no good for anyone living today or those in successive generations.

The way you describe it, it does sound like it does benefit 'successive generations'?
It's true that it could go one way, but, then again, it could go the other.
It seems to me that nobody has really engaged with what you've said here yet, because you've said a lot. To summarize as simply as possible, this is what I think you're saying: 
1) Human flourishing has improved a lot in the past, and
2) We're at the beginning of a downward trajectory that only seems to be accelerating. 
Does that sum it up well to start, at least in a like very TL;DR way? >

Yes, that would be an accurate TLDR. >

Ok. I feel like you did a great job of explaining in detail why you think that way, and I honestly don’t think you’re totally wrong about much of your supporting evidence. I agree with you that something like rapid decline is a very real possibility in our future. But there are two counterpoints I’d make. 
The first is that I think I see local politics a little differently than you do. I’ve spent a good chunk of time working on local issues, and the main assessment I have is that local activity is basically being abandoned. Local government in the United States provides us with really powerful tools to make change in the world, but basically no one is using them. When you start showing up to stuff, you quickly find that there’s a leadership vacuum and people will put you in charge of things by your second or third meeting. They’re desperate for people to do stuff, and this is the case all over the US—big cities, small towns, and so on. 
While that’s a bummer, and maybe a sad commentary on the state of polity, there’s honestly nothing stopping people from simply showing and picking up the tools available to them and starting to use them again. All you need is a will to do it, and a little bit of free time, and you can make enormous change in your community. 
Which brings me to my second point. Everyone alive today (in the developed world) happens to have been born into pretty sweet circumstances where human flourishing has done nothing but improve for multiple generations. Lucky us! But this improvement hasn’t just happened by accident or due to enormous structural forces no one can control. The generations of improvement occurred because generations of people lived through moments where things could have gone either way, and chose to do what it took to move things to a better place. Whether you’re talking about science, or politics, poverty or war, each improvement that occurred happened because somebody lived in a challenging and difficult time and decided to push things forward. 
History is full of moments like the one we’re living through now. I can imagine someone looking at the world in 1939 and thinking exactly as you do now. Fascists on the march, Franco just winning in Spain, world war coming. Who could have guessed that a mere decade later we’d be sitting on the precipice of a 70+ year period of relative peace and prosperity? >

You definitely see local politics differently than I do, because I have not found any such inroad. On the contrary, in my experience, trying to change anything through politics is pretty much a losing battle. This is why I don't believe there's a political solution to the current problems. In my experience, there are few traces of democracy left in the US at any level, and politics is a club that only a select few are invited to, and which resists outside influence. There are going to be some exceptions certainly, but they would seem to be just that — exceptions. In addition to fighting your way into that club, you also have to deal with the people in that community who support the current status quo and are going to make things nearly impossible for you at every step. And even if you have some success of that kind of incrementalism — all the while you're doing it, people are suffering and dying while they're waiting for that progress. It's like if a patient goes into cardiac arrest and the doctor's office, so, instead of emergency resuscitation, the doctor schedules them to see a cardiologist a month from now.
Secondly, while plenty of problems occur at the local level, the biggest issues and shenanigans seem to take place at the state and federal level, at least here in the US. The problem is, with the hierarchy of government the way it works, whatever kind of progress you make at the local level can be swept away at the state or federal level. I do believe that things need to start at the local level, but with how compartmentalized politics are, I don't see that as a viable strategy through political channels. Mutual aid and community organization, which then branches out into surrounding areas and spreads — that can certainly start local, but it also doesn't have to operate within the limitations of politics.
Thirdly, no, not everyone has been born into sweet circumstances. There are people born today, even in developed countries, who have the odds stacked against them far more than some people born centuries ago. There are people today who are never given a real chance. We like to think that we are so much better off because of our technology, and how much that improves quality of life — but that only applies to the degree people have access to it, and even then it's not the only variable. People today have far less free time than in most points throughout history, and social cohesion is pretty much gone. We have luxuries, but we have little peace, little rest, little connection. We can afford a smartphone with internet access, but when we get sick we're left to our own devices, without anyone to take the burden off of us, and instead usually have to go to work and bear somebody else's burdens through it. It's a miserable existence. Give me a mud hut and bland food with community, rest, and peace any day. Give me a shorter, fuller life over a long, miserable, lonely life any day.
For all the improvements we've made, we've regressed in so many critical ways, which is the core point I'm making. It is extremely privileged to be able to point to the technology we have today and call that improvement when so many people don't have access to many of its benefits, or when they experience hardships that outweigh them. >

I agree almost wholeheartedly except for the assertions that bigotry will be a thing of the past. Since the dawn of man there has been some type of othering of groups and treating them worse. The target group changes, the intensity ebbs and flows, but it is a line of thinking that will always require upkeep, and egalitarianism will require upkeep. For a lot of really racist people today, racism totally ended in the 60s. Most people say we have gotten worse since a certain high-level politician made bigotry accepted again. There will always be a need for anti-bigotry. Think of how many times the Jewish population got persecuted for roughly the same damn conspiracy throughout history.
I think pessimists see everything as one step forward, two steps back, when really it isn't the case. There's a lot of things that really fucking suck right now, but luckily they aren't incapable of changing, and we show the right trajectory. Some of the really bad things like right-wing power plays are the death throws of a dying ideology and place in time, desperately clinging onto whatever it has left. The only major concern for me is maybe we just can't rectify climate change, but even then our efforts seem to have been finding some payoff I hear >

Racism is an extension of tribalism. So yes it has always been with us. But it doesn't necessarily have to be part of us.
America is actually one of the least racist countries on planet earth. You know why? Cause black and white kids grow up going to the same schools. They are friends with each other. They don't see each other as members of the opposite tribe.
As wealth grows. So does integration. >

My premise is that there are some bad things that keep coming up throughout history. I believe that humans are innately more good than bad, but there are circumstances destined to come and go that make a population trend towards certain lines of thinking. As long as there is some type of hardship, and there will never be a true utopia, there will be a blaming type of negative reaction that takes hold. Always has, always will, even if the world is generally getting better. Some people will always be inclined to dry lines and divide, there will always need to be people protecting this from taking over. We will never be able to stop worrying about the problem, because it will come back up like a virus. Ignoring bigotry helps it take root, we will never be able to fully get rid of it. We will continue to get better over time, I agree >

Humans have gone through "regressive" periods before only to come through them, so there is reason to believe that this could happen again, despite our current trajectory.
People have been saying 'now is the end-times' since ancient Greece, probably earlier. >

I mean, you're right. In the far future, trends might reverse. Absolutely nothing lasts forever — but neither do we. It seems like we are heading into a dark age, which we might emerge from eventually, but does no good for anyone living today or those in successive generations.
That said, technology would be a factor that might throw a wrench and even this. That is, it allows for a more total and complete subjugation of people by those who hold the power — between omnipresent surveillance technology, automation rendering human labor obsolete, and even now automated enforcement systems that, if you recall, there was a recent debate about whether or not they should be allowed to use lethal force. That debate likely isn't over. There's a lot of talk in the futurist community about a singularity — a point of technological no return where the acceleration of advancement compounds on itself to a critical degree. Often, this is seen from an optimistic standpoint — but it's very easily go the other way as well, and that does seem to be the direction we're going. We may soon enter a point where the power and wealth difference between those on top and those on the bottom is so great, that we can't do anything to reverse it. And while I could be wrong on these predictions, they seem to be the most reasonable given the current evidence and trajectory.