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This seems not-exactly-right in an important way. In most ways the 1990s were, judged by polling and behavior, more socially conservative than the '70s and '80s. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1281656449203085313
Taibbi is right that the Boomers overthrew an age of greater of prudery, but the excesses of the Hefner-Polanski era produced a mild conservative backlash, an era interlude of bourgeois liberalism that tried to strike a balance between the '50s and the '70s.
Think Tipper Gore vs. record labels, "Dan Quayle Was Right," the @sullydish conservative case for same-sex marriage, plus dropping divorce and teen birth rates - they all emerged out of this matrix.
This bourgeois liberalism tried to stiff-arm the religious right while taking social conservatism in small doses. Fro a while it seemed to work - but it somehow produced a succeeding left-wing generation that somehow wanted more liberation and more puritanism at once.
Alternatively, you can divide recent history as follows:
1964-70: Moral revolution
1970-80: Me Decade, total chaos
1980-98: Attempted conservative counterrevolution
1998-2014: Attempted bourgeois-liberal synthesis
2014-?: Attempted establishment of left-wing moral order.
1964-70: Moral revolution
1970-80: Me Decade, total chaos
1980-98: Attempted conservative counterrevolution
1998-2014: Attempted bourgeois-liberal synthesis
2014-?: Attempted establishment of left-wing moral order.
Choice of 2014 slightly arbitrary, but the transition from bourgeois liberalism to Great Awokening happened somewhere in Obama's 2nd term.
