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.
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.
