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How is the modern American red triber ‘socially conservative’? Do they refrain from sex before marriage? Do they go to church every Sunday? Do they sincerely believe blasphemy is a sin and avoid expressions like ‘damn’ or whatever? Social conservatism is dead in America outside of a few niche communities of Christians, Mormons and Jews. Your average red state conservative is as ‘socially conservative’ in their own daily life - if not less so - than a deep blue Democrat corporate lawyer who lives out in Connecticut and hosts fundraisers for Biden. Unless disliking Bud Light ads is the central defining factor in social conservatism, of course.
The American way of life is, in many cases, all about the acquisition of cheap consumer goods made in China and elsewhere.
Social conservatism is relative. American red tribers don't refrain from sex until marriage but it's more often with a long term boyfriend/girlfriend that eventually leads to marriage as opposed to either hookup culture or cohabitating for 5+ years without planning to get married. Some of them do go to church every Sunday. Many go at Christmas or Easter. They don't generally avoid saying "damn" but that's been common for centuries so I'm not sure we can blame modernity for that one. If you define it by pre-1920s America standards then yeah nobody is a conservative any more but there are still useful distinctions.
The blue tribe Democratic lawyer in Connecticut is probably socially conservative than a red triber in a trailer park, but less so than a red triber of the same class. The manners of the upper middle class have always skewed conservative.
It seems like a major confound that you pretty much have to have a college degree to be a blue triber, whereas the red tribe covers the whole economic spectrum.
IME red tribe normie elites are fairly socially conservative, at least enough to raise objections to their grandchildren fornicating openly(although usually with a don't ask/don't tell) and expecting their dependents to be members of- and at least sometimes attend- a church. That's of course not getting into the omnipresent homophobia(which is enough for tons of people to call Russia based), continuation of at least occasional shotgun weddings, and belief that yes, it's better for mothers to stay home even if it's not realistic for lots of families.
A red tribe country would be by western standards fairly socially conservative, but Islamic norms would be a pretty small minority.
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I've sometimes thought of the mainstream contemporary mode of social conservatism in Europe (and, increasingly obviously, in the US), as 'lifestyle conservatism': conserving the typical lifestyle of, say, the early 90s (or even the early 00s), what increasingly seems like the true golden age of the West, the carefree period between the Cold War and 9/11 (perhaps even extending up until 2008 crisis), with no real threats to Western dominance, continuously improving economy, no particularly onerous environmental regulations (if you're not a farmer), EU momentarily looking unambiguously like something that creates wealth for all Europeans instead of channeling it to GREEKS WHO DON'T PAY DENBT´S and so on. And, yes, cheap consumer goods made in China, too.
Lifestyle of the grill pill, currently considered to be threatened by (in Europe) 15 years of no growth, environmentalists blocking your traffic and trying to tax your meat, immigrants (in a variety of ways) and weird wokesters who think you should be interested in US-imported causes you don't understand and which don't seem to affect your life, expect perhaps negatively. Maintenance of a set of secular societal values that were common in your childhood and associated with a period of economic growth. Extremely exploitable by right-wing political parties unless they start getting uptight about sex stuff or partying; the 90s-00s lifestyle still includes casual sex, alcohol and feeling absolutely no shame about not going to church on Sundays, after all, perhaps even moreso (in the first two cases) than now.
Is it social conservatism? If your reference point is the 1950s, well, no, but that's 70 years ago - might as well be the 1850s, insofar as most people are concerned.
Going to push back a bit on "the early 90s [were] the true golden age of the West". The way I remember it, there was a lot of abundance but also a deep ideological conformity and a corrosive cynicism. I remember the 00s better but I remember it as a time that was resolutely anti-ideological, such that any hint of sincerity was mocked and any possibility that we hadn't discovered the only philosophy man would ever need was almost incomprehensible. The great questions of life were regarded as solved or irrelevant.
Our current crisis is unpleasant in many ways but at least we know the wokeness exists. It's something that one can recognise when implemented, it's something that you can identify with or stand against (even if one is afraid to stand against it publicly). There is far more, and better, free thought now than there was in the 90s and 00s.
I'm not saying it was necessarily the "true golden age" (a thing with no objective criteria, really), I'm saying that it's easy to view it that way. The conformity and the anti-ideological nature of it all are arguments for why people would see it that way, not against it. If one's criteria for good life are purely hedonistic and materialistic, good and free thought is not all that important - a clarity that it's been all solved and you can just concentrate on living your best life is far better.
Fair enough. It’s a common perspective and I wanted to provide a counter-proposal.
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I'm going to be blunt here - the reason why there's current nostalgia for the 90's, is that is now the age where middle-aged people were now children. Shockingly, about a decade ago, there was nostalgia for the 80's, including I'm sure paens to how the culture was better then as well, because everybody, even libs, didn't like the Commies or whatever.
Also, as somebody who was alive during the 90's, there were many, many, many, many social conservatives upset about the current state of things at the time, and looked toward the prior generation of pre-11/22/1963, just like the current middle-aged people look to a pre-9/11 age. Oh, wow, groups of people looking back around 30 years to an imagined past. Weird how that continually happens.
There will be people upset about whatever in 2050, who will talk about the 2020's as a golden time. Hell, there was nostalgia for the Depression as people freaked about how teenagers had freedom and such in the late 50's and early 60's.
I think a couple big differences are that, today, this is a common view of social progressives rather than of social conservatives. Social conservatives seem to be pining for stuff that was considered old fashioned and backwards in the 90s. Another big difference is that these people were pining for the nostalgic 90s (and actually the 00s as well) at least 10 years ago, so this isn't something that happened to middle-aged people. It was that adults in their 20s and 30s (I've even seen teens, actually!) were remembering what things were like fairly recently and concluded that, in some important dimensions regarding the culture war, things were better back then, and coming to these conclusions due to the specifics of how these societies looked relative to their progressive standards.
I'd also note that the nostalgia for the 80s that we saw perhaps a decade ago seemed to be purely aesthetic, with things like 80s fashion and pop culture coming back en vogue, but I saw very little talk about how much better something like, say, race relations or censorship was back then. In contrast to the nostalgia for the 90s (and, again, much of 00s actually) seem to be around the actual ideological regimes that influenced our day-to-day lives.
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Sure, I thought of that, but the years I pegged here as the golden age - late 90s, early 00s - were horrible for me. I was not a child, I was in junior high, I was bullied, didn't have friends, any thought of having a GF was incredibly remote, the works. The post-08 years, in particular, have in almost every way been better for me. Still, objectively speaking, the global vibes had a marked difference that is also possible for me to now analyze.
Well, yes, that's almost the definition of conservatism. Conservatism tends to change a lot, ironically more than liberalism or socialism. I was just analyzing the current particular mode of conservatism and its underpinnings.
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Well, since we're being blunt...
The first issue with the whole "the past was not better" argument is that we cannot trust progressives to admit it, if it was. The entire legitimacy of progressivism rests on things getting better, so mentioning even stagnation gets them antsy, let alone a decline. Not even a partial concession is possible, nor an acknowledgement of a trade off, because if some things got better while others got worse, some people might be prone to ask "was it really worth it?". Indeed, for a defense of modern culture there's scarcely a mention of anything you find good about it.
The second problem is that the entire argument boils down to an extremely flattening equivocation: there was cultures war before, there is culture war now, culture war = culture war => things aren't worse.
As someone who also lived through the 90's I can tell you there was a marked difference between the discourse of today and back then. Back then progressives were pushing for race blindness and harmony, now they're pushing for centering race as an identity and racial conflict. Now, you can point out that harmony was not achieved at the time - muh Rodney King riots etc. - that does not detract that it was explicitly what progressives were fighting for, and now they are explicitly fighting for racial conflict. That looks like a decline to me.
As fun as it is to point at conservatives of yesteryear handwringing over trivial things, and smugly point out that society has not fallen apart, I'm not sure you can actually look at how things have developed and declare that nothing has gotten worse. Sure, back in the 90's conservatives were losing their minds over on-screen titties, and while the world has not literally ended, the rampant sexualization in media got so bad that young audiences of all people are saying it's getting a bit much for them, which to me is a clear sign something has gone terribly wrong.
We could go over the issues this way, though I'm not sure how convincing either of us will find it, and you maybe right we'll have impassioned arguments in the 2050's how not-quite-so-terrible the 2020's were, but that doesn't mean people arguing it will be wrong.
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The rest of your comment is defensible, but unless things pick up dramatically a decade defined by three-ish years under government lockdown being looked back on with nostalgia would require things to be pretty bad by the 2050s I would think.
There won't be nostalgia for the bad things, just like there's no nostalgia over the Rodney King riots or the OKC bombing, but for the aesthetic, and how it was better for reasons. It'll just be nostalgia for Fortnite, whatever shows on Netflix teens like these days, maybel Marvel, and the styles of the time.
As a side note, nobody was under lockdown for 3 years in the US. I'm in one of the most blue parts of America, and even here, things were fairly normal by summer/fall of 2021 as far as places being open and being able to go to them. Yes, mask mandates were longer and concerts checked for vaccines longer, and you can dislike that, but saying there were three years of gov't lockdown is just a lie.
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People in the UK got nostalgic about the Blitz. A feeling of “we’re all in it together” is attractive for a lot of people.
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