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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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