I think a combination of tech and the September 11th attacks has been the biggest driver of that sociopolitical change you refer to. Even if people went from wearing funeral clothes in 1980 to clown outfits in 2000, it's still a smaller and less fundamental change than people carrying around a fully functional computer in their pocket everywhere they go, being constantly afraid.
I was born in the early to mid-80s and I was the youngest of 14 cousins, so I was exposed to a lot of what they were doing by the late 1980s. Me sitting at home on a Wednesday night in 1998 listening to an Offspring CD and playing Nintendo 64 was not that fundamentally different from my cousin sitting at home on a Wednesday night in 1988 playing NES and listening to 80s stuff on the radio. If I wanted to contact my friend to hang out in 1999, I picked up the landline phone and called them just like someone would in the 1980s. Different bands and clothes and tv shows and movies cycled in and out of popularity, but fundamentally as a teen in the late 1990s, my life was not that different from the life of a teen in the late 1980s. The things I was doing as 1 15-year-old in 1999 were roughly analogous to the things a 15-year-old would have done in 1989 or even 1979. I would go to the mall, hang out with my friends, get something to eat, and go to the arcade. In the 1970s my parents would go to a take-out, hang-out with their friends, get something to eat, play the pinball games that every take-out had back then, etc. It's the same essential thing and the changes are largely just surface level. If you plucked a teenager from 1978 and dropped him in 1998 I think he'd fundamentally understand what was going on. If you plucked me from 1998 and put me in 2018, I don't think I'd know what in the fuck was happening, and that's pre-covid.
What I'm saying here in a round-about way, is as far as I can tell from the mid 1970s(There was a shitload of change in the 50s and 60s) until 2001, things weren't changing that fast or that fundamentally. I think looking back, September 11th set up the model for the current way news is reported, just constant DOOM!, and that draws people in. The attacks were so big it got everyone, high school students, adults, college students, everyone paying attention to the news, then it activated that little part their brain that gets activated when they watch a horror movie and they have to see how Jason is going to kill everybody, and now they are glued to the news. My parents never watched CNN before September 11th and after that they seldom turned it off.
Even when people were scared of stuff in the late 90s, like Y2K, the news wasn't as pervasive as it was after the September 11th attacks and the following war on terror was. Even during the cold war, most people had confidence by the late 70s early 80s that the west was running laps around the commies. There were news stories about stuff, but people didin't pay much attention to them. By 2004, the fact that people were so into the news as entertainment that Fahrenheit 9/11 reached number one at the box office and made $250-million is a pretty telling example. That would have been fodder for page 50 in the Saturday morning paper that your average person wouldn't have read in 1999. They took an episode of 20/20 and made it into a movie and it took off.
Fast forward to the 2010s people got into smartphones and they're just being broadcast constant DOOM! to this device in their pocket 24/7 and that's driven stuff like the SJW/woke stuff and the over the top fear surrounding covid. People on the right aren't immune to it either. Look at how much traction the idea that known millionaire pants-shitting neoliberals Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are going to convert the US into a socialist country gets, which really when you dig down is completely laughable because all both the dems and the republicans really care about is maintaining the plutocracy outside a few young idealists and the occasional Trump-like populist figure. The September 11th attacks got everyone on the retarded short-bus, but smartphones just caused the driver to hit the gas and now it's going at a constant 99 miles per hour.
