The Forgotten Generation

[user328]

For us, the major conflict was between liberty and communism, not liberalism and conservatism.

These are sort of the same thing, really. A more generic description might be "liberty vs. authoritarianism." The current battle between nationalism and globalism roughly falls under that heading too.

Other than that, it wasn't in-your-face "all politics all of the time" the way it is now.

When I first saw the 1987 film The Bonfire of the Vanities, I thought it was a complete farce, something that could never happen in real life. I had no idea it was a parody of actual events happening in big cities. It would be a couple more decades before I saw that the "grievance industry" or "oppression Olympics" was an actual thing. The left really has become a parody of itself.