American culture became socially liberal in the early 2000s because of the great art created by the socially liberal culture in the 1990s--movies and TV shows like Seinfeld, Friends, The Simpsons, and The Real World on MTV. Art in the 90s was not directly political, but those TV shows were great, so people watched them and absorbed the culture embedded within them, a culture of socially liberal values. Those socially liberal values became so embedded within the minds of people who watched and loved those TV shows that those people retain socially liberal values to this day. That's how the woke movement was born.
Wokeness really is like a mind virus because it infects people's minds and spreads without them realizing it. Based on the art and culture people loved in the 90s and early 2000s, they thought it was good to be socially liberal and progressive. So the culture kept progressing to be more and more socially liberal, just like a virus (or a cancer that must always grow, even if it kills the host). The woke movement spread as people tried to be more progressive and liberal than each other, so socially liberal values were taken to the extreme. Because of that, it destroyed art and culture, so that no good new movies and TV shows could be made within this politically correct culture, which is so progressive that it became illiberal. (Liberal and progressive are not synonyms.)
In the 90s, it was cool to offend the dominant culture, which was conservative Christian culture. So the people who grew up on 90s TV and movies that made fun of Christian conservatism still think Christian conservatism is the dominant culture today because it was the dominant culture in the art they grew up on. But that 90s art was so influential in subversion that Christian conservatism is not the dominant culture anymore. The dominant culture in the 90s was actually progressive liberalism. By the 2020s, progressive wokeism became the dominant culture. But because wokeism is illiberal, people are not allowed to critique and make fun of it in art, which is why all art now is terrible. The woke cancer killed its host.
Thankfully we have reached a tipping point where the vibes are shifting, as 90s liberals are coming to realize that there is such a thing as being too progressive. We will see a movement back towards the right in culture, which will become less woke. It will be okay to make fun of those who take progressivism too far. It will be cool to make fun of them and critique their extreme wokeness. Once that is allowable, art can be great again--which will help reinforce those values of finding a middle ground between socially liberal and conservative values. That will likely be more libertarian--live and let live--which was the real vibe of the 90s.
