There is another polarity that is orthogonal to the Liberal/Conservative conflict. I call it the Puritan/Libertine conflict. Both words are usually used as terms of abuse these days, but I want to give them these value free definitions:
Libertines think to fulfill yourself as a human being, you have to throw off the restrictions imposed by society.
Puritans think that we can fulfill ourselves only by putting newer and harsher restrictions on ourselves.
During the 60s, liberals were usually libertines, and conservatives were puritans. Liberals wanted sexual freedom, and no restrictions on any kind of symbolic expression. (Language, movies, comedy, cartoons, etc.) Conservatives thought anything but married heterosexual sex was a sin, and that creating "obscene" literature and art should be a crime. It sounds like you lived through that period where Liberals were Libertines in this sense, as did I.
Today however the New Woke Liberal (What Ruy Teixeira calls the “cultural left”) is constantly on the lookout for new reasons to ban symbolic expressions. Sexual expression used to be the only thing under threat of being banned. Now expressions can be condemned because of racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, Islamaphobia, microagressions, cultural appropriation—the list continually grows. If any of these sins manifest themselves in social interactions, blog posts, cartoons, movies etc. the perpetrator is shamed. The modern Conservatives, in contrast, cast themselves as the defenders of freedom—of the right to not wear masks, to offend whomever they want to offend, to pollute the environment free of governmental regulations etc.
I think these examples show that either extreme is wrong and destructive. Because liberals of my generation were libertine to the extreme, the next generations of liberals have gone the other extreme and become a kind of puritan. This may be morally necessary, but there are dangers of going too far in the right direction. I discuss this phenomenon here.
https://teedrockwell.medium.com/the-fall-and-rise-of-forbidden-language-bb0a27152b09
