It's...sanity never reigned, the 90's I grew up in, but you are too young to know...and knowing how much of what everyone I know's plan for the future has devolved considerably since 2001, and really even that image was because my generation were born just before the wall fell, but too young to understand the Cold War we were born into the end/half-time of.
This is one of those things a lot of even former leftist have trouble grasping: even in the 90s the Democrats and Mainstream Media were Corrupt Bad Guys.
There were MASSIVE scandals regarding Clinton and how he sold technology and industry to China. He also was the one who decoupled human rights reviews to maintaining trade with China as well as pushed for Most Favored Nation status for China. There was all kinda of dirty money links between Clinton and China that the nascent right wing media of the 90s tried to get out to people... but were studiously ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media, who instead focused on Clinton's sex scandals. Many think that the sex scandals were the primary thing the Republicans disliked Clinton for... no, they disliked Clinton for a long, LONG list of corruption issues but the only thing the media would run with that caused enough noise was the sex scandals. Not the Clintons laundering money from foreign countries to use in their campaigns. Not Clinton selling out secrets to the Chinese. No, the media focused on the damn blowjob and Clinton lying about it.
Ask yourself why?
I think you know the answer. Said scandal was purposefully focused on BECAUSE it was the least bad thing Clinton did. Because the media could turn it around against Republicans and make THEM look bad. Because at the end of the day, lying about a blowjob made Clinton look like a regular joe and raised sympathy for him. Heck, the joke at the time was that Clinton's biggest issue wasn't the perjury or even the blowjob, it was his taste in women as Lewinsky well, she's not unattractive but she's not "risk your career and marriage for a blowjob in the office" levels of hot.
You also had all the race baiting and race extremism excusing going on in the Democratic party and the media. The Rodney King riots were a prime example of this, as was the entire dialogue around the OJ Simpson trial and so many other things people have forgotten about.
People remember the 90s with rose tinted glasses, but the decade opened with a war in the Middle East and closed with the Infatada. People remember it as a period of prosperity, but it was the 90s that saw the complete collapse of the Rust Belt and the first rumblings of the discontent of the Blue Collar and Forgotten Men of America with the rise of Rose Perot in 1992 and '96. They also forget that the Tech Bubble burst under Clinton, and that there was almost annual government shutdowns due to feuding between the Republican congress and Democratic President over the budget (and then they give CLINTON credit for balancing the budget even though it was the Republicans in the House who actually reigned in spending and set the budgets that were balanced).
The only thing that has developed for those of us paying attention to how things were unfolding in the 90s is that we didn't expect 9/11. That was the Black Swan event. The rise of China, conflicts in the Middle East, the conflicts over illegal immigration, the death of the Rust Belt, the ongoing racial tensions, the rise of the LGBT and the collapse of the family and birth rates... all long foreseen by many in America going back decades, or even happening at the time.
For me, personally, the only true devolution of my future plans was that I had hoped and planned to live in Virginia all my life, but thanks to Obama and the massive expansion of the Federal government poisoning much of the northern parts of the Old Dominion, I think in the long term I will have to flee to West Virginia or Tennessee in order to live in a place I don't feel like a stranger to the culture and morals I hold dear...
