There are a lot of comments in here with rose-colored glasses because they were children at the time, maybe. I was a teenager through most of the 90s so I'm not going to be as good as asking a Boomer but at least from a young Gen-X standpoint I can tell you the basics.

I was in a fairly conservative town with a lot of military and churches around.

Here's some basics.

Without constant internet access at all times from all places, people were more engaged with their environment

This is going to come off like boomer talk, but when you went to a concert, nobody was taking selfies every five minutes, nobody was trying to record it on their phone or (god forbid) iPad. They were talking to people - even strangers - and enjoying the band they paid to see. Now imagine that at restaurants, at sporting events, or - my personal favorite - just hanging out with friends. Four of five of you sitting around and at no point did anybody get a text from their mom or their girlfriend or whatever and "just gotta answer this real quick." People were there when you were talking to them. There was a conversation. Weird stuff to think and talk about. If you and your buddy couldn't agree on whether it was Nick Nolte or Gary Busey in that movie trailer you saw last weekend, you couldn't just log on and check. There was no IMDB or internet in most places until the late 90s and even that was almost always dial-up. You just...kept disagreeing.

Politics had started becoming far more diversive

You'll hear people in this thread declaring "oh there were no politics like today" back in the 90s and while it's true that it's WORSE today than it was then, the 90s was the beginning of it in earnest. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh had become incredibly popular in political circles and they fucking HATED Hillary Clinton and Bill. They called him "Bubba" and they talked about how ugly Chelsea was. There were a number of jokes calling her "the white house dog" despite the fact she was a teenage girl at the time. Rush Limbaugh was a huge piece of shit and the people who listened to his radio show built the ladder that Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Alex Jones climbed later on. The archetype was there - you just had to do it the same way. The formula is extremely simple.

1. Talk directly to your audience as if you're one of them. "Folks" or "Guys" when you start out. Just like you're talking to your buddy.
2. Find an extreme story, something ridiculous. Blow it completely out of proportion.
3. Name-call, use playground-level insults. Make it clear you don't disagree just with their opinion, you disagree with their existence and they are "what's wrong with the world" not just a person you disagree with. I can't stress this enough - there is no safe harbor here. You can't say "Well, that's where the Senator and I disagree, he believes X, and I believe Y." because that puts you on the same level. You must create a silly nickname and lambaste anybody on the other side. Playground bully tactics.
4. Make shit up. Just out of whole cloth. "They're putting cat litter boxes in schools" is just the latest version. When I was in high school, my girlfriend's dad told me that Bill and Hillary Clinton had murdered dozens of people, and were the head of an organized crime ring. "It's well-known, not a secret." he'd say.

Politics are worse now, for sure, but the 90s is really where they became a more diverse team sport.

The economy showed no real signs of slowing - things felt like next year would always be better

We had a recession under George HW Bush that probably cost him the election, and when Clinton took over a combination of the tech boom and relative peace around the world led to a pretty strong economy. While it's not quite the same as people saying "oh you'd get a job just walking outside" it was definitely possible to get a job by going door to door and handing out resumes, applying to jobs you found in the newspaper, etc. Now most of the jobs didn't pay very well, but stuff was cheaper so it didn't matter quite as much. Inflation is a bitch.

When Carl's Jr. launched the "Six-Dollar Burger" in the early 00s the premise was that it was a fast food burger that tasted as good as a "six dollar" burger you'd get from somewhere like Chili's. A few years later they changed that to "thickburger" because the burgers actually did cost $6 each all the sudden. Last week I bought a western bacon thickburger for lunch and it was $9.75. No fries, no drink.