> The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time
It was a fairly modest aggregate growth period with unusually poor distributional effects, where the bottom 3 quintiles so real income drops and the fourth was flat.
Which is actually a lot like the subsequent expansions.
> what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work).
Er, the trend of automation and distraction hasn't really changed (indeed, it's gained even more cultural currency), though the shock genre has moved from reality TV to online video venues, often relayed by social media; not any less of a thing, just a slightly different medium. Though I guess a VR headset worn on the smart toilet would be more 2018 dystopian futurism than the big screen.
> Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now.
No, using slurs implying homosexuality and lack of manliness as anti-intellectual insults isn't less of thing now than it was then. If anything, both anti-intellectualism, it's time to homophobia, and it's tendency to conflate those two opposed things has increased.
> but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore
I've seen them about as much in the last two years (including on mass media outlets) as I did in the whole of the 1990s, in the specific confluence of homophobic insults with anti-intellectualism. Less of “gay” as a generic equivalent of “bad”, sure, but that wasn't the context of “you talk faggy”.