do remember part of the reason why we had this hard left backlash to what we had in the 80s and 90s is because trying to use the government to enforce your ideology leads to dumb shit that we're fighting against from the left.

I’m not sure that that’s true. Remember, most of the leftist thought we’re dealing with now can be traced back to various bolsheviks and marxists and communist academics and revolutionaries and the like. That shit started bubbling under the surface way, way before the 80s and 90s. It seems more accurate to suggest that the left successfully captured academia and much of legalism sometime leading up to the 60s. That’s why they managed to get the campus protests (riots) and the Civil Rights Bill, which indirectly has made much of leftism unchallengeable, passed at that time. Their unrest continued into the 70s as the Weather Underground (among contemporaries) and consequences of integration, among other things, played out.

Conservatism in the 80s and 90s was just a pushback against this stuff, but if anything, its fault was in not going far enough. Leftism sunk away from the public eye for a bit, but it stayed alive in the various influence circles they had created and corrupted before. Patronage networks, lawfare, and political influence saved people like Bill Ayers and later Susan Rosenberg, allowing literal far-left terrorists to influence high levels of government. The right did not conserve its own temporary power nearly as well.

It’s easy to say “rightward overreaching allowed for the left to grow in popularity,” and there’s maybe some truth to that, but one should also remember that the left has been on a long, long campaign which the right ultimately has failed, at every turn, to effectively quash. One in which they do remember their allies and fight to retake lost ground, while their opponents do neither and pretend it isn’t happening.