I don't want to push back too much against what you're saying, but this is a bit complicated, at least in the US, I think?
First, some of the stuff like Roe v Wade I think is more the result of political strategy than public opinion. If the electoral college were eliminated, for example, and US political process were more representative, you'd see very different patterns over the last couple of decades. I'm not all that surprised to see studies showing that Americans misunderstand the opinions of their peers on many topics, because of a discrepancy between political representation and public opinion. Basically electoral college and senate politics, combined with gerrymandering, has distorted certain things somewhat.
Second, my sense is this is a bit of rose-colored glasses with regard to looking at the past. Anyone who looks back at the politics around the AIDS crisis, and remembers the congressional hearings around music lyrics (!) might be a little reluctant to characterize things like porn financing controversies as a norm regression. Onlyfans leveled porn distribution in a way that previous years didn't have to deal with, so to some extent this is just the same-old blocs responding to new technology. I also think to some extent this is more due to hard cold financial risk modeling than the article admits -- I don't think it's all of it, but some of it (the article implies, for instance, that all those chargebacks are due to regrets rather than, say, it being a common charge with stolen credit information; I'm sure it's a bit of both but the latter possibility isn't really acknowledged at all in the piece, even if to refute it).
First, some of the stuff like Roe v Wade I think is more the result of political strategy than public opinion. If the electoral college were eliminated, for example, and US political process were more representative, you'd see very different patterns over the last couple of decades. I'm not all that surprised to see studies showing that Americans misunderstand the opinions of their peers on many topics, because of a discrepancy between political representation and public opinion. Basically electoral college and senate politics, combined with gerrymandering, has distorted certain things somewhat.
Second, my sense is this is a bit of rose-colored glasses with regard to looking at the past. Anyone who looks back at the politics around the AIDS crisis, and remembers the congressional hearings around music lyrics (!) might be a little reluctant to characterize things like porn financing controversies as a norm regression. Onlyfans leveled porn distribution in a way that previous years didn't have to deal with, so to some extent this is just the same-old blocs responding to new technology. I also think to some extent this is more due to hard cold financial risk modeling than the article admits -- I don't think it's all of it, but some of it (the article implies, for instance, that all those chargebacks are due to regrets rather than, say, it being a common charge with stolen credit information; I'm sure it's a bit of both but the latter possibility isn't really acknowledged at all in the piece, even if to refute it).