It just occurred to me that it may have something to do with the "crystal generation" thing: young people today are less tolerant and unwilling to compromise.
My wife is quite "conservative " with right leaning values (for mexican) while I myself am pretty socialist/left leaning. But we leaned to live and enjoy our differences and opinions.
So that's the thing, in the US "right leaning" and "actually votes Republican and actively supports the Republican Party" are night and day differences. Because moderate conservatives (or libertarian-conservatives) who don't care for Republican's weird crusades against abortion, trans people, blue lives matter, anti-vaxx bullshit, climate change denial and whatever the next not-actually-realted-to-conservatism thing is and just want regular-ass conservative politics a la Romney, McCain, DeWine are totally alienated.
Among my friends and coworkers those right leaning people have just started calling themselves liberal but not progressive and voting Democrat because that's now actually closer to their views than Republicans and they don't want to be associated with MAGA.
No offense, but could it be that you aren't as extreme or different from each other as you think? It's not like there weren't plenty of extremist young men willing to die and kill for socialist or fascist ideology during World War 2 or the Spanish Civil War; or, going back further, for the various reactionary and radical ideologies during the French Revolution. Perhaps your generation was an outlier in being less extreme.
My wife is quite "conservative " with right leaning values (for mexican) while I myself am pretty socialist/left leaning. But we leaned to live and enjoy our differences and opinions.