You raise an important point about the Soviet Union, but I think this needs to be dismantled somewhat. My suggestion that the 'conservative revolution' was the most fundamental turning point in this debate on generational experiences in the West of course includes as a consequence the collapse of the USSR.
Firstly, 'conservative revolution' is not particularly geographically confined (and certainly not just to the UK). The economic ideas known most variously as 'neoliberalism' or 'monetarism' gained traction in the US (with Reagan) as elsewhere - Chicago School economics (Milton Friedman,
et al.) really did change the economic and political narrative a great deal
globally.
The effect this had on the USSR is debatable, but there is an argument to suggest that the 'Second Cold War' instigated by increased defense spending in the 80s (or at least rhetoric thereto) forced the Soviet Union into another arms race which it simply could not afford; as the proportion of GDP 'wasted' on defense increased, the rest of the centrally-planned economy struggled to cope. In fact, this is the pattern predicted by Paul Kennedy in
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Whether you believe that the centrally-planned economy was doomed to failure at the outset or not, the impact of increased defense spending cannot be ignored, and this you could argue was a direct result of the 'Second Cold War' following the conservative revolution in the West. In traditional terms, the Soviet Union had lost Clauwitz's 'war by arithmetic' (that is, economic warfare waged by direct comparison of competing military forces).
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That's the first point:
the conservative revolution is to a large extent causally responsible for the Soviet Union collapsing when it did.
Secondly, the political template of a 'free Western state' was largely
set upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, and hence became the model which the newly independent Eastern Bloc countries would attempt to emulate. At the end of the 80s, this was a neoliberal model, but it could have just as easily been social democratic or something else had the conservative revolution not taken place. This is why Fukuyama was able to argue that liberal capitalism would essentially 'inevitably' take over the world; it was seen that
neoliberal capitalism had won, and not any other kind of capitalism.
The political and economic situation which the West finds itself in right now (millennial woes) is the direct result of neoliberal economic policies and not the fall of the Soviet Union or its international sphere of influence.
