Before Current Year, I heard that hippies are the founders of "political correctness" as it was in the '90s.
Of course since then, "political correctness" has spread and mutated into "social justice"... like a cancer.
More or less. Of course hippies have become a pop culture character like pirates or cowboys, there's a lot of nuance to them that got lost.
The zeitgeist of our world is very similar to the 1970s. Despite our habit of naming cultural periods by decades, that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. The cultural 50s started more around the mid-50s and lasted into the mid-60s, and the cultural 60s and 70s were the same period lasting from the mid-60s into maybe the mid or late 70s.
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love is a great depiction of San Francisco's turn from the Summer of Love (the heroic 1960s) to the "winters of discontent" (the grungy 1970s) and captures a lot of the hippies/60s Leftist/Progressive insanity, written by somebody that is sympathetic to it. Around 1964 or so you get a revolution in American culture that suddenly we go from cheesy-ass rock-and-roll, barbershop quarters, bubblegum boy and girl bands to classic rock, folk, and the beginnings of the really experimental stuff. Suddenly you go from the aesthetics of Leave it to Beaver/Pleasantville/The Andy Griffith Show to the Summer of Love. Politically, it hinges around the Civil Rights Act and Kennedy and Johnson taking power from Eisenhower. Religiously, the 1950s were a peak; think Moral Orel.
Let's call them the Long Fifties and the Long Seventies. Shitcan the idea of the Sixties. And some of what pop culture tries to pin on the Long Seventies is actually the Long Fifties. Civil Rights in the South? That's the Long Fifties. All that shit happened in the 1950s, just about. It shifts North (and broadens into a socialist agenda aimed at economic equality and imposing itself into White social spaces) after achieving political victory in the South.
Leftists weren't just "politically correct." Make no mistake, they were as militant and batshit crazy back then as now. This was the heyday of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army waging a terrorist campaign against the NYPD and massive Black race riots every other day in the cities. This was the heyday of the Days of Rage and the Weather Underground. Terror attacks were usually just dumbass spoiled rich Jewboys bombing toilets in buildings, but there was a campaign of bombings and stick-up robberies all over the country by Leftist Revolutionary outfits; although they were far from having the mass support to actually wage a revolution (very different from the ton of the 1870s or 1920s), they thought that they were. Che Guevara wasn't the only hero; Mao Zedong was just as revered. Jim Jones was a political powerhouse in San Francisco and Jonestown was meant to be a pro-integration Liberation Theology (Christian Communist syncretism) Black/White utopia.
Read
Days of Rage by Burrough for that. The kids (Burrough does not discuss this) that played Mao Zedong against the US Government went on to groom Obama and the Long Teens (2014-2020s, Clown World) Antifa.
Everything today is history rhyming (like you said) with the Long Seventies, on a fifty-year cycle that I've come to identify. (Mind, someone else has probably recognized this before me.) Antifa = Weather Underground and other White/Jew revolutionaries. BLM = Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, BLA, SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) and others.
Reparations was a common goal. Second Wave Feminism was retarded. Free love and anti-family propaganda was everywhere in the Left camp.
The only difference between then and now is that they didn't have full capture of the institutions. They were powerful in academia, but not monopolistically so. They had certain cities locked down, but didn't have all of them. The media didn't especially side with them, but Hollywood did (particularly in the long run). The average person was fucking bewildered and hated this shit. It was the first at two attempts of an American Cultural Revolution, and it essentially won the media
The character we call a hippie is many different things. In modern pop culture it's usually a soft-hearted utopian type that is into weed, playing their faggy little guitar, faux Buddhism/New Age spirituality, that stuff. That was a big part of it, but hippiedom included a lot of different types. Back then the aesthetics often, oddly, drew on the American West and South; listen to the old classic/country rock, look at the costumes these people wear, and you see lots of cavalry hats, belt buckles, twanginess, a huge interest in folk crafts. There was an embracing of Americana instead of a hatred of it like you get from modern day cosmopolitans. There was similarly a genuine rejection of consoomerism (not just impotent bitching about late-stage capitalism) and an agrarian/rural ethos; these hippies often built communes deep in the countryside and practiced traditional herbal medicines, alternative medicines and practices like midwifery (which The Farm in Tennessee still does). There was an overlap between hippies and biker gangs (like the Hell's Angels) that in turn linked them, as well as their drug dealing (which was a genuine counterculture then; drugs were still exotic enough to take seriously as an avenue of spiritual exploration, and were often thought by men like LSD apostle Timothy Leary to be a path to mankind's salvation), to a seedy criminal underworld, and the links of them directly to the terrorist fringe. Hippies could be just as Christian as the general public; a huge body of Christian hippie music exists. These people were called Jesus Freaks because a "freak" was an enthusiast (ie speed freak, LSD freak, animal freak, Jesus freak).
Hippies/New Age were, in a lot of ways, a New Religious Movement with no core. It was a revival of utopian socialism from the 1800s; it was a revival of Anabaptism from the Reformation. New Age was like a convoluted, confused soup that came from Dharmic religion and Abrahamic values/thought processes colliding. It prioritized imagination over revelation or philosophy. It's quaint nowadays, but I just finished reading Heinlein's
Stranger in a Strange Land, and that was one of the Long Fifties novels that laid the groundwork for the Long Seventies. That one deals with (through a man raised by Martians traveling to Earth) the nature of religion as sociological phenomena, free love and belief; the lad in the book becomes a Jesus-like figure and gets his martyrdom for it. The hippies were millenarians, waiting for some sort of transformative change in the world (the Age of Aquarius). They were influenced by Marxism, but only in the lame and shallow sense that they liked the good feels it gave them. I argue that Marxism is a religion, and it is, but hippies were a different branch of the family with a totally different vibe.
Hippies are a rich subject to mine, so is the Long Seventies in general. It's a period I became intensely interested in over the past few years.
Edit: I forgot to talk about environmentalism. It was a thing to. If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, I think you'd be shocked at how UNIMPORTANT it was to hippies. It was a part of their worldview; it was not the all-consuming black hole of attention it is today.
Civil Rights goes violent and peters out when it goes North. In the South it's Southern terror against Blacks which the Federal Govt squashes with military occupations. In the North it's Blacks rioting, destroying cities, getting aggressive. Southern Blacks went nonviolent and church-based because anything else would have gotten them wiped out. The Southern post-Civil Rights experience went a lot smoother; through the Long Fifties, many employers wanted desegregation, the youth were starting to mingle on a large scale with Blacks, and the average Southerner was not hostile to desegregation but was cowed by what was a de facto one-party state that could socially ruin people that stood against it. Civil Rights isn't just imposed from outside; the White Southern establishment sort of negotiates its own surrender under pressure from the outside. I believe the obsession with "hatred" is a huge mistake in how we interpret the past. Before emancipation, Southern society is better interpreted through fear and selfishness; afterwards, mostly fear. The Southerners were basically, from Haiti onwards, always terrified that Black political emancipation would end in a genocide, social emancipation in destruction of Western culture within the South. When that didn't happen (well, at least not overnight...), they took a huge chill pill.
The big trouble up North kicks off with forced integration. In the North segregation was done by the market, not by law. It was just as segregated for most people, just that you COULD find specific cases of Blacks mingling. Desegregation and integration were different things, not just synonyms. One is getting rid of state barriers to mingling; the other is forcing people to mingle. In the North they started forcing Whites and Blacks together and they both hated it. The Whites fled to the suburbs (White Flight). It was a real mistake, as the two had different cultures, whereas White and Black Southerners shared a culture.
A good - shockingly evenhanded - portrayal of the Black experience in the Long Seventies South is
The Wonder Years reboot.
Watch
All in the Family (Archie Bunker). It's a great depiction of the Long Seventies from a square's perspective. Archie is a sympathetic man; he's the fool of the show, but so is his bigot Black neighbor Jefferson (The Jeffersons is his spinoff). So is Meathead (his dumbass son-in-law that's a college libtard type). A big part of what people get out of it is that it depicts the silliness of bigotry on all sides and it does so without demonizing people. Bunker is funny and lovable because he reminds people of their racist uncles, fathers and grandpas that are
flawed people but
good people at their core.
Also watch
Sanford and Son. It's like Archie Bunker, kind of, but with a based old salt-of-the-earth working class Black man (the kind you see in old movies) and his Black nationalist type son. A typical Sanford and Son episode would be something like the son showing up wearing a dashiki and leapord skin Mobutu-style hat saying he's now a Muslim going by the name Shakalaka Zulu. The dad makes some old man jokes about him chucking spears and just totally clowns on him while being totally unphased. Dude brings along his Ongobongo girlfriend from the Old Country or whatever and accidentally makes an ass of himself while the dad charms her with his old-time gee-shucks folksy grace.
I love them. I should watch some tonight.
