The US Tea Party movement is comprised primarily of 55+ year old men. These guys were in their prime 35 years ago. In 1975 and earlier. They were the hippies, protesters of “fascist government” and the Viet Nam war, smoking grass, espousing free love, dodging the draft…sticking it to The Man. Now they’ve grown up, sobered up, gotten jobs, made peace with God, and reject socialist ideals, non-Christian values, and peace mongers.
To all appearances these people appeared to care about freedom and their fellow man above all else. But now the winds have changes and the fog has lifted and we see them for what they truly are: naysayers with the wit only of two-year-olds whose only means of asserting their collective will is by saying, “NO!”
An extraordinary conclusion by gross generalisation. Only a relatively small proportion of now +55 year old people were hippies sticking it to the man 35 years ago. They were noisy and arguably influential but nonetheless only a small proportion. The current Tea Party movement also comprises an absolutely miniscule proportion of now +55 year old men. The suggestion that these two groups co-incide is, without strong evidence, laughably presumptuous.
I’ll take a shot at it. While it’s true that only a small, highly-visible percentage of the baby boomer generation were radicalized, that was understood to be true at the time. Nobody offered Spiro Agnew serious contradiction when he pointed out the “silent majority.”
Call it human superficiality, but all the young people who were energized by JFK seemed to have turned their energies inward within ten years. The quest for self-actualization faded into one for self-gratification, the “Me” generation, etc.
Many Baby Boomers went to brand new state “universities” that had been upgraded from state teachers & agricultural colleges (albeit with ugly Brutalist architecture) just for their sake. Low tuition and state grants (instead of our current student loan profit engine) made a college education a new reality for working class kids.
One explanation for campus unrest in the 1960’s was that college was suddenly available to people who previously wouldn’t belong there, so some of them would naturally abuse the priviledge. Although it seemed at the time that the big new universities had been built as playpens for pot-smoking, fornicating, protesting spoiled brats, ultimately they served their intended purpose of educating a generation of Americans for careers commanding the kind of money previously undreamed of.
I guess it’s also no surprise that they aren’t interested in anyone else having the advantages they had. America got as “socialist” as it was going to get for their behalf, and now that that’s served it’s purpose, let’s get back to the values that guided Washington and Jefferson (cue Glen Beck’s tear ducts)
And your evidence that any of your ramblings have any factual backing whatever is what? Back of a cereal packet? Something you and some other guy concluded after a few drinks? Anything?
Yes, most of these tea party dudes were probably members of Nixon’s Silent Majority 35 odd years ago. As such, they had major jealousy issues regarding the hippie class. Now that they’re old and senile, they’re madly trying to recreate the glory of someone else’s past.