I mean, look at the people Trumpists look to for guidance; apart from Trump himself, virtually none of them could possibly remember the 1960s. Ben Shapiro? Alex Jones? Marjorie Taylor Greene? Tucker Carlson? None are boomers.
Who do they work for and who runs those companies (who gives them their marching orders)?
Just because the people in congress are “boomers” does not mean they reflect what the rest of us “boomers” think. They are at the very least upper middle class if not stinky rich.
Most of the Maga hat wearing people I see are younger than me, and I came at the end of the Baby Boom ('59).
I will continue my anecdotes by saying most of the people I went to school with and am in contact with are progressives. Is every “boomer” a peace loving hippie? no. Are they all vitriol spiting Trumpists? No. I assume, again without anything but anecdotes, that there are any number of variables that creates the monsters that are Trumpists. Blaming “boomers”, hippies, the counter culture, your aunt Sallies wig that traumatised your now Trumpist friend, is all just speculation. Your anecdotes against my anecdotes.
I really dislike the inter generational bickering. I finally broke my millennial son of saying,“OK, boomer” ugh! I also don’t think all millennials are lazy and don’t want to work or whatever the current stereotype is. Stereotyping is not cool.
Oh, and Peace, Love, and Rock n’ Roll. 
I am a millenial and I think the generational bickering is stupid. Literally parents blaming their children, and vice versa, for things that nobody had any control over. Blame the people in charge for the decline in living standards in our country. It is a neat trick that has people blaming other generations even to the point of alienating family.
I recall Dave Barry complained that people who were “fighting the man” in the 1960s in just fifteen years had now become yuppies voting for Reagan.
I believe that everyone has good points, but I don’t think that you can look at a group from 1969, for example, and say anything about what any of them are doing in 2022. Likely many joined because they were scared that they, or their boyfriend, or cousin might die in Vietnam, or that they were mad at their old man who wanted them to conform. Like all young people (from then to today) they go through a phase but don’t fully understand it because the brain is immature.
Many likely continued left wing politics. Some but down the bong, finished college, and started a career, possibly becoming yuppies. And everything in between. Perhaps some clung to the “fight the man” and redirected it towards QAnon theories while others became normal. I don’t think that any broad statements can be made of them as a group.
I don’t think it did.
Some people did leave it to take up “normal” jobs, and some of those did abjure things they’d believed and ways they’d behaved in their youth.
But parts of it got absorbed into the wider culture. Some peoples’ counterculture work/behavior started to become considered “normal” jobs, “normal” politics, “normal” ways to behave. And some people who decided to go change the world from within did so, in a lot of ways that most now take for granted. It didn’t change as much as many thought it would, or wanted it to, when they were 20, of course. But it never does – and that certainly doesn’t mean the world didn’t change at all.
And some things mutated into different generations’ versions, just as the 60’s was made up in part of things taken from earlier eras to suit what was going on in what wound up being called “the 60’s”.
I wasn’t aware that living in agrarian communes was a significant part of the '60s counterculture…
It was some of it; though there were certainly also people part of that culture who spent their time mostly in cities.
There was a significant back-to-nature component, and a significant share-instead-of-amassing-indivdual-wealth component, and for some the intersection of those did indeed involve living in agrarian communes.
Some of those communes are still going. Some of them shifted into functional farms, seed companies, etc. but dropped the communal aspect – though some of those companies are now or have recently moved back into joint ownership of various sorts. Most people, around the time they started having children, either added or moved to indoor plumbing and joined the electric grid; and some indeed moved entirely to cities, cut their hair off, and took suit-and-tie jobs.
Of course, living in agrarian communes is much older than the 60’s; it’s a theme that runs through the country’s history, with more of it going on at some times than others.
It’s always easier to knock the Old Order than to do the work needed to build a new one. Not a problem limited to the 60’s at all.
But again: while the basic capitalistic system is still very much with us – and has in some ways been gaining more power in the most recent decades – there have been changes that are now not obvious because we take them for granted.
The counterculture was about wearing long hair, listening to rock music, and being against the war. About 0.001% of hippies ever lived on communes. Communes were written about because they symbolized the evils of SEX and pot smoking and SEX and anti-consumerism and SEX and NUDITY and FREE LOVE and SEX, but they meant little or nothing to the overall population even of young people.
They were certainly written about like that, yes. That’s what sells magazines.
I remember in particular one article, I think it was in Life, in which the people being interviewed straight out told the reporter, ‘We lie to reporters all the time about what goes on here.’ And the story reported that, entirely straight faced, and then proceeded on with the rest of the article as if they hadn’t heard a word of it.
I mean, there certainly was sex, and pot smoking, and nudity; and there were certainly some people who came by only because they were interested in that. They often weren’t all that well received. There is, in most cases, significant difference between a commune and a frat party.
Although, come to think of it, fraternity houses are an example of one of the permutations of communal living in American culture. And some of them, AIUI. weren’t/aren’t about that kind of party, either.
The key element of counterculture is “culture” not policy or “reorganizing society”. 1960s counterculture didn’t fade away; it was co-opted by the mainstream culture - which is the destiny of almost any significant counterculture.
Well, B.D. married Boopsie. And Boopsie would appear nude in many movies. Isn’t that scandalous enough?
Plus Zonker was continually zonked.
That’s sex and drugs. Jimmy Thudpucker provided the rock ‘n’ roll.
Doonesbury corrupted us all!
Here’s another couple, not limited to students, and including long term residents:
To be fair the anti-vax movement started in the 1800’s with the smallpox vaccine, which is fair enough given 2-3% people died of it.
When I think of who might be called the Voice of the Counterculture, boy Tom Wolfe is sure not on the list. He was completely irrelevant to those concerns.
People that come to mind would be Bob Dylan, Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, I could come up with quite a few others. Don’t think they contributed anything to the new fascism.
And by the way, I knew a ton of people who lived on back-to-the-land communes. I did myself. And ashrams and things of that nature. Many more bought cheap rural land and tried to farm without knowing how, for much the same reasons. Quite a few of those folks are still living rural, only they’re a lot better at it now. These people are the same ones behind land trusts, right-to-farm laws, organic food certification, and many other movements which are now part of the social fabric. The ubiquity of eastern spiritual practices like yoga and tai chi, all kinds of things that were at that time astonishing revelations but are now ho hum – that’s all due to the counterculture.
It was a movement of university students, in essence.
survivorship bias + intentional genocides against minority groups like the AIDS pandemic led to this. (I am saying that the mismanagement of AIDS was deliberate genocide, not that it was purposefully introduced).
qft. I didn’t really need to say anything
But it wasn’t like everyone that wasn’t full-on counterculture was oblivious or even incurious, there were varying degrees of counterculture adjacent or counterculture curious, and there was a light commercialized version that had a very strong influence on entertainment, music and fashion.
Laugh-in and Peter Max jeans, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Woodstock, the musical Hair. I was 13 in 1970 and I pretty much aspired to be drug-abusing hippie. My dad and the other dads in my suburban community grew their hair past their collars and wore wire-rimmed and tinted glasses and wide colorful neckties. My dad put flower decals on his VW bug. And I think they became simultaneously a little more open-minded and skeptical. The open-mindedness was because of the new ideas and attitudes, and the skepticism came largely from Vietnam.
My memories are distant, and I was little too young to fully comprehend the horror, I have a cringeworthy memory of watching the evening news over dinner with the family, hearing the weekly body counts of both sides, and thinking “We’re killing way more of them than they are of us, we must be winning BIG”.(It was too bad that our politicians and generals thought the same way, I had an excuse I was a dumb kid) I remember the parents of the older boys freaking out over draft lotteries, and every community had young men that were killed or maimed or captured. A lot of people began to rightfully question the American Exceptionalism that was driving the war even outside of communes and universities and the peace movement. It wasn’t a distant or philosophical issue, it hit home.
The counterculture had a really dark side, too. A lot of these yoga groups became full-on cults that brainwashed and sexually abused generations of followers……I’m thinking of Yogi Bhajan’s group that started in LA (I have some personal experience with the 50 year later version), the Buenos Aires yoga cult that was connected to a South American prostitution ring and the Children of God group that directed their female followers to seduce and have sex with potential recruits and donors. And there are lots more, many that are still around today.
And there were lots of people living in filthy communal surroundings that were abusing and trafficking teenage runaways for sex in exchange for food, shelter and drugs. This one is very personal with me, because this happened to my sister and her best friend for several months when they were 12 and the details are so horrific that it hurts to write about them. So it wasn’t all peace love and yoga.
Oh yes. Plenty of dark. With all the turmoil, naivete, and new ideas (and new drugs) there was a lot of opportunity for evil and squalor. I saw a good bit of that, too, although not on your scale.