Capitalism absorbs and commercializes any critique of itself.
Alternatively: many people are gullible and stupid, and it doesnt take much to push a big chunk of them over the edge into utter nonsense.
The alt-right is a comtemporary phenomenon with young, shallow, roots.
My personal recollection of growing up in a hippie household in the 70s is that we knew quite a few people who at some point went “back to the land” and moved to remote rural areas, some of whom stuck with it long term and some didn’t. They weren’t necessarily forming communes, just moving with their own families, but the phenomenon was definitely fairly widespread.
I can see a link between the “natural/organic/traditional is always better” ethos of that movement and the anti-vax stuff in particular, but linking it to the racism and sex policing of the alt-right seems like much more of a stretch.
(I hadn’t read this thread until now, so apologies for responding to posts from August).
I, too, found @JohnT 's observation insightful – that there is a strand of self-centeredness that connects '60-'70s counterculture with 21st-century MAGAs.
However, this doesn’t that many actual people (or their children) morphed from one (in their youth) to the other (in their old age – or their children). I agree with subsequent posters who noted this doesn’t happen much (though it does happen).
It’s more that the ethos of self-centeredness shifted from the left (where it was mostly a vehicle for good things*, like individual rights for women, people of color, etc.) to the right (where it is mostly a vehicle for bad things, like sabotaging universal health care, hating immigrants, and imposing one’s religion on others).
I am intrigued by the idea (mentioned upthread, citing someone named Thomas Frank, IIRC) that the commodification of “me first” merchandise, in the 70s and 80s, helped to drive this self-centered ethos from the left to the right. (Social media fueled the flames, in the 2000s).
(*This counterculture self-centeredness - mainly by those, as others noted, at the edge of Berkeley marches (say), rather than actually forming communes or political socialists - is manifest in, for example, my mother – born 1939 – who is wonderfully hippy-adjacent culturally and spiritually (think Ram Dass), and still very much a Democratic voter and Trump-hater, but has always exhibited an annoying self-centered streak. I’m sure I’m like this, too, in more ways than I’d admit…but at least I’ve actually lived with poor people, and learned another language, and volunteer as an elections worker…)
I’m not buying the idea that the Alt Right is an evolution the ‘60’s counter culture; if anything, the right (both Alt and otherwise) has been motivated by a rejection of the ‘60’s counter culture and the influences of that counter culture on the larger society.
I also don’t think that the Alt Right is anything new: It’s just the old nativist, white nationalist right rebranded with a new name (Alt) and a new marketing channel (the internet).
What is somewhat new is that the mainstream right was more generally more vigilant and effective at distancing itself, at least in public, from the nativist, white nationalist right from 1945 to 2015 than after 2015.
I think you have indirectly hit on the answer. No, the 60s, counter culture has nothing to fo directly with today’s alt right, except that they are both fighting against “the man.” What changed is that back in the day “the man” was Richard Nixon. Now “”the man” is represented by people like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, who are every bit as conservative (in the traditional meaning) as Dwight Eisenhower was in his day.
In other words, now that the alt-right is out of power, they have revealed themselves to not be conservatives. Instead they’ve adopted the same habits of trying to use physical force to get everyone else to follow their minority beliefs.
Said yet another way, the mainstream right used to be embarrassed about their wacko reactionary wing.
Now they have mostly turned into the wacko reactionary wing. Which has duly grown a wacko^2 reactionary^2 wing of its own.
A cancerous tumor on the body politic.