I love historical parallels, and I haven’t seen this parallel anywhere else. So I’m curious if the comparison is sound. So here it is.
Remember how widespread "leftism"was in the seventies? The pendulum has just swung back again.
In the seventies, the Dems were hijacked by extremists, yet the extremists viewpoints were popular among a broad segment of the population. Well, not the actual viewpoints themselves, but rather the “I’ll wear my hair long and smoke weed at parties and have a Che Guavara Poster in my dorm room and discuss Marcuse over a bowl of sangria” watered down version of it.
The way I see it, the right in the US currently has a similar outburst of popularity with irrational but attractive ideas.
Another parallel is the hostility the left felt, at the time for the right. “Fascist government dogs” almost was a term of endearment. The right didn’t go much further then “damn misguided hippie kids”.
Even those tables are turned. The right is the one foaming at the mouth now; the left in the US currently has the bigger percentage of reasonable people.
Anyway, that is my Dutch take on it. And it is the same in the Netherlands at the moment.
I don’t see the parallels. Hippies didn’t try to take away people’s voting rights, they were all about expanding voting rights and the 18 year old vote came about during that time. Hippies weren’t about denying others the rights they sought for themselves- free love didn’t mean you were forced to participate, nobody tried to force anyone else to take drugs, etc. The Teabaggers are all about making the whole of society conform to their religious views. Equating the two groups is an insult to the flower children of the 1960s.
Okay, so maybe the mainstream hippies were much more friendly and tolerant. But those days did see an amalgam of left-wing extremists. Mainly in the corner of people self indentifying as anarchists and communists. They certainly would have limited the freedom of other citizens to consume, to vote. Such extremists were not democratic. If thwarted, they’d strike, occupy, and smear.
I think that the tea partiers are the antithesis of the hippies. If you look at the demographics a large number of them aged 60+ would have been the ones back in the 60-70’s who weren’t the hippies of that generation. They would have been the young republicans back then and felt they had no voice. And now, with the tea party, they won’t shut the fuck up. At least the ones I know.
The hippies of the 60s were predominantly younger.
The demographics of the Tea Party movement are quite different. They’re predominantly middle aged or older.
The hippies eventually grew up to become our parents and grandparents. Members of the Tea Party are already our parents and grandparents.
That’s not to say there aren’t younger members of the various Tea Party factions, but they certainly aren’t the driving force, nor are they a large fraction of their own youth demographic, who are more likely to identify with OWS than the Tea Party.
There have to be at least a few Tea Partiers who were hippies. While each is the major political movement of a particular period, the demographics make a big difference and they indicate the Tea Party isn’t going to have the kind of long-lived cultural impact the hippies did. Further, they’re not making hippie-quality music.
LOL… I thought most of them were retired and lived off the teat of the US gov. At least my father in-law is, laid off, collected unemployment, now on SS…
Trying to screw over hardworking middle-class families…
Those old bigoted, hypocrites just need to crawl off and let the world evolve.
Actually Hippies didn’t do politics. They dropped out of society. A lot of people who didn’t drop out adopted versions of the fashions and attitudes. The ones who didn’t drop out managed, with a lot of help of the Nixon people, to nominate George McGovern as the Democratic Party nominee in 1972. As wonderful a guy as McGovern was and is, he was a poor campaigner and got clobbered and ended the effectiveness of the far left wing of the party. Please note, he’s far too left for even me. But he seems to be a very decent fellow.
As for the Tea Partiers, a lot of the Republicans were disgusted by the Bush II years with the war and deficits and financial collapse and want to distance themselves from those legitimate failures. Those who liked it still realize the “brand” was horribly tarnished. So they took to calling themselves Tea Partiers. I’m okay with the sincere ones, they help keep the Democrats more honest when the Dems are in power and the Reps are in opposition. The ones who are just rebranding and not sincere are the heart of the problem.
Yep. They ask, ‘Why should I work if the government will give me everything free?’ This says a lot about them. The vast majority of people would rather work and live, rather than not work and just survive. The Teabaggers see no reason to work if they don’t have to.
