October
30th 2007
Posted under Culture
The American Prospect and Washington Monthly are the two best regular liberal mags. Here’s an interesting article that writes about the conservative phobia about hippies and how they wish the distinctly un-hippie Hilary Clinton into one.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=haunted_by_the_hippie
    As a young paleo I have written of my pleasure of seeing the Culture Wars finally come to an end when the Boomers are safely confided into nursing homes. I imagine the political conversation will turn in a more favorable direction towards decentralization and non-intervention.
Andrew T. on 30 Oct 2007 at 7:58 pm #
Hillary Clinton is distinctly un-hippie? How do explain the recent incident with her support for federal funding of the Woodstock museum.
Bede on 30 Oct 2007 at 8:04 pm #
†I imagine the political conversation will turn in a more favorable direction towards decentralization and non-intervention.”
I doubt the wars will end completely. If you look at almost every cultural issue, the Left today is much farther to the Left than the Left of the early 1960s. In fact, the only reason the cultural wars are somewhat going away is because, by and large, the Left has won. The Left now wants no dissent, as they are willing to censor anyone who violates the protocols of political correctness (just look at the new speech codes at universities, etc.).
Andrew T. on 30 Oct 2007 at 9:17 pm #
Patroon, aren’t you the one who said, in reply to me saying that “there is no good Leftism”, that you don’t see anything wrong with Leftists as long as they’re not where you are?
That was an awkward thing to hear.
Vanishing American on 31 Oct 2007 at 4:29 am #
Patroon, are you, as a young paleo, typical of your age group?
I know a number of young people in their early to mid-20s and 30s who vote Republican — but they are the most liberal of the liberal on social issues, embracing the gay agenda, legal drugs, the whole libertine agenda that started back in the 60s.
Many of the libertarians I have known follow the sixties counterculture in their social values, having much more in common with ‘hippies’ than with earlier generations.
I’m a baby-boomer, and like most, was influenced by the counterculture and the political left — though I have become very conservative. But the counterculture and the political left were really not one and the same, as people often imply. There was some overlap, but there were distinctions. Many of the most dedicated political leftists were fairly conservative in lifestyle and appearance and decided to work ‘within the system’ to promote change. I say Hillary and Bill were such political leftists, although their ‘hippie’ predilections mostly centered on wearing beads and unkempt hair back in the 60s; we’ve all seen pictures of them during their collegiate radical phase.
They cleaned up their outward appearance but kept their liberal/leftist ideals and agenda.
So strictly speaking, no, they are not and were not ‘hippies’. Hippies were the apolitical dropouts who followed the same libertine lifestyle as many of the political leftists but the two groups were at odds over how to change the world.
As far as baby-boomers being the cause of all the leftism in America, no, I think even when we are all in nursing homes (where our ‘conservative’ kids may in very un-conservative fashion, deposit us in our declining years) or when we are all six feet under, the left will still be here. Leftism has become too entrenched in all parts of our society, and it will be all we can do to uproot it. The trouble is, leftism and liberalism have captured both parties.
All baby-boomers, by the way, are not the enemy; Tom Tancredo is one of us, as are a number of the good guys on the right. It’s a stereotype that most people born between 1945 and 1964 are leftists and hippies.
ikantspel on 31 Oct 2007 at 5:16 am #
The left has won so many battles because the right has become impotent. The modern “conservative” movement only desires to conserve victories won by the left decades ago. It is merely friction, so to speak. I believe that the roots of social, economic, and political deracination began way before the Hippie movement.
The modern conservative establishment is stagnant by it’s own ideology (or lack thereof). Many self professing conservatives go around cheering for a quasi-Marxist form of equality, for example, and then blame the net result on something entirely different.
As for libertarians, I personally believe that many use their libertarian philosophy just to escape tradition (i.e. the left-libertarians) but I know many paleos who have many things in common with more socially conservative political libertarians. Many of these people understand the social issues but do not see the state as the cure (with perhaps the exception of abortion); it is, rather, the problem. But I believe that genuine conservatism does indeed have the threads of anti-statism woven throughout.
I think, therefore, that it is important for conservatives to understand that tradition and culture can never be institutionalized. The key is to teach our children well and keep them out of the path of these destructive ideologies.
Patroon on 31 Oct 2007 at 4:13 pm #
Andrew my parents are tree hugging leftists. Should I avoid going home for Thanksgiving of Christmas because as you say “there is no good leftism?” I can appreciatre a leftist place like say, Madison, in my home state of Wisconsin. But I choose not to live there. We keep our distance. After for the Woodstock Museum, my guess is a local supporter or the local Chamber of Commerce ask for a federal grant to fund the museum and being good pork-barrel politician Sen. Clinton obliged with an earmark no different than when Ron Paul takes earmark requests from his constituents. And of course some enterprising GOP operative saw this and knew he had an issue by hollwing out the remaining juice in that rotten mellon known as the Culture War.
Vanishing American is absolutly right that the counterculture and leftism were two seperate things entirely with some overlap. This is where the Libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party sprung forth in the late 1960s and early 1970s when counterculture types like Justin Raimondo at the time joined with intellectuals like Murray Rothbard fianced by Koch oil empire. This is also that same time that the “bearded former-hippie,” to coin a David Frum quote, Dr. Thomas Fleming married the counter culture to traditional conservatism.
It should be pointed out that several conservatives and libertarians had their “hippie phases” whether its Fleming or P.J. O’Rourke or Peggy Noonan or Norm Coleman or the infamous Jeff Christie a.k.a Rush Limbaugh. I don’t doubt for a minute that John McCain has supporters who were at Woodstock. Some hippies became conservatives because they thought it was their penance for being swept up in the counterculture and unleashing what they believed to be Pandora’s Box on the rest of society. They may have won political victories by stoking the resentments of those who didn’t take part in Woodstock or were repulsed by what they saw there, but they did not win cultural victories. The article is right, the hippies won. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t play classical music or Gregorian chants on the bumpers to his show. No, he plays rock music. Lynn Cheney writes lesbian novels. There is a reason for this. All of the aforementioned have been influenced by the counterculture in one form or another and some are still shaped by it.
What’s interesting about paleoism and paleoconservatism in particular is that still has its hippie twinges to it. The Vanishing American is right in saying that the hippies were dropouts from what they saw as a conformist, mass production American society created by the New Deal and World War II. That rhetoric appears in the pages of Chronicles frequently. They rejected it. They celebrated what was unique in American society, what small, what was different. That’s basically the plot of “On the Road” in a nutshell (and Kerouac was a Taft Republican.) They saw big government, big business, big labor and such forcing all to live in Levittowns where everyone looked the same, acted the same, talked the same and they had to be, otherwise the Communists, the very epitome of comformity and samness, would take over. Hippie communes and agrarianism is similar in style to the agrarianism paleos celebrate (without the commune part of course.) They both reject American Empire. Do you think the 1960s just happened in a vacumn. No! It was created by the natural exuberance and energy of youth bumping into the regimented and economically efficient society created by the New Deal and World War II. Something had to give.
Now the left may have won the broader culture wars as the excesses of the counter culture became the culture itself, but they haven’t won all the little wars, all the guerrilla wars that take place daily within the culture itself. There are still places around the country where it’s easier to buy a gun than to buy a drink. There are still places where you can see Bible verses along the highway and where there are nativity scenes in the village park. The left will naturally overreach in its desire to control, to make evereyone conform or better yet “Be like us or else!”. The more we encourage seperatism and decentralization, the less influence the broader culture has over the whole nation.
Am I typical of my age group? I have no idea. I suppose I find myself as libertarian as many young Republicans these days. But I that doesn’t mean I choose to live in a neighborhood of gay bars and bathhouses nor would I wish to see such establishments next to where I live. I think what sums up my ethos and that of a lot of young people is “the choices we make.” We wish to live and work where we feel comfortable and what fits us best. What others decide to do with themselves is of no concern to me. But we should have the right to live and create communities of the like minded if we so choose. And like people of my generation (Oh God what a cliche!) we’re tired of a political scene dominated by wars and events that took place 40 years ago. It’s nothing personal against the Boomers. It’s just that one generation is ready and waiting to influence events and elect its own leaders just as Boomers chafed against the World War II/Depression generation of their elders. Ron Paul’s camapaign is a manifistation of this even though Ron’s old enough to be the grandfather of many of his supporters.