I’m not well versed on the history of that era. It would seem to me that the hippie movement and adjacent counterculture was just as threatening to conservative values as everything they’re currently calling “woke.” Yet from what I can tell, it didn’t provoke the same kind of conservative backlash. Is that my ignorance of history, or is there something different now that wasn’t at play back then?
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I’m not well versed on the history of that era. It would seem to me that the hippie movement and adjacent counterculture was just as threatening to conservative values as everything they’re currently calling “woke.” Yet from what I can tell, it didn’t provoke the same kind of conservative backlash. Is that my ignorance of history, or is there something different now that wasn’t at play back then?
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no but those guys are boomers now.
The 80s were more conservative than the 70s.
Well, first of all I think Richard Nixon has a lot of overlap with Trump, and his rise was definitely tied up with backlash against 60s counterculture.
And secondly, I think the counterculture of the 60’s is actually directly related to the anti-woke backlash too. IMO a lot of the cultural overreaches of today’s left are basically the result of the student protesters of the 60’s and 70’s growing up and occupying large chunks of academia. A lot of the stuff that conservatives whine about is actually a bit excessive in the higher education field right now, though IMO it’s more of a minor annoyance than a huge societal crisis.
Yes. The war on drugs in particular was designed to crack down on both black communities and hippies, while not explicitly sounding like it. There was also a substantial anti-feminist backlash, exemplified by Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant.
Oh absolutely there was a conservative backlash to the 60s and 70s: the Reagan era. In fact, the backlash was so huge that we’re currently dealing with the direct ramifications of it as we speak, from the forming of the Christian Right to increased prosecution of minorities left behind during the white flight to the decimation of wealth equality starting with Reagan’s tax cuts to cuts of social services to the ending of the Fairness Doctrine (allowing for Rush Limbaugh and FOX News to explode from there)…list goes on.