…is this article suggesting that the natural home of hippies is the Tea Party.
No, really. Among the article’s highlights:
– taking an anti-war poster with “Great Society” on it, the point of which was that Johnson’s rhetoric about the Great Society were belied by his actions in Vietnam, and arguing that posters like this meant that hippies actually hated government anti-poverty programs and civil rights
– arguing that conservatives believe that humans are inherently flawed and selfish, just like hippies do
– saying that hippies rejected “artificially constructed collectivist utopias,” which is about as a good a four-word definition of the commune movement as one could manage
– suggesting that the reason Democrats lost in 1968 is because hippies all voted for Richard Nixon
– further arguing that Democrats protesting the 1968 Democratic convention and not the Republican convention is proof of this (conveniently ignoring that in 1972 hippies protested the Republican convention, but whatever, that’s four whole years later)
– glossing over the fact that although both hippies and Tea Partiers believe in “accepting the natural order of things,” that their respective definitions of what that might actually be are wildly divergent
– and, of course, a political spectrum diagram that tells us exactly where “bums” and “trustafarian anarchists” lie on the political spectrum (although it does leave out “those damn kids listening to their Black Eyed Peas” and “my neighbor whose dog keeps digging up my azaleas” on the author’s list of personal bugbears, although I am sure they are both evil commies)
Seriously, folks. This thing is a work of art.
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Given that the Tea Party is an extremely loose coalition of people who believe “Government bad and incompetent. Money equals freedom!”, I’m not really surprised by anything they say.
“FDR/Obama Democrats”
If only.
I enjoy the explanation of why both “hobos” and “bums” appear on the chart. Hobos equal the choice of freedom while bums equal living off handouts.
I’m waiting for large cities to be divided into red and blue areas and then watching as hobos and bums bicker back and forth about the allocation of spare change while the right-wing Hobos accuse the Bum President of being a secret Communist.
Actually, I found that article very interesting — the guy made a lot of good points. Thanks for linking to it. Sure, not every point was accurate, and some of the arguments are a bit of a stretch, but overall I thought it was a refreshing way to conceptualize the political spectrum, better than any other way I’ve seen in a long time, or possibly ever.
I think your point of disagreement about “arguing that conservatives believe that humans are inherently flawed and selfish, just like hippies do,” misses the gist of the author’s argument. The groups/ideologies at the bottom of the chart, who share the belief that human nature is innate, do not share a unified idea of what that human nature might be. The unifying factor is the belief that people DO have a human nature that pretty much can’t be changed. Nazis believed that Aryans were superior and everyone else inferior; hippies believed that everyone has an urge to seek pleasure; Tea Partiers believe that social programs designed to change people are a waste of money. They differ on the details of what human nature is, but they all agree that there is such a thing as human nature. Conversely, at the top end of the chart are ideologies, like Maoism, where they actually don’t believe that people have immutable human nature; they think people’s very souls and personalities can be molded to fit society.
I think this is all pretty insightful.
Also, you’re off-base about the commune thing: Hippies believed in NATURALLY OCCURRING communitarian utopias, not artificially constructed ones. If you look at the history of communes in the ’60s and ’70s, they are started to fall apart and break up as soon as any rules were imposed, which is what inevitably happened in most cases.
And if you scan the comments section at the linked site, you’ll find plenty of aging ex-hippies who applaud the essay — they seem to think the author hit the nail on the head.
All in all, I’d say this essay was more than a cut above most of the lame and repetitive political analysis that spews out onto the web and airwaves on a daily basis.
I guess the hippies just knew that they needed Nixon Now…
Gotta love baby boomers trying to reconcile their overly celebrated hippie past with their current Tea Partying ways.
So the political opinions of a fleetingly fashionable crowd of college-age kids hanging out around NYU and Berkley in the late 60’s are suddenly relevant again?
I’m sure the Tea Party movement has a lot of people who think they were hippies back in the day but were just there for the sex & drugs & rock & roll. Look how fast the core of the “youth movement” turned into yuppies. They (i.e., the hippie/Teap party overlappers) were self-serving then, they’re self-serving now.
I must have missed the parts of my political education equating Libertarians with hippes:
Let’s see, both think that businesses whould be able to do whatever they want without any government interference, right?
Both have exatly the same views on environmental legislation and technology, right?
Both have exactly the same opinions on capitalism, materialism, New age spirituality as a whole, right?
What?
Why are you looking at me that way?
I think I lost 3D10 SAN reading that essay.
I’ll be over in the corner, cradling the limp corpse of Satire.
They do both tend to not have completely acceptable levels of hygiene, and if that’s not a sound basis for a political coalition, I don’t know what is.
It’s the kind of identity politics appeal that libertarianism has been trying for decades, ever since they realized that they’re never going to attract anybody with their actual policies. “Hey, you like freedom? Libertarians like freedom! It’s like you’re a libertarian already! Hey, you’re a carbon-based lifeform? Libertarians are carbon-based lifeforms! You’re totally on our side!”
Amazingly, not the dopiest thing I read today.
That honor goes to:
http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/2010/10/12/ken_buck
where Ken Buck, a Republican candidate for office, refused to prosecute a rape case as a DA because the victim had previously had sex with her attacker. Despite having a recorded phone conversation where the attacker admits it was rape.
Top THAT!
Aside from intense level of narcissistic self involvement and a bulk of participants from the boomer generation I don’t see much similarity between hippies and Teabaggers.
@John, I was at the flea market a few weeks back with my dog and my beautiful girlfriend, who goes for sort of a hippie look. Two libertarians tried to recruit her on the basis of “freedom.” “Freedom” in this case meant legal pot. “Who doesn’t like Freedom?”
I pet my dog till they went away.
I will say that my mother (who was not a hippie in any way) DID vote for Nixon in 1968 for the sole reason that he promised to get the U. S. out of Vietnam. It was also the reason why she didn’t vote for him in 1972, because he escalated the war.
Anyone else notice that Islamists(Muslims) are the only religion represented and are grouped with Fascists/Nazis? Whaat about Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Etc.?
Goddamn, that was so stupid my brain hurts now. I killed fewer brain cells that time I matched a Russian lesbian drink for drink.
The Teabaggers want to convince themselves that everyone really truly thinks and acts like they do… well except for the obviously evil Zombie Obama and his Commie cohorts.
This is part of an ongoing effort to rewrite history to fit the Teabaggers’ fogged-up vision. Making the hippies of the 60s into proto-Teabaggers of their era, much in the same way conservatives keep claiming former Presidents – like Harry S. Truman – as “really one of us”. Did you know there are far right wingnuts now pining for the heady days of Clinton’s “oh, NOW he’s conservative” administration?
@solid snake — traditionally Jews & Nazis are not famous for co-mingling…
traditionally Jews & Nazis are not famous for co-mingling…
Yeah…well… you know who else didn’t like the co-mingling of jews and nazis? HITLER! /Gleck-logic
Remember that we’re talking about a scale in which osama bin laden and hitler are both categorised as collectivist and natural. In that vein you might as well just bunge zionists (no, don’t bother distinguishing between the ultra-orthodox and borderline atheist ones, we haz a label, and it must take up a unique and singular place on the graph), Johnny Cash and Gandhi into the same corner down there.
Nixon of course would be found hanging out with the maoists, what with his progressive taxation and signing all those civil rights measures into law and all…
I think one of the problems is that people equate “counterculture groups of the 60s” with “hippies”, which is reductive. But I actually can see the logic that Libertarians came out of the 60s mindset–not the classic hippie model so much as the motorbike ridin’ “don’t let the man hassle me” Easy Rider type (Dennis Hopper, by the way, was a lifelong Republican).
But both Democrats and Republicans, as well as baby boomer culture, have shifted around so much ideologically that it’s become basically pointless to draw a line from the 60s to today. I mean, 100 years earlier Democrats had been the party of slave owners, then in the 60s they became the party of civil rights. At one point I think Republicans did have an honest appeal to countercultural sorts, but Nixon and (especially) Reagan did so much co-opting and Orwellian re-defining that the historical definitions of stuff like “Libertarian” became meaningless.
Wait- his spectrum seperates the Tea Party and Social Conservatives- yet no Tea Party endorsed canidate supports a woman’s right to choose or gay marriage- how is this apparent (and obvious since the beginning despite the delusions of libertarians to the contrary) contradiction?
The most depressing thing over there is all the positive comments. Yikes.
Cookie McCool, I envy you for your wit and wish that I had written that.
I notice Social Conservatives are on the “less government control” quadrant. How … moronic. To say nothing of putting the militia on the less government side–a position they notably drop whenever a Republican gets into the White House.
So, the EU is closer to Stalin than Obama? Good to know…
What happened to all those right-wingers who were advocates for the Unitary Executive a couple years back? They’re all for states’ rights now?
This is of a piece with some wingnut blogger who came up with a list of the “50 Greatest Conservative Songs”, including a bunch that weren’t in any way conservative by either twisting the meaning of the lyrics into a pretzel or simply ignoring them. (See also Reagan’s claim that “Born in the USA” was a song of hope, and Springsteen’s polite but emphatic refutation of same.)
Dean: I didn’t think hippies had guns!
Hank: They’re probably like… pirate… hippies?
http://mantiseye.com/?ep24