We Need To Let the Hippies Go

A pro-war counter-protest in 1966. Note the presence, far right, of 19-year-old
Mitt Romney, future presidential candidate and Senator from Utah. (source)

I grew up wanting to be a Baby Boomer. Surrounded by mass-media images of Boomer ingenuity, relative luxury, and countercultural vigor, I wanted to join that cohort. My parents inadvertently fostered this desire by the profusion of 1960s TV in syndication; I believed that shows like My Three Sons, Family Affair, and Bewitched were still current. Thus, in my teens, I embraced that icon of Boomer defiance, the Hippie.

For twenty years, from age fifteen until thirty-five, I refused (with fleeting exceptions) to cut my hair; at its peak, my ponytail nearly reached my belt. I never embraced tie-dye, but my faded jeans and solid-colored shirts radiated a John Fogerty vibe. My one cannabis experience proved disappointing, and I decided my life didn’t need that influence, but I chose other mind-altering experiences, like late-night psychedelic rock and the Firesign Theatre.

These years, mostly in the 1990s, came surging back recently, reading Jennie Rothenberg Gritz’s essay “The Death of the Hippies.” Rothenberg Gritz, descended herself from hippies, describes how the late-sixties Counterculture surrounded itself with mythology that didn’t match its behavior. The mostly White, relatively well-off hippies clashed with similarly White squares, bankrupted the Great Society, and lived off work they themselves refused to do.

This hippy mythology stands contrary to reality. As Bruce Cannon Gibney writes, hippies were outliers; Boomers overall trended more conservative than the American mainstream. They gave lip service to insurrection, but in practice were generally passive. They resented work, the draft, and other impositions of responsibility as oppressive paternalism, at least verbally. But they didn’t mind imposing upon others: the hippie movement was often covertly racist, and overtly misogynistic.

Hippies’ rejection of purported bourgeoisie conformity mainly came across in their attitudes toward overseas war. Overall, Boomers supported the Vietnam War, though they opposed anyone requiring them to fight in it. What I grew up calling “anti-war protests” were generally just anti-draft protests. Knowing what I know now, most hippies probably didn’t oppose war philosophically, they just opposed the requirement to participate.

The blogger as post-adolescent
hippie wannabe. Probably age 25,
somewhere around the year 2000.

Ironically, by identifying myself with hippie-dip era radicalism, I managed to reinforce for myself a strange hybrid conservatism. Yes, Dr. King accomplished greatness in fighting the lawful protections of bigotry, I told myself. But he won those battles, so the fight should stop now. Similarly with the battles of second-wave feminism and the Stonewall generation: it’s unlawful now to behave with visible bigotry, so there’s nothing left to strive after.

To preserve this mental illusion, I surrounded myself with cultural influences which reflected the era I wished I’d flourished in. I only listened to music by bands which broke up before I was born, like the Beatles, the Byrds, and Creedence Clearwater Revival; or which still existed, but stopped mattering decades ago, like the Stones, Pink Floyd, and the Eagles. This, I told myself, was as cutting-edge as society ever needed.

Thus, I managed a weird balancing act. I embraced the image of adolescent rebellion still projected by Boomer pop, but displaced that ambition by three decades. I rebelled against… my grandparents, I guess? In the present, I supported maintaining, even expanding, the power structure that defined American modernity. A power structure from which I, a White, middle-class child of privilege (like the first-generation hippies), stood to benefit.

Nearly seventy years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr., defined conservatism in the inaugural issue of his National Review. A conservative, he wrote, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” To Buckley, this wasn’t a condemnation; he stated this with pride. He wanted human development to freeze. We’d gone far enough, he averred, in 1955. Indeed, he admitted, we could profitably rewind some years, probably to around his parents’ putative youth.

I never would’ve admitted it during the 1990s, when I tried to burrow back to Woodstock Generation, but I did likewise. Buckley seemed stodgy to me; I found his books sludgy and unpleasant. But the perseverance of hippie ethics, for me, was a refusal to accept complexity and moral ambiguity. I wanted to stop history at a moment I considered it comprehensible, which coincidentally happened before I joined it.

Today, I witness this same duality in many people I consider friends. They celebrate the counterculture of 1960s America, while wearing MAGA hats and decrying anything new and sharp-edged. I dare not condemn anyone for this position; I still dig the British Invasion and Summer of Love, sometimes. I respect the hippies’ accomplishments. But when I used that respect to avoid occupying the present, I, like them, began to die.