I.
When we think of hippies, we think of many things. We think of VW’s and LSD. We think of yacht rock and reggae. We might also think of tie-dyed shirts or brazen bralessness. But much of the enduring legacy of the hippie lies in their commitment to non-violence, anti-war agitation, freedom of expression, cooperative enterprises and good old-fashioned organic farming. The hippies sought to change the world by being the change, not by forcing the change – a position that, today, borders on heresy, or at the very least stands accused of sheer idiocy.
The modern hippie proves a fickle species to spot. We can identify the impostors well enough, the Elvis impersonators of political identity, found ferreting about festival grounds. They don the familiar dress and, at least for a few days, bathe with the requisite infrequency. Yet something’s missing. Like punk anarchy and grunge apathy, all that’s left is the fashion and none of the fight. Social movements don’t just die, they pay for their sins through zombification.
The hippies knew this at the time. The Diggers, a prominent counterculture group once operating out of San Francisco, decried the media’s shallow, enterprising fixation on hippie culture in their short-lived series of street sheets. On October 6th, 1967, the group penned a swan song for the hippie identity, writing:
Media created the hippie with your hungry consent. Be somebody. Careers are to be had for the enterprising hippie. The media cast nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am.
Free City News (1967)
Diggers
Half a century on, however, and even those shallow representations of left-wing anarchism appear erased from the political zeitgeist. The hippies either died out or were pushed out of view by forces displeased with their passive dissent. Instead, a new creature stands in their place today – the alt-right hippie. The term might sound oxymoronic to some, but it represents an ideological civil war that has passed almost without comment.
Enter, the French.
II.
Originating from the seating of Frenchmen in the late 1700s, the terms left and right have wained in usefulness. At the time, those seated to the left broadly represented the interests of the emerging capitalist class – an amusing detail in today’s view of things – while the seats to the right reflected the interests of the established aristocracy. In short, it was old power versus new power. Terms like populist or libertarian or alternative could not be accommodated. We simply picked sides.
At the time, the choice was simple for the hippie. The hippie must be left-wing because the left wing is the lesser power. In more recent years, however, the modern left appears to have moved away from thoughts of pacifist foreign policy and non-violent cultural revolutions. The sabre-rattling against Russia and Obama’s eight-year drone strike campaign in the Middle East demonstrated, beyond doubt, the neo-liberal’s bloodlust. And even in terms of activism, the left now largely divides into the misanthropic acts of Antifa, and the staggering hypocrisy of adorning populist slogans before strutting into lofty galas. The first isn’t non-violence, and the second isn’t revolution – just the status quo with a can of spray paint.
But the left didn’t just leave hippies, they declared them Public Enemy No. 1:
Peace, love and freedom are the three most well-known tenets of hippie philosophy, yet the purveyors of reality have decreed freedom and liberty to be neo-Nazi dog-whistles.
Despite hippie leftists coining the counterculture proverb, “It’s all a conspiracy, man”, in the modern left lexicon, the term conspiracy theorist stands as synonymous with domestic terrorist.
Finally, while hippies rank among the original vaccine sceptics, in March of 2020, the political left sided firmly with the drug companies, going so far as to declare vaccine hesitancy a mental health problem.
So, apparently, hippies are actually fascist terrorists with mental issues.
The bullet points above are more than a departure in ideology, they’re a declaration of war on one’s prior political allies. We don’t need to look too far to see this playing out on the media stage. Consider Russell Brand, who has openly called for a socialist revolution and dresses like Gandhi, and yet even he stands accused of “right-wing” extremism. The same goes for Joe Rogan, who the mainstream press and even much of his own listenership do not consider left-wing, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Where does this leave the hippie? Where is left for them, in a world where neo-cons are called liberals, pacifists are called fascists, fascists are called anti-fascists and, in the view of our security state overlords, the only thing homegrown in the peace-loving hippie’s backyard is domestic terrorism?
III.
As every black or brown kid who loves comic books knows, where we have no representation, we will simply find it elsewhere. This is part of the reason, as I’ve observed in both my personal life and online, many hippie lefties have come to wilfully identify as right-wing. No, not with the puritans and the corporatists of the right, but with the sceptics, the paleo-people, the homeschoolers and the anarcho-capitalists. Some hippie lefties forty years ago are paleo-conservatives today, and most of their values haven’t fundamentally changed.
They still recycle faeces into mulch. They still don’t trust the government. They still tout conspiracy theories of all sorts. They still foster the communities around them and create art. But now the world is a little scarier for them too. Many own guns. They balance their chakras and they tune into Tucker Carlson. They recycle. They stand in front of bulldozers and they sneer at carbon credits. They despise the World Economic Forum and tend to their free-range chicken run.
But is the right-wing a safe haven for the hippie?
At the moment, sort of, but the right still has an ideological gap to close. Older, more evangelical ideas still barnacle themselves to the right, in their resistance to gay marriage, opposition to drug decriminalisation, perpetual inflation of military budgets and more. However, many of these instincts are evolving in the conservative base itself, while their ageing and heavily lobbied representation remain a step behind their constituency. Only time will tell if the right will fully welcome the hippie or continue to leave them politically homeless.
In an odd way, “hippies versus normies”, emerges as a more apt political dichotomy than left-or-right. Our level of trust in, as our hippy brethren once coined it, the system, defines our politics and lifestyles far more immediately than a question like, “where do you stand on the filibuster?” We have bent the political horseshoe so bent out of shape that it’s basically a straight line, with naivety at one end and paranoia at the other.
Could they speak today, the hippie lefty of yesteryear and the right-wing populist of the present era would have much to discuss. They might compare Vietnam with Ukraine, and the Red Scare with Russiagate. They might both long for the non-violent activism of Martin Luther King Jr and consider the case for science denial with similar vigour. They might form a curious alliance, one inexplicable to modern pundits, because while movements die – ideas endure.
Let us finish by revisiting that ode to the death of hippies, quoted at the beginning. That same street sheet that began by proclaiming the death of the hippie, ends with a rousing call-to-arms to their fellow counterculture compatriots, in the form of a familiar quotation. The modern scholar would weep into their Snuggie at such dog-whistling, such thinly veiled threats:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.-That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Free City News (1967), quoting the US Declaration of Independence
Diggers
An alt-right screed if I’ve ever heard one.
the hippie lefty of yesteryear turned into the right wing populist sometime around 1993, often without changing any of their opinions.
Not all of today's hippies are political at all, of course. Some of them have morphed identities. Yoga, meditation, mindfulness, recreational drug use, spirituality, artistic expression and philosophy are increasingly the domain of the often apolitical gym bro. The power of the mind and the spiritual fabric of the universe stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their amino acid intake and core routine.