Alternate US Counterculture

[HueyLong]

Yes, although as the Hippies looked back to the Lost Generation, the Libbies look back to the Futurists. (who survived WWI, the only thing that stopped them was the lack of any modern way to spread their message, and that their ideas were ahead of their time. They died out in the 30s) There is no direct connection, and there are certain to be things the Libbies do that Futurists would hate. (Mass rallies, the Futurists disliked drugs from what I understand, the Futurists only accepted artists so killed any chance of mass acceptance etc.....)

 

[Wendell]

Wouldn't racism violate this conception of American futurism?

 

[HueyLong]

Well, that depends on what you mean.

There are a few schools of thought among the Libbies on the matter.

Some are fully behind the Civil Rights movement, although some of the doctrinaire market Libbies don't like the beginnings of affirmative action and race based hiring.

Some simply don't care. The Libbies include a lot more former youth gangs than the Hippies did, and they certainly wouldn't welcome blacks into their groups, but they wouldn't mind if they had greater freedom elsewhere.

Then, a rather sick and unfortunate twisting of individualism and all of those other tenets, a might-makes-right group basically believes that whoever wins the struggle deserves to win, even if that means furtehr apartheid and all of that. These are the thrill-killers and spree killers of the Libbie period.

As for the status of Hispanics and African-Americans in the Libbie movement, it id going to be, like the Hippie movement, variable between groups and regions. The fact that there is a struggle in there time will enthrall some libbies. Others are going to revive jazz and pick up motown, the wild and fast music styles that they associate with black people. Of course, others will spurn them just on the exclusivity of their group.

 

[Straha]

*bump*

I want to see a libbie TL

 

[HueyLong]

I'm not good with TLs, but I'll try. I'm still reading about the formation of the US counterculture and the effects of it thereafter.

 

[pacifichistorian]

I have a sense Starship Troopers'd be their bible. Saberhagen would be big (very militaristic). Phil Dick too, judging by “Bladerunner” (if it's anything like faithful to “Do Androids Dream...?”), maybe Alan Nourse, too, judging from Bladerunner (his novel, no relation); ditto the Logan's Run trilogy. Probably STTOS would never catch on; a darker "Mirror universe" ST, loosely based on Troopers, Saberhagen, & the like, could be huge.

Not to throw a wrench in it, but I'm struck by the similarity with the droogs of A Clockwork Orange...

 

[Superftagn]

The Futurist Renaissance in the American 20's obviously causes art-deco rockets and raygun futurism to have even more of a revival in the late 40's and the 50's then it did OTL. This pushes the consumerism military-industrial capitalist paradise edge of the Cold War American government. However the increased alienation from previous societal moores now that the middle-class is big and technology has changed the way of life causes even more of a moralistic reaction to the roaring 20's, radical 30's, and bopping 40's than it did in our 50's.

Thus you have 50's youths raised on consumer technophilia but in turn alienated by the extreme moralistic waves carrying off their parents and the attempts for their families, schools, and religious leaders to imprint them with it - packaged in conformity, consumerism, and trust in the government.

So the Libbies are a deviation of the technophiliac 50's the same way their parents are sort of the Victorians of post-war America. The Libbies aren't reacting to the Vietnam war, they're reacting to the 50's pod-people-and-prayers society that they feel is wasting all the good hyperkineticism and energy that you can get out of living in the world of the future.

Libbies will return from Vietnam with all the same mental and physical scars, but convinced that they could of done it better if they had been running things, or that the war was misidirected and they should of been building ICBM's and death-sattelites to take on the Soviets directly instead.

Of course they might not categorically hate Stalinism, just the communist ideals it's attempting to be. Soviet futurism will likely make them view the world in the "communicating ideas and helping each other evolve into the future society through warfare" mentality the futurists seemed to have.

The Capitalist Christian society will be in their mind a throwback, an evolutionary dead-end in the march to the future. Only after the bombs and the space wars will the world be a collection of futurist city-states or whatever it is those Italians way back when would of wanted.

 

[Mark E.]

A different type of counter-culture can be rationalized with a POD in the fifties.

The OTL fifites were a time when supply finally caught up with demand for consumer products and housing. Though it might be well into the sixties when most Americans enjoyed these products, they were well visible on the showroom floors. For that reason, late fifties tend to be idealized.

Now, suppose the cold war escalated into a war between the US and USSR in the late fifties. You can look up "Operation Dropshot" to read accounts of how the US actually had a contingency plan for such a war. Without stressing the political details (maybe Stalin lives a few more years; maybe Ike can not run again in 1956), suppose a war does break out and the US comes out ahead. In any scenario, the resources of the country (and all NATO allies) will be stressed. Rent and price controls will be back as they were in WWII. The world will have no standing example of a large, free-market economy, as the sixties will be dominated with the economy of scarcity that characterized 1942-1952 OTL.

Now, a version of the counter-culture in the late sixties was inevitable, for two reasons. The birthrate soared after WWII, creating a demographic split. Then, US schools in the fifties and early sixties did an incomplete job reconciling the Nuremburg trials with the ex post facto law, fostering a generation that questioned the authority of the government.

Move to ATL 1966, some seven years after a major war. The US economy is not one of plentiful goods, but one of government-regulated price and commodity control. The twenty-year olds of the time, with a streak of rebelousness in their blood, will not be protesting a consumer-based militry industrial complex. They will protest an opressive government-controlled economy that stifles productivity.

The hippies would be a fiscallly conservative group, even more in line with the "libertarian" label with which they are credited today. Some of their left-wing interface with the mainstream might remain, dress codes for instance. But the lackluster "drop out, drug out" culture might be replaced with an Amish-style work ethic for individual productivity.

The OTL hippies protested a gluttonous consumer-driven economy run by WWII veterans busy rewarding themselves with homes, cars and appliances. In ATL, the economy is very different and the protesters take a different position.

 

[Jman]

On a related note, I was thinking about doing a short TL on the Third Wave getting out of hand and becoming a late 60's proto-Nazi-punk subculture in direct competition with the hippies (including a fairly epic brawl between longhairs and Wavers at Woodstock). Later they become a crypto-fascist third party which replaces the Republicans as the conservative party in California and a few other places, elect Ben Stein (yes, the Visine guy, but also a Nixon speechwriter, and all the Wavers are big Nixon fans) to the Senate in California and run Oliver North as a third party candidate in the 80's (he loses, but not by much), and remaining a right-wing fringe group to this day. I haven't really fleshed it out, but this thread kind of reminded me of that idea and I might pick that up again. Thanks!

 

[Mark E.]

During the hippie era, you had reactionary conservative attitudes (ref. Charlie Daniels' song "Uneasy Rider"). You had rednecks in the South and you had young Klansmen in places, but I am not sure you can classify them as alternate counterculture movements, since they came from an established status quo.

You can have movements that support Reaganomics (or Oliver North), but the term "counterculture" more or less inherently excludes elements with substantial mainstream support.

Now, I can imagine a type of counterculture that would fit into future history: suppose the founders of the sixties movement again flex their influence circa 2015. That will be the year birth year 1945 turns 70. Now, I want to avoid specific references to current politics, but economic factors could push retired people into very non-conventional situations.

 

[Superftagn]

Retrohippies resisting evictions that have left many of them homeless?

 

[Mark E.]

Retrohippies resisting evictions that have left many of them homeless?

Hmm. Not quite. Maybe retro-hippies who pool resources to buy property that the economic crisis deflates to 10% value and re-establish some sort of communal value system pooling their retired expertise.

Build it and they will come.