AHC: Libertarian counterculture

Will the Dems and GOP remain socially conservative if the counterculture was libertarian?

  • Yes

  • No

  • Maybe

  • I don't know


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You mean in addition to supporting less restrictive laws governing sex and drug use, the counterculture is also supporting a laissiez faire economy and an a dismantling of whatever welfare state exists at the time?

"Baby, I really wanna bring our spirits together physically, if you know what I mean, but ya gotta promise me, if you're takin' the pill, you're gettin' it from a privately owned drugstore, not from some community-health clinic that's gettin' government funds, because that's like, socialism, ya know."

I dunno. Might be a bit of a tall order.
 
"Oh yeah, I'm really fired up about going over to Africa and helpin' to hand the power back to the people, but, come on. The Peace Corps? That's just robbing the taxpayer of his hard-earned money. Maybe we should try and fiind out if Exxon is running a program like that over there?"

Eh, still not quite working for me.

 
"Y'know what the real tragedy of the blues is, man? The way they're takin' it away from the people who perfected it, the corporate record labels, and sellin' it down the river to these teachers-union parasites who wanna force-feed it to kids in public school musiic classes".

Joking aside, if things in the overall culture had gone a little(well, okay, considerably) differently, you might have seen the counterculture embrace a decentralized approach to governance, with a back-to-the-land ethos that's hostile to federal encroachment in the areas of education(because "the man" can't force his values on our kids), and also to things like highway construction(along with the more expected opposition to conscription, drug laws and morality police). This might spread over into opposition to the welfare-state as just another cudgel wielded by the tyrannical government.

But, in all honesty, it was the general trend of liberalism in the mid-to-late twentieth century that individualism in the sphere of personal regulation got melded(sometimes awkwardly) with increased regulation in the economic sphere. That was all around the world, not just in the USA and Europe, so it was probably inevitable that the it would manifest itself in the counterculture as well. Commune-dwelling hippies might not have liked the government building big dams near their bucolic communities, but at the end of the day, they'd probably like the plans of the big oil companies a lot less, and would look to the government to block them. Same basic dynamic with issues like civil-rights etc.
 
You need to have white men dominate the counter-culture, given that libertarianism's appeal is almost exclusively limited to them. There was definitely a libertarian element to the Beats like Kerouac and Ginsberg, a general desire to be left alone from society's rules without the social concerns of the New Left's women and African Americans. This suggests you need to derail or delay both women's rights and civil rights.

For the former, you might be able to get someone to develop serious side-effects during testing of the first birth control pill and slow down the progress on it being produced. But research was happening worldwide and you've only set the sexual revolution back a few years.

For the second, a 1960 Nixon who passes a limited civil rights bill could get white people to think that it's taken care of and enough has been done. African-Americans will still strenuously and justifiably disagree, but without the cause being as sympathetic to moderate whites it might have a harder time getting folded into acceptable political discourse even on the left.

I think a libertarian counterculture is going to smacked with a New Left eventually, and probably even stronger the more it is delayed, but it should be possible. I don't think they'd necessarily embrace capitalism explicitly so much as an "I'm okay, you're okay" ethos which discourages government involvement in private affairs.
 
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