AHC/WI: American counterculture persists longer

What if the hippy movement had more power and lasted longer (perhaps even started earlier)? How could this happen and what would the effects be?
 
I've tried myself a few time to get this topic covered, so I hope the best of luck to this thread.

That being said, I have no clue how to get this to come about. Something to note though is why the counterculture died. There are a few reasons. First, the causes that inspired the most outcry were won or at least enough to take the wind out of the sails; we pulled out of Vietnam, blacks had civil rights, etc, etc. After that, it petered out.
Two, the counterculture assimilated into the culture. They didn't go away; they became the liberators of the mainstream. That's why you can wear a t-shirt and jeans and don't have to walk outside wearing a nice suit. That's why you can have any hair style or facial hair you want. That's why you can swear in mixed company. That's why on TV, you don't have to have couples sleeping in two beds anymore. They unpuckered America's butt.
Three, there were crack downs on the counterculture. Groups were infiltrated, seeds of dissent were sewn (there was the fake Black Panther coloring book or whatever it was that the FBI made up to make them look like they wanted to kill white people), everyone was getting probed and an FBI file, and so on.
Four, there was the backlash against the counterculture once it went more militant. Flower Power and all it's peace and love are something mainstream America can stomach, but Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and the Weather Underground and all that, whether militant through actuality or simply popular conception, were something that made mainstream white Americans very upset. I'm not saying that was predestined, though. The later 60s and early 70s birthed the militants and radicals because of the times and the environment. Peace and love were being questioned because the problems of America were still there and Vietnam was still there, and authority figures were pushing back against it with violence often times, and so more and more people started to replace flower power with "by any means necessary"; what those means were depending on the group ideology. A calmer times would not have lead to all that in the counterculture; at least not as the big force it became. There's probably more reasons, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.
To summarize, the way you get a less militant counterculture is to remove the Vietnam war from the equation, and a less militant, peace and love counterculture seems to me to be one that can survive longer and not burn itself out.

Alternatively, maybe you can just go completely the opposite direction of that, have the militancy still happen, ramp it up, go to the extreme in that direction, and push many of the hippies to a position of separation from society. I've been thinking this sort of thing over for a future TL, with the idea to have multiple successful communes with commune hippies becoming like the Amish.
 
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hard to say, I'd say no 'Nam, I think the conformist 1950s will always lead to a huge late 1960s back lash, 'nam made them political, and losing in 1968 brought them down, that said I think the growth of hard drunks and the down turn of the economy in the 1970s will always end the hippies
 
Echoing Emp Norton's comments

Emp Norton's on the button about the social trends of the 1960's re: what birthed the counterculture, how it evolved from flower power to SDS/Panther/Weathermen wackiness and what made the counterculture more mainstream as the 1970's wore on.

Other things that made full-time immersion in the hippie counterculture less attractive are the vast majority of hippies getting older and going, "Well, time to get a job, raise some kids, and do "normal" life".
Employers got more accomodating of hippie traits and folks got less insistent on being full-time hippies.
As a result, the counterculture fissioned into numerous line-item sub-movements-- women's rights, gay rights, Native American civil rights, environmentalism, that folks picked and chose as pet causes instead of being a down-the-line progressive coalition.

So to butterfly that, worse American economic malaise in the 1970's- if there's no "straight" jobs for hippies to "sell out" for, there's less incentive to drop back into the mainstream.
More of a conservative backlash/external social pressure in the 1970's would also give the hippies more reason to stick together.

As Emp Norton said, the main irritants that fueled the counterculture- draft-fueled Vietnam and the civil rights struggle were "solved" to the satisfaction of many.
If the US stayed fully involved in Nam using the draft to keep the ranks filled, you'd see riots in the 1970's that made the '65 Watts and '68 Newark riots look like backyard barbecues.
IDK how much more widespread the Weathermen could've been b/c they were the rather tiny minority of SDS that wanted revolution now and felt violence was the answer.

SLA was a different breed-- felons who felt they had nothing to lose. They got their Gotterdammerung.
Most Panthers and Black Muslims I've met and heard about wanted to live and improve/protect their communities, NOT go out in a blaze of infamy.

A home-grown American Sendero Luminoso or Red Army Faction just doesn't compute- UNLESS say the Birchers or Minutemen start acting like death squads on hippie communes. If the local cops and FBI don't respond to stop such atrocities, the hippies might get a tad more hostile.
 
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