Keep The Summer Of Love Going

I'm curious as to how you could either or both strengthen or lengthen the hippie movement in late 60's/early 70's America.

I was thinking something like butterflying away Manson so he doesn't end up giving such a bad name to the hippies, but is there any other way to keep this movement going strong? I mean, didn't it dissolve even before the Vietnam war was over?
 
The hippie movement started off more or less as a protest movement that fissioned into different single-issue movements (environmentalism, women's rights, and other personal issues vs protesting Vietnam and changing society as a whole) as the 70's wore on.
LBJ's Great Society and Good Lord, how he escalated the Vietnam War made great tomato targets for critics right and left both wanting him to do more.
Nixon FWIW was an economic liberal dealing with both the OPEC embargo and winding down from 'Nam, but boy did he live up to being Tricky Dicky. Both wholeheartedly gave the FBI carte-blanche to investigate, harass, and arrest hippie activists as political subversives.
Without those Presidents as lightning rods for dissent, the main impetus broke up. There was a lot of tension within the movement between the "serious" political activists and the Merry Prankster/Yippie crowd even in the 60's.
By the time the 70's rolled around, SDS had birthed the Weathermen as our own homegrown leftist terrorist group. It was the style then. Every Western nation felt the need to have one.
Germany's RAF and Baader-Meinhof gangs, Japan, Italy, all had very active terrorist cells semi-quasi collaborating with the IRA and PLO, merrily bombing, hijacking, kidnapping, and so forth to make their nihilistic point against the Man. Police adapted, got brighter about counter-terrorist techniques, collaborated across borders and nailed them.

Sure Manson's "Family" didn't do the hippie image any favors, but mostly,
you could see a difference after Altamont. Nobody trusted each other (too many people finked on each other), nobody could agree to a common agenda, and there was a violent edge to things that turned folks off. So it became more and more personal vs social and global as mentioned before.

The political right didn't see the need for underground terrorism, as they wholeheartedly supported official violence- death penalty, no-knock laws, all the fun legal short-cuts for law enforcement to get those damned hippies under control.

Plus, you run into that whole adult life thing. Tuning in, dropping out and so forth are cool 18-25. By 1980, most of the Boomer cohort had hit thirty and needed to make the compromises everyone makes to make a living, raise kids, and so forth.
There's a saying in Europe, "If you're NOT a socialist under thirty you have no heart, but if you're still a socialist after thirty, you have no brain".

So, to keep the hippies alive as a social movement past 1975, you need to make it mainstream as a rite of passage for youth. It'd help if the drug laws were not as rigorously enforced. In a way, it has, but not in the explicitly political dedication to progressive politics.
Kids adopt a lot of the postures of the hippie movement w/o the meaning b/c kids are economically dependent way too long IMO so they've got nothing better to do than rebel. They want the emotional space to be themselves, yet belong.
Now there's not as much emphasis on physical conformity (men can wear long hair, women can dress in anything masculine, so that kind of outward statement isn't quite as powerful.
It's funny to see how many folks support school uniforms these days to remove the whole dimension of envying another kid's clothes or other gear.
 
Okay, so, get rid of the Weathermen, make hippie concerts more civil, maybe get Johnson and Nixon to do even more unpopular things to keep dissent growing.

Also, what you said with:

"There was a lot of tension within the movement between the "serious" political activists and the Merry Prankster/Yippie crowd even in the 60's."

That sort of reminds me of the Anonymous of today...
 
Butterflying away the Weathermen is very difficult b/c the Black Panthers were seriously confronting cops and the SDS types knew they looked like pussies by comparison.
The big difference was, the Black Panthers had plenty of Nam vets as cadre and perfectly able to mix it up. IIRC tho, their philosophy is to do what the cops weren't doing to protect their community, NOT randomly stir up shit. The Panthers also fervently believed in military discipline and so forth.
SDSers OTOH were overwhelmingly kids from comfy white backgrounds to whom cops had to be polite to but felt the need to feel the heat poor people felt. Not many ROTC types or Nam veterans were SDSers for obvious reasons, so the Weathermen were spectacularly unsuccessful as terrorists.
They also were considered wankers by the "serious" left and generated zero political momentum when the Panthers, SLA, and other "resistance groups" were part of the "guerrilla chic" 1968-72.

Keep in mind cops (local, state, and federal) were really aggressive at the time and handled any hippies political or otherwise as Commie subversives and sent folks away for serious prison time on bullshit charges for what are now traffic ticket misdemeanors.

I'm going on a long digression just to show how the Weathermen developed and to give the context of how some hippies became radicalized. Keep in mind the Weathermen were fringe-of-fringe-of-fringe of the whole movement. By and large, hippies rejected violence.

As I said before, what made the hippie movement was confronting obvious evils and trying to tap the better angels of our nature making things better. With the passing of LBJ and Nixon, there wasn't much obvious evil to confront domestically. Nam was over. The civil rights struggle became more diffuse addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, etc.

I pose a question to you, how long do you want hippies as a cultural movement to last, and if so, what aspects?
 
The main thing I want to see is just to have the hippie movement have a bigger impact on American society and culture as a whole.

If you butterfly away Watergate and keep Nixon in office, how will that help the hippie movement?
 
OK so Nixon stays in power all the way until 1976. Hippies were shocking in 1966, but by 1973, they weren't as transgressive. They still caught a lot of police attention, but the wind was largely out of their sails by 1975 b/c Nam was no longer a going concern, the draft was no longer a worry and so forth. J Edgar Hoover dying in 1972 did a lot to end COINTELPRO, the FBI-led harassment of "subversives". Without Watergate, I think Nixon would have felt a freer hand at home and abroad. Detente would have advanced as we got out of Nam.

If we were still involved in Nam, enough mainstream people had taken up the cause that the hippies would be seen as the unrealistic visionaries that pioneered the movement but the "serious" people turned into a success. YMMV about whom to credit in that situation, but Congress was determined to rein Nixon in as far as warmongering b/c of the liberal support.

As to being more culturally successful, it's tough to see how. The personal agenda of hippies, be free to be yourself, worked so well it became the watchword of the 1970's until AIDS and herpes spooked everyone out of the love pool in the 80's and sparked the ongoing "conservative" backlash.

We wouldn't be arguing about gay marriage now if the hippies hadn't made gay rights part of the expansion of sexual freedom. Cohabitation is thoroughly mainstream now. Hell, nobody freaks out if you're smoking marijuana as if you're part of any subversive conspiracy anymore.

The big problem is, their mainstream liberal allies balked at the common sense alterations to narcotics laws in the 1970's about marijuana and other drugs. It was a lost opportunity to end the drug war in the 1970's and find better ways to combat the various urban blights highlighted in the 1980's we still deal with, endemic high unemployment, homelessness, an underclass with minimal social mobility that we dealt with by locking them up.

MY argument was that you could either have the cultural impact, which they certainly did or political agitation. Unfortunately, their political contributions pales IMO next to their cultural impact. If they stayed with it, they joined causes that became mainstream and thus co-opted.
 
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There's a saying in Europe, "If you're NOT a socialist under thirty you have no heart, but if you're still a socialist after thirty, you have no brain".

I believe that's a transcontinental saying, except with "liberal" instead of "socialist" naturally.
Very informative post too.
 
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