The hippies were not leftists (and Nixon was not a conservative)
The deeply reactionary worldview of the hippies and what it means for current politics
Graphic I made today off of scrounged images from the internet
The hippies, were not leftists, how is this possible, with their endless calls for “revolution” and reading people like Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse who were Marxists? To understand this we have to go below the level of surface rhetoric, and look at symbols and iconography. Who were some of the favorite icons of the hippies? They were people like Indians 1, cowboys of the old west, the Amish, troubadours of the middle ages, the late 19th century crafts movement, poets like William Blake and Walt Whitman. What do all these people have in common? They are romantics or romanticized peoples whose gaze is firmly rooted towards the past.
Romanticism of the past is primarily a reactionary impulse that can be wholly contrasted with the progressive impulse which is forward looking, and cold and rational in terms of embracing Jacques Elul’s technique which is about abolishing old folk ways in favor of the rational and efficient. Romantics are rebels, but they are reactionary rebels against the cold efficiency of machine society. Because the hippies were rebels and rebellion in the popular mind is associated with the left many of the hippies themselves thought they were leftists. But they were not, for example look at a phrase from the 60s like “human being, please do not fold, spindle or mutilate.” What does this mean? Well in the 60s era computer data was still often read from punch cards which came with this or similar warning about damaging the cards. The reason the hippies would use this phrase sarcastically with added “human being,” was a deeply humanistic and sarcastic plea to treat individual people at least as well as punch cards.
Punch cards became not only a symbol for the
computer, but a symbol of alienation.
They stood for abstraction, oversimplification and
dehumanization. The cards were, it seemed, a two
dimensional portrait of people, people abstracted
into numbers that machines could use. The cards
came to represent a society where it seemed that
machines had become more important than people,
where people had to change their ways to suit the
machines.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:788264/PDF/?embed=true
Another perhaps even more telling example is from the Graduate the ur 60s movie with a soundtrack by 60s legends Simon and Garfunkle. The justly famous part of the movie is the “plastics” speech. In the plastics speech the establishment man pitching Dustin Hoffman to go into the plastics industry is very much a progressive, he is future looking, cold and rational. If you somehow have never seen this clip before, take a moment to watch it, to see what I mean.
Further Nixon was in no way a true conservative, he was an establishment man to a T, who embraced the “creative destruction” (Schumpeter) of big business capitalism, and U.S. imperialism that uprooted and destroyed small traditional villages all around the world for Geo-political strategic advantage and to steal resources wisely left in the ground by traditional people.
Ok, all well and good, but what does this mean for today? Does it have any practical relevance? I would argue it does, to understand who our friends are and who our enemies are if we are conservative reactionaries against the madness of today’s “progressive” gender cultists, AI advocates and trans-humanism advocates. As Carl Schmidt wisely observed the friend enemy distinction is at the root of all politics.
Today’s progressives want to embrace the mantle of the 60s hippies, “they like us are revolutionaries, we are just continuing their trajectory,” they will exclaim. But nothing could be further from the truth as I hope I have shown at least in outline the hippies were rebelling against the “progressive” mindset of endless technological progress. Today’s rebels many of them self consciously style themselves as progressives, and even those who call themselves communists are for infinite industrial growth even on out into space eventually abandoning Earth altogether, this is the meaning of “fully automated luxury space communism.” This explains the at first weird fact that so many supposed “leftists” share a similar ideology to Nike, Disney and the U.S. State Department. In fact they do share the same root ideology of being advocates for endless technological progress. The left is now on the side of the progressive establishment, much like they were in the “progressive era” between the reigns of Teddy Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This leaves those of us who despise the progressive establishment of large corporations and the Federal Government an interesting opening, and that is to own we are now the romantic rebels. This means that like the hippies in the 60s who invented folk rock we too should looking at past genres of artistic expression and bringing them up to speed for this era. It means we should own we are the creative rebels against the establishment. The 60s romantic rebellion against the machine was an era that saw a creative explosion and we should be engaging in a similar creative explosion against the current establishment. We should also claim the hippies and environmentalists as our own people, and explain to aging boomer hippies and younger neo-hippies that their deepest root desires are not “progressive,” but in fact are romantic reactionary against the progressive machine embracing establishment, with roots going all the way back to William Blake when he inveighed against the “dark satanic mills.”
1. I use the term “Indian” and not “native American,” because it actually the term many natives to this continent prefer to use for themselves, and it’s also the historically correct usage for the 1960s time period I was referring to.
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It stands on its own. Some of this touches on the bad described in the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Familiar with it?
Do you ever read Ben Braddock on twitter? He's a hippie just like you explain. He's also a doc and had a really helpful treatment protocol during covid using standard OT meds, ivermectin and/or the "Trump med" hydroxychloroquine. He described the illness in terms a layman could understand, that it is largely inflammatory in nature, which is how it differs from the flu.
He also tweeted how he reversed his dog's heart failure by feeding raw grass fed heart.
My last dog is 16 and she has had CHF for years. She was experiencing uncomfortable edema/swelling for a year and the pharma meds weren't cutting it anymore. I started feeding her beef liver and then added beef heart and within a month her swelling started to reduce. 6 months later her swelling was almost totally gone and now it's a year later and she is totally stable and doing wonderful. Two vets told me she's a "medical miracle" because she's been living with symptomatic CHF for over four years and is doing incredibly well -- literally they both used the same words. I explained what I was doing and they shrugged and said whatever I'm doing it's working. She's sleeping on my leg right now, completely content.
Braddock is a conservative/conservationist hippie just like you describe.
I love your point about the romantic and reactionary nature of the hippie movement and the artistic expression that mirrors it. Inspiring stuff.