this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Wait, what? No it wasn't. It was an environmentalist counter-culture movement directly spitting in the face of the hedonism and personal excess of 50s era marketing and industry. The Madison Avenue "everything is about sex now" mantra was what swallowed up middle America during the prior decade. It was so choking and claustrophobic that news media of the time could only ever describe counterculture as "People who fuck the wrong way", "People who do art and culture the wrong way", and "People who use the wrong kind of drugs".
What you've regurgitated is Nixonian Era propaganda against counterculture and the subsequent moral panic of the 70s and early 80s that led to its demise.
That is, again, flatly untrue. The heart of the Reagan Revolution was the California Tax Revolt of the 1970s, not the Greenwhich Village hipster movement of the 1960s. Not only do you have your history backwards, you have your geography backwards. Reagan was a West Coast conservative backlash to the civil rights movement primarily focused in the Northeast and Gulf Coast states.
He was the end-stage of the Southern Strategy, that flipped a whole bunch of middle-age Dixiecrat Klansmen into Republicans. He was a corporate vehicle for the Bush Family and their post-Cold War allies in the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America in order to demolish the Socialism of Postwar Europe. And he was a reactionary response to the Democrats' own failures in supporting an active labor movement in the Midwest.
But the idea that the Black Panthers of the 1970s were Reaganites ten years later? That folks chaining themselves to industrial chemical plants and weapons manufacturers were clapping for Star Wars and cheering "we start bombing Moscow in five minutes"? That the people who marched in Selma and stood their ground at Columbia were lining up to endorse Bedtime for Bonzo?
Get fucked. No they weren't. They were deliberately and systematically purged from the Democratic Party in the neoliberal turn. They weren't voting for anyone, because nobody was voting for them.