Digby examines the pundit class’ Pathological Fear Of Hippies
The political issues were just a small part of why people voted for Nixon both times and why the political establishment moved to the right (as the culture itself grew ever more liberal.) Broder and his pals’ facile rendering of that history has pretty much crippled liberalism for almost 40 years and it’s long past time that we ignored those who persist in perpetuating it.
My conservative Texas neighbor still uses “hippy” as a generic term of disdain for anything he doesn’t like — generally political stuff, but not exclusively. Anything out of his scope of experience, dirty, eccentric, contrary to his idea of middle America — which he thinks is personified in the Waco atmosphere, apparently. It really pisses me off.