Progressives and mainstream Democratic pundits disagree with each other about many issues at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests, but with few exceptions they are joined in their contempt for drum circles, free hugs, and other behavior in Zuccotti Park that smacks of hippie culture.<\/p>\n
In a\u00a0post for the\u00a0Daily Beast<\/em><\/a>\u00a0Michelle Goldberg lamented, \u201cDrum circles and clusters of earnest incense-burning meditators ensure that stereotypes about the hippie left remain alive.\u201d AtEsquire<\/em><\/a>, Charles Pierce worried that few could \u201csee past all the dreadlocks and hear\u2026over the drum circles.\u201d Michael Smerconish\u00a0asked on the MSNBC show\u00a0Hardball<\/em><\/a>\u00a0if middle Americans \u201cin their Barcalounger\u201d could relate to drum circles. The\u00a0New Republic<\/em>\u2019s Alex Klein\u00a0chimed in<\/a>, \u201cIn the course of my Friday afternoon occupation, I saw two drum circles, four dogs, two saxophones, three babies….Wall Street survived.\u201d And the host of MSNBC\u2019s\u00a0Up<\/em>, Chris Hayes (editor at large of the\u00a0Nation<\/em>), recently reassured his guests Naomi Klein and Van Jones that although he supported the political agenda of the protest he wasn\u2019t going to \u201cbeat the drum\u201d or \u201cgive you a free hug,\u201d to knowing laughter.<\/p>\n Yet it is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues\u2014something that had eluded even the most lucid progressives in the Obama era.<\/p>\n Since the mythology of the 1960s hangs over so much of the analysis of the Wall Street protests, it\u2019s worth reviewing what actually happened then. Media legend lumps sixties radicals and hippies together, but from the very beginning most leaders on the left looked at the hippie culture as, at best, a distraction and, at worst, a saboteur of pragmatic progressive politics. Hippies saw most radicals as delusional and often dangerously angry control freaks. Bad vibes.<\/p>\n Not that there is anything magic about the word \u201chippie.\u201d Over the years it has been distorted by parody, propaganda, self-hatred, and, from its earliest stirrings, commercialism. In some contemporary contexts it is used merely to refer to people living in the past and\/or those who are very stoned.<\/p>\n The hippie idea, as used here, does not refer to colloquialisms like \u201cfar out\u201d or products sold by dope dealers. At their core, the counterculture types who briefly called themselves hippies were a spiritual movement. In part they offered an alternative to organized religions that too often seemed preoccupied with rules and conformity, especially on sexual matters. (One reason Eastern religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism resonated with hippies was because they carried no American or family baggage.) But most powerfully, the hippie idea was an uprising against the secular religion of America in the 1950s, morbid \u201cMad Men\u201d materialism, and Ayn Rand\u2019s social Darwinism.<\/p>\n The hippies were heirs to a long line of bohemians that includes William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Hesse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, utopian movements like the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists, and most directly the Beatniks. Hippies emerged from a society that had produced birth-control pills, a counterproductive war in Vietnam, the liberation and idealism of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, FM radio, mass-produced LSD, a strong economy, and a huge quantity of baby-boom teenagers. These elements allowed the hippies to have a mainstream impact that dwarfed that of the Beats and earlier avant-garde cultures.<\/p>\n In the mid-sixties rock and roll\u2019s mass appeal fused with certain elements of hip culture, especially in San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company (as well as Seattle\u2019s Jimi Hendrix). That mood was absorbed and expanded by much of the popular music world, including the already popular Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. John Lennon\u2019s songs \u201cInstant Karma,\u201d \u201cGive Peace A Chance,\u201d \u201cAcross The Universe,\u201d \u201cRevolution\u201d (\u201cBut when you talk about destruction \/ Don\u2019t you know that you can count me out\u201d), and \u201cImagine\u201d are probably as close to a hippie manifesto as existed, and the Woodstock festival as close to a mass manifestation of the idea as would survive the hype.<\/p>\n It is easy to cherry pick a few idiotic phrases from stoners in the 1970 documentary Woodstock<\/em>, but what made the event and its legacy meaningful to its fans\u2014aside from the music\u2014was the example of people in the hip community taking care of each other, as shown in the Wavy Gravy documentary\u00a0Saint Misbehavin\u2019<\/em>. No two hippies had the same notion of what the movement was all about, but there were some values they all shared. As\u00a0Time<\/em>\u00a0put it in 1967, \u201cHippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence.\u201d<\/p>\n Like any spiritual movement (or religion) hippies attracted pretenders, ranging from undercover cops to predators such as Charles Manson, who used their external trappings for very different agendas. By October of 1967, following the so-called \u201cSummer of Love\u201d (during which more than a hundred thousand long-haired teenagers overloaded and permanently changed the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco), exploitation of the word \u201chippie\u201d had become sufficiently prevalent that a group of counterculture pioneers in the Bay Area held a \u201cDeath of the Hippie\u201d mock funeral. A flier announcing the ceremony warned young seekers against the existential perils of hype.<\/p>\n Media created the hippie with your hungry consent. Careers are to be had for the enterprising hippie. The media casts nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV. Your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the [San Francisco<\/em>]\u00a0Chronicle<\/em>. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcissism, plebian vanity.<\/p>\n The pure of heart were exhorted to \u201cExorcize Haight-Ashbury. Do not be bought by a picture or phrase. Do not be captured in words. You are free, we are free. Believe only in your own incarnate spirit.\u201d\u00a0Woodstock<\/em>\u00a0shows that by 1969 even the long-haired masses had taken to calling themselves \u201cfreaks.\u201d<\/p>\n A YEAR ago, shortly before the 2010 mid-year election, a left-wing blogger on a conference call with President Obama\u2019s adviser David Axelrod complained that dismissive comments by the administration about its left-wing base amounted to \u201chippie punching.\u201d The phrase was used to emphasize the contempt that the administration had shown for the progressive base, but it was also a reminder of the disdain that most of the Left has for the word \u201chippie,\u201d as if to complain, \u201cYou think that we are as irrelevant as hippies!\u201d Like those who ostentatiously distanced themselves from the Wall Street drum circles, the bloggers wanted to distinguish the modern Left from actual hippies (or who they thought hippies were).<\/p>\n The anti-hippie ethos on the left runs deep. Many 1960s radicals claimed that the hippies had squandered a chance to mainstream left-wing political ideas. In Black Panther leader Bobby Seale\u2019s book\u00a0Seize the Time<\/em>\u00a0he quotes white radical Jerry Rubin as saying that he and others had formed the \u201cYippies\u201d because hippies had not \u201cnecessarily become political yet. They mostly prefer to be stoned.\u201d In the real world, the Yippies never got a mass following, but the Grateful Dead did.<\/p>\n Early in 1967 writers for the Haight-Asbury psychedelic paper the\u00a0Oracle<\/em>, along with local poets, musicians, and mystics, organized the first Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. They were chastised by a group of Berkley radicals, including Rubin, for rejecting their proposal that the gathering should have \u201cdemands,\u201d a suggestion that the amused hippie conveners saw as a contradiction of the whole idea. (There are echoes of this argument in criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street protesters as insufficiently specific in their demands\u2014as if the interests of 99 percent are not a clear enough litmus test for any proposed laws or regulations.)<\/p>\n Bill Zimmerman, an antiwar activist of the Vietnam era, summarized the radical attitude toward hippies in his excellent memoir\u00a0Troublemaker<\/em>:<\/p>\n Not believing they could alter the juggernaut of American capitalism through politics, the hippies tried culture instead\u2014starting with [Timothy] Leary\u2019s slogan, \u201cTurn on, tune in, drop out\u201d….While we [\u201cthe political people in the antiwar movement\u201d] all accepted a subsistence lifestyle without expensive clothes, cars or other luxuries, they were about enjoyment, friendship, shared experiences, and whatever transcendence could be achieved through mind-altering drugs, music, and sex.<\/p>\n This both exaggerates the political viability of the non-hippie radicals of the day and underestimates the social conscience and commitment of many of those who chose to develop communes and new age spiritual communities. One example is the SEVA Foundation, founded by Wavy Gravy and Ram Dass in the early 1970s. Over the course of thirty years, the nonprofit organization has raised enough money from rock benefits to pay for over three million eye operations in third-world countries to rescue people from blindness. And of course the modern environmental movement owes as much to a mystical belief in the sanctity of the earth as it does to science.<\/p>\n Some on the left maintained that hippies scared off socially conservative liberals who otherwise would have been more sympathetic to the antiwar movement. In\u00a0There but for Fortune<\/em>, a wonderful documentary about radical singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, the artist can be heard complaining that freakish looking protesters undermined the credibility of antiwar demonstrations with middle Americans. In a piece for the\u00a0Nation<\/em>in 1967, Ochs\u2019s friend Jack Newfield complained, \u201cBananas, incense, and pointing love rays to the Pentagon have nothing to do with redeeming America.\u201d<\/p>\n Republicans leaders including Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan eagerly used cartoon versions of hippies as part of their successful attempt to break up the New Deal coalition. \u201cA hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,\u201d quipped then California Governor Reagan in 1969. Jefferson R. Cowie\u2019s\u00a0Stayin\u2019 Alive<\/em>\u00a0theorizes that America\u2019s rightward trend began when Nixon lured working-class whites into Republican arms by contrasting the hippie myth of Woodstock with country singer Merle Haggard\u2019s anti-hippie anthem \u201cOkie from Muskogee.\u201d<\/p>\n One was southern, gritty, masculine, working class, white, and soaked in the reality of putting food on the table; the other was northern, eastern, radical, effete, leisurely, affluent, multi-cultural, and full of pipe dreams. One was real, the other surreal; one worked, the other played; one did the labor, the other did the criticism; one drank whiskey, the other smoked dope; one built, the other destroyed; one was for survival, the other was for revolution; one died in wars, the other protested wars; and one was for Richard Nixon, the other for George McGovern.<\/p>\n Cowie\u2019s book is terrific, but this is nonsense. The lion\u2019s share of the decline in Democratic votes for President occurred between 1964 (61 percent) and 1968 (43 percent), when Hubert Humphrey was the nominee. Most of those formerly Democratic votes went to the racist Alabama Governor George Wallace, who garnered 13 percent of the vote on a third-party ticket\u2014an explicit reaction against civil rights legislation. The demonstrations outside of the Democratic Convention in 1968 in which many Americans sympathized with cops more than protesters had nothing to do with hippies; they were orchestrated by radical non-hippies like Rubin. (Hippie icon Allen Ginsberg argued in vain against the Chicago protests, because he presciently feared violence).<\/p>\n Four years later, there were no hippies involved with the McGovern campaign\u2019s mistakes, like the ill-advised selection of Thomas Eagleton as the vice-presidential nominee and the breakdown of the relationship between the campaign and organized labor. Those mistakes were made by well-intentioned but inept liberal political consultants, many of whom would self-righteously characterize themselves as \u201cpragmatists\u201d in future years.<\/p>\n It is possible that some non-racist, older, white Democrats switched sides because they were offended by aspects of hippie culture, but it seems likely that more of their children and grandchildren rejected conservative orthodoxy because of their attraction to that very culture. The Allman Brothers and other southern rock bands developed a following that dwarfed that of Haggard, and ended up being a source of funding for Jimmy Carter\u2019s primary campaign in 1976.<\/p>\n Modern heirs to the hippie idea include millions of \u201cNew Age\u201d believers, inspired by the likes of Baba Ram Dass, Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra, and in some cases Oprah Winfrey, whose non-hierarchal spirituality exists outside the confines of traditional churches and synagogues. Although very few neo-hippie groups have explicit political agendas, many in the progressive public interest world benefit from their largess. Spiritual movements do not adhere to \u201cparty lines,\u201d which is one reason why conventional political activists find them so maddening. Martin Scorsese\u2019s recent documentary on the life of George Harrison reminded us not only of the Beatle\u2019s passionate embrace of Hinduism and the funds he raised for Bangladesh but also of his perverse anger at paying his taxes. Nonetheless, it doesn\u2019t take a poll or a focus group to know that people who identify with the hippie idea are unlikely to vote Republican. (Ron Paul\u2019s people are trying. They give out fliers at Occupy Wall Street while, as of this writing, Democrats still fear to do so.)<\/p>\n Conservatives have effectively peddled the notion that all politics are corrupt. The resulting apathy, and opposition to government, conveniently leaves big business more in charge than ever. The price that Democrats and progressives pay for belittling or ignoring contemporary devotees of the hippie idea, who share the opinion that politics are corrupt, is to reinforce the impulse to \u201cdrop out\u201d in a cohort that would otherwise be, for the most part, natural allies.<\/p>\n Spiritual values can expand the reach of political action, especially at a time when progressives struggle to connect to mass consciousness. Their causes have been mired in phrases like \u201csingle-payer\u201d and \u201ccap-and-trade.\u201d For all of their virtues, policy wonks didn\u2019t come up with \u201cWe are the 99 percent.\u201d People with drum circles did.<\/p>\n The Right understands the subtle connections between ideology and practical politics. Few Republican leaders distance themselves from right-wing Christians or demagogues like Glenn Beck. And Ayn Rand\u2019s doctrine of selfishness, despite elements that conservative politicians would be afraid to avow, is celebrated by right-wing oligarchs and wanna-bes. Alan Greenspan, the long-time head of the Federal Reserve, was a personal disciple of Rand, and Congressman Paul Ryan, who drafted the Republican budget that would\u2019ve eliminated Medicare, cites Rand as his intellectual hero.<\/p>\n Any bohemian movement will attract goofballs. Drum circles may inspire and unify a crowd in one situation, but simply drown out conversation in another. It is one thing for a polite protester to offer \u201cfree hugs,\u201d and quite another for a sweaty inebriate to impose them. The way to deal with this is to rebuke individual jerks, not to dismiss a vibrant section of mass culture.<\/p>\n As Martin Luther King pursued his strategy of nonviolent protest, the NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, who oversaw most of the legal strategy for the civil rights movement, mocked him by asking, \u201cHow many laws have you changed?\u201d King replied, \u201cI don\u2019t know, but we\u2019ve changed a lot of hearts.\u201d Obviously, the civil rights movement needed both spiritual and legal efforts to achieve its goals. So do modern progressives. As Nick Lowe asked in the song made famous by Elvis Costello, \u201cWhat\u2019s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?\u201d<\/p>\n _________________<\/p>\n
\nWHAT POSSIBLE relevance does any of this have to American politics in 2011? For one thing, many of those young people who like to beat on drums and who devised some of the subtle infrastructure of Occupy Wall Street are clearly tuned into an energy that exists outside of the parameters of political science.<\/p>\n