The role hippies now play in American politics and consciousness is the role that ethnic scapegoats have traditionally played. We’ll discuss this in more depth in Chapter Four, but for now, walk with me down Memory Lane.

Let’s first step back to the sixties. George Wallace, the Alabama governor and infamous white supremacist, had thrown his hat into the presidential ring. Early in his career, Wallace had been a liberal judge who treated African-Americans respectfully; then, he lost a 1958 bid for governor and privately declared, "I was outniggered, and I will never be outniggered again!" ("George Wallace"). The key to Wallace’s political success in Alabama, according to campaign staffer Tom Turnipseed, had been "Race and being opposed to the civil-rights movement" ("George Wallace"). In 1968, running as an independent, he hoped to win a substantial portion of the conservative vote from Republican Richard Nixon. But if race-baiting had worked well at home, Wallace apparently felt he needed to modify his message for a broader national audience; thus, his campaign speeches spent a lot less time talking race than lambasting hippies.

On the campaign trail, Wallace taunted allegedly countercultural protestors: "Oh, I thought you were a she; you’re a he. Oh, my goodness," "Come up here after I’ve finished my speech, and I’ll autograph yuh sandals for ya," "All he needs is a good haircut; if he’ll go to the barber shop, I think they’d cure him" (“George Wallace“). Explains Turnipseed: "Governor Wallace used to love to use the long-haired hippie agitators, the folks who were out in the front lines of the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement. He felt like his constituency just really disliked [them] the most" ("George Wallace"). Wallace’s Finance Director, Seymour Trammell, adds:

That would be the kind of pictures [Wallace quarreling with “hippie” protestors] we would want; when that would be on television . . . people would just . . . send whatever dollars they had right into the campaign headquarters, and by doing that, we were able to finance the campaign. ("George Wallace")

So, hippies became Wallace’s new "niggers," anti-hippie hatred the lifeblood of his campaign. The old race-baiting dog learned a new trick: hippie baiting--indicting a target by somehow associating it with hippies, exciting political passions by appealing to anti-hippie bigotry. And just as his old appeals to racism long sustained Wallace politically, his new appeals to anti-hippie prejudice worked political wonders. No Wallace didn’t win, but his campaign mobilized millions of Americans, invigorating the forces of prejudice and ethnic chauvinism, often branded the politics of “backlash,” and moved the nation in a more intolerant, angry and ugly direction.

Let’s fast forward to 1994: Halfway through the first Democratic Clinton Administration, mid-term Congressional elections approached. The Republicans, led by the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, were pushing something called the Contract with America. Vehement and vengeful, Gingrich angrily branded the Clintons “counterculture McGoverniks” (Dowd); this was the cutting edge of his campaign. Reporter Maureen Dowd paraphrases Gingrich: " . . .before America got what conservatives scoffingly call the welfare state and hippies, things were on the right track." Journalist Frank Rich comments:

But now Newt Gingrich, echoing other Republican moralists, like William Bennett and Dan Quayle, has brought the counterculture back—not for a reunion concert, alas, but as a scapegoat with flowers in its hair. Not only is the counterculture being held responsible for the excesses of Bill Clinton—a non-inhaling Fleetwood Mac fan, of all unlikely hippies—but for everything immoral, violent and sexually explicit in American culture today.

The Republican Party won the elections handily, gaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time in decades; Dowd concludes, " . . . the Republican leader [has] dragged his party from a 1992 slough to a nasty and successful attack mode." Gingrich, then, had effectively hippie-baited the Clinton Administration, tarring the Democratic leadership and pushing the nation to the right.

Obviously, these notions of hippies and Establishment Liberals being one and the same are often strained; like Rich, writer Stephen Mo Hanan pokes fun at images of "those members of the President‘s [Clinton‘s] inner circle who slip into tie-dyed tunics and sneak bong hits when no one is looking . . . all those millionaires in hushed suits who anchor the news when they aren’t busy turning over their communal compost heaps." The Clintons probably wouldn’t be considered hippie by most reasonable people,* but that’s largely beside the point. Probably, since not all anti-Vietnam activists were countercultural, not all of the “hippie protestors” Wallace excoriated were hippie either. And, speaking of "counterculture McGoverniks," what’s so countercultural about long-time South Dakota Democratic senator George McGovern? Am I missing something?

No, the real issue here is the ability to politically cripple someone by accusing them of being hippie, and underlying that issue is the even larger issue: anti-hippie prejudice. After all, if there wasn’t widespread prejudice towards and hatred of hippies, then calling someone "countercultural" wouldn’t be an issue, would it? Race baiting couldn’t work without racism. Thus, the scapegoat status of anyone ultimately jeopardizes everyone since no one is immune from being in some way associated with the pariah--"If you‘re not a nigger, then you‘re at least a nigger lover; if you‘re not one of those hippies, then you’re at least soft on them."

Hippie baiting is a weapon waiting to be wielded by any demagogue craven enough to use it; as we’re going to see in Chapter Four, it’s been used effectively in almost every presidential election of the last forty years--right up through 2004. In fact, it’s already being used in the upcoming 2008 Presidential election against the Democratic Party as a whole and particularly as part of a pre-emptive strike against Senator Hillary Clinton. The hippie baiting of Democrats by Republicans has become a modern American political tradition.** That's important, relevant and, as Austin Powers might put it, "Very post-sixties, baby!"

FN1--We'll examine the flimsy evidence for claims of Clinton counterculturality in some depth in Chapter Four.
FN2--As we’ll see, there are conservative counterculturists, including some prominent Republicans; so in theory at least, the GOP could be hippie baited. To our knowledge, however, this hasn’t happened.