Jonathan Chait noticed that the Weekly Standard loves hippies an awful lot; he put together a slideshow of Standard cover illustrations depicting hippies engaged in various acts of malfeasance. "Though the influence of hippies culture has been on the wane for the last, oh, 40 years," he notes, "on the cover of the Standard, they're as ubiquitous as ever."
This is something that has amused me for some time. During the 2008 primaries I wrote a column on the way conservatives kept insisting that Hillary Clinton was some kind of hippie, despite the fact that even back in the actual 1960s, the "Goldwater Girl" was hardly some tie-dye wearing, acid-dropping radical. There are still a few hippies around, but when it comes to our political life, they are about as harmless and ineffectual as any group of citizens you could think of.
But they still exert a powerful grip on the imagination of conservatives. For right-wing baby boomers, I suspect a lot of it is about resentment. Back in the day, the hippies were the cool kids, the ones who got laid and seemed to be having all the fun. Not only that, they were in large part vindicated by history. They won the argument about whether the Vietnam War was a good idea, and over time, their ideas about a whole range of things -- race, gender equality, child-rearing -- have come to dominate our culture, while the ideas conservatives held have been marginalized. If you were a square forty years ago, it's enough to make you still mad.
It's also, of course, a convenient shorthand. If you caricature your opponents as hippies, then they're self-evidently frivolous and stupid, and you don't have to bother addressing the substance of whatever argument they're making. I'm not saying liberals don't mock their opponents -- I myself have found Tea Partiers' penchant for dressing up in Revolutionary garb to be amusing. But that, at least, has something to do with our current political situation, as opposed to something people felt really strongly about four decades ago.
