if the right was entering its "hippie" phase they would be all for legalizing pot....This is so true. Remember radical lefties in the late 60s? This is pretty much today's Party of Trump. The roles have reversed. Brilliant piece from a very conservative writer and website. At least what we USED to consider conservatism.
Kevin Daniel Williamson (born September 18, 1972) is an American conservative political commentator. He is the roving correspondent for National Review.[2]
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As Democrats embrace authority and Republicans push countercultural revolution, we’re reenacting the 1960s with the roles reversed.My hunch is that a great deal of what is presently going on with the Right — and it won’t do to pretend it is just a tiny fringe — is an echo of that 1960s counterculture. Republicans have evolved out of their Apollonian sensibility and adopted a Dionysian one just as Democrats have, by and large, made the opposite journey. Today among progressives, it’s “experts say” and “science says,” but not long ago it was, “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson,” in the words of Bernardine Dohrn, who went on to marry William Ayers and become a professor of law at Northwestern as well as a benefactor of Barack Obama.Democrats’ overall approach to politics right now is to associate their party and its members with high-status authority figures and to denounce Republicans as insufficiently reverent of these figures, and insufficiently deferential to them. The response of many Republicans has been to subject those authority figures and their institutions — and, in some ways, the idea of authority itself — to ridicule and scorn. They desire to be both outraged and outrageous, high on rage themselves and a source of rage and anxiety in others. Like those of the hippies and, later, the punks, this right-wing tendency is largely outward-focused rather than the expression of some intimate individual sensibility: If the hippies and the punks had been driven by some kind of anarchic individualism, they wouldn’t have all looked alike and listened to the same music. The point wasn’t originality or authenticity — it was to freak out the squares, to vex and offend the mainstream of society, the ’60s and ’70s version of “owning the libs.”The leftist radicals of the 1960s were willing to engage in genuinely self-destructive behavior as a sacrifice to the idols they had constructed for themselves. They held science, reason, the government, the business establishment, organized religion, and much else in disdain, along with such notions as compromise, moderation, and cooperation. The contemporary Right also hates the government, the business establishment, much of organized religion, compromise, etc., but instead of LSD and Transcendental Meditation it has hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, absurd mask politics, election trutherism, anti-vaccine activism, 1,001 conspiracy theories, and QAnon.It even has its own version of the Manson murders, the five dead after the January 6 sacking of the Capitol only one unborn child short of the six dead at Roman Polanski’s house — both episodes of violence meant as theater for public consumption. This is self-harm, but it is also communicative. It is ceremonial outrage directed at the foundations of respectability per se, a reaction to what many on the right — and here I include myself — experience as an ever-narrower corridor of thinkable thoughts and sayable sentences. In some cases, those who are on the outside looking in discover that they are better pleased to be on the outside looking out — but others prefer to smash the windows, or to perform obscenities in front of them to shock and disgust those seated comfortably inside.Obviously, this kind of histrionic, ecstatic, Dionysian politics is ultimately incompatible with conservatism properly understood, though it goes easily hand-in-hand with a particular kind of right-wing revolutionism. Hence the contemporary Right’s promises of revolution and of a Dionysian frenzy presaging a return to innocence, from Ron Paul’s “Revolution” to the Tea Party to “Make America Great Again,” which, as far as right-wing slogans go, at least has the good taste to be properly reactionary. Hence also the cultishness of Republican politics circa 2021: the fever-dream hysteria, the idolatry, the mad quackery and pseudoscientific enthusiasms, and — lest we forget — the violence. In 2000, the “Brooks Brothers Riot” was a joke — in 2021, the riot was for real, and some on the right are starting to get a taste for it.Where and how this ends, I do not know. But if there were such a thing as stock in cults, I’d be long on those and short on most of what we understood to be conservatism until the day before yesterday.
Full:
The American Right Hits Its Hippie Phase | National Review
As Democrats embrace authority and Republicans push countercultural revolution, we’re reenacting the 1960s with the roles reversed.www.nationalreview.com
