Thread by @Noahpinion

Our online replay of the 60s/70s is interesting, because in the original version, the "peace and love" hippies, the angry identitarians, and the leftist radicals all happened basically at the same time. But we got our peace-and-love in the 00s and our angry radicals in the 10s.

In 1969 you could be for "revolution", and that could either mean you wanted to change our culture so people weren't uptight assholes anymore, or it could mean you wanted to bomb bathrooms to bring down capitalism. (Only one of these worked.)

In the 2010s, both radical leftism and radical identitarian movements had a very downbeat, grim attitude (which persists to this day). No beads and flowers. Not much music or art or self-expression. No Age of Aquarius. Not much vision of utopia.

Usually this is attributed to the more dire circumstances of the modern day -- the economic pain of the Great Recession and student loans, the looming doom of climate change, and so on.

An alternative hypothesis is that social media just makes everyone negativistic...

But I'm toying with the hypothesis that we did get our beads-and-flowers hippies; they just came in the 00s.

The antiwar movement and the triumph of the gay rights movement being the most obvious manifestation of "peace and love".

But there was also a sort of gentleness to 00s liberalism...a sort of softness and pluralism and warm, accepting attitude. That is now almost entirely gone, and I feel like few even remember it. But it did feel like a beads-and-flowers moment for the online age.

And because the beads-and-flowers movement of the online age came a decade before the radical movements, there's a generation gap between the older and younger Millennials.

I think about this tweet a lot

I also think that this decade separation between hippies and radicals worked against the modern-day hippies.

Our culture really did loosen up and become more accepting in many ways after the 60s, but in the 10s it became harsher and more negativistic than ever.

We needed a new beads-and-flowers movement. We needed an America that was more accepting of diversity, more willing to let people do their own thing, more "live and let live".

Instead we got the opposite -- a country where people just drink hate all day.

We needed -- we still need! -- that beads-and-flowers movement, because it's a thing that gives people hope and helps them imagine a better future. Anger is strong motivation in the short term but it peters out.

There are hopeful, optimistic people on the left, working to build a better America -- the YIMBYs, the socdems, the Green New Dealers -- but they need the sustaining energy of positivity and hope. At the mass level, our current online culture just saps hope.

Don't think that our modern challenges are worse than the 70s. Those people faced plummeting wages, inflation, a disintegrating social contract, environmental devastation, an out-of-control FBI and CIA, and the ever-present looming threat of nuclear war and the end of humanity.

We need another "beads-and-flowers" hippie movement (a term I got from @csilverandgold btw), to sustain our positive energy, create a more tolerant society, and give us an idea of what a better world would look like.

I don't know where we're going to get one, though!

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