Cutting and pasting a Reddit post which I really liked. Kinda told it to me in a way I knew but hadn't exactly ciphered out precisely.
“Hippies” weren’t really liberal. Closer to, “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Aside from opposition to the war in Viet Nam and the war on drugs, the prevailing ethos wasn’t “fix the system,” it was “ignore the system and render it irrelevant.” We thought that was going to work.
No competitive political party represented anything close to the “hippie” ethos then, and none does now.
I think anyone who has retained that sensibility now is caught between two ugly positions. One is to look at politics as “harm reduction” — neither party is good, but one is clearly more malevolent and poised to hurt more people than the other. The other position is that the faster we burn it down, the sooner we can build something that doesn’t suck. However, I think most of us realize as we get older that “burn it down and build something on the ashes” isn’t a strategy, it’s a fantasy that will just get people killed. There are still folks who like the fantasy better than reality, though."