You might want to check out Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” for a most excellent trip down memory lane. Those “Merry Pranksters” were a wild and crazy bunch.
Ken Kesey strikes me more as a libertarian than the far left radical politics of the others of his day (and Kerouac didn’t even stand with them to oppose the war in Vietnam).
Ken Kesey’s second novel was about a man who crosses a union picket line.
He seemed more about going off into the woods of Oregon to raise his family, cut trees, and do his own thing.