Having had the opportunity to view the so-called "counter culture" up close, I can tell you that "hippie" was just a phase that many people passed through on their way to jobs selling insurance and living in the burbs. It wasn't a lifestyle that very many adopted for the long haul. There were casualties from drugs and wrong thinking, but that number (though tragic) is relatively small.
The real problem is this: society as a whole adopted their ideas, even as the original proponenets mostly abandoned them as impractical. Many of the ideas were watered down and bureaucratized, but they are still reconizable.
Why did this happen?
I view the counter culture as the diffusion of bohemian manners and mores through educated young people to society at large.
Yes, it was only a phase for some. I believe that the counterculture cannot be separated from the persavive prosperity and economic security of the postwar "Golden Age". It was an age when upper and upper middle class young people were so comfortable that they believed that scarcity based values like hard work, self-discipline, deferred gratification, etc were as obsolete as knightly chivalry. The counterculture presumed that effortless prosperity was everyone's right, conflict and competition were unnecessary and we could all play frisbee, smoke pot and screw.
Most people were not that comfortable. And the recession of the early 70s smashed counterculture delusions as it poured the main cohort of the baby boom with their soft liberal arts degrees into a glutted job market (before 1970 it wasn't necessary to have a college degree to have a white collar job. degree inflation has made it necessary since.). But the sexual morality (immorality, rather) took, shorn of utopian pretensions. "Winning Through Intimidation" replaced "The Greening of America".
The culture of the mid to late 70's kept the drugs and depravity but discarded the flower power stuff. It's a hard, cold cruel world in which there are winners and losers (notice how that term popped up in "Rocky" and "Saturday Night Fever" ?). Disco culture was elitist, which is why it was so easy to hate it from the outside. There are a handful of the rich and famous and beautiful who glide past the velvet rope while most wait outside in the cold. The clothes were expensive and the dances were difficult and rejection hurts. There are the Tony Manero "winners" whose happy ending is to realize how far above their "loser" friends they are.
Well the two hippies pictured up above never left that phase. Alinsky's poison saturated both. One ruined our nation for 8 years (after ruining Arkansas previously) and the other waits her turn.