You are confusing societal dropouts, back to the land, live and let live hippies, with left wing activists, yippies, and hard driven college kids who lived for power, activism, and politics, and anything but moving off into the country to live quietly.
No I’m not. I’m simply using the word “hippy” to denote the politically significant New Left, which consisted of the activists of whom you speak, plus the older generation who joined in. Which I feel is appropriate usage. Nonpolitical hippies are beside the point.
And, yes, these hippies were “antiwar,” or at least anti-Vietnam. They were also anti-whatever it is neocons are in favor of, which set the stage for Pubs as the war party since Mcgovern. Not to say the New Left were purely antiwar, nor that Dem presidents since then haven’t started or carried on war. Obama, though too young to have been a hippy, is a perfect example of leftist warmongering. And neocons still pretend like he’s “gutting defense” and letting terrorists run wild, or somesuch nonsense.
The major point to remember is that the ascendancy of the New Left in the Democrat party marked the shift in public consciousness of Republicans as the war party, even if leftist activists of the era weren’t the groovy free spirits they were made out to be. Even if not all Pubs were neocons, either, though enough of them were to influence the foreign policy of future Pub president.
I feel the fact that we also called people who dropped out of society to live on pig farms “hippies” is rather a ln unnecessary point to make, and a mere distraction from my larger argument.