Hippies mainly consisted of spoiled middle-class boomers who constructed a false angst on materialism and denouncing the very life that their parents and grandparents sacrificed to give them after 2 world wars and a long depression.
We handed them the means to turn the federal government into the ham-fisted nanny it is today with the New Deal. That steaming pile of socialist sophistry should have been stomped on. We can piss and moan about how "the hippies" are to blame for it all, but I think we need to face the fact that the "Greatest Generation" had no small role in turning us down the path to socialism.