Hipsters Are the Vanguard of Fascism
This is only kind of a joke
We’ve all heard California Uber Alles. Or maybe you haven’t. I don’t fucking know you. Anyway, in that song Jello Biafra warns us that voting for a hippie like Jerry Brown will definitely bring about fascism. I’d always read this as some kind of absurdist humor, but I get it now. He was being serious. Sort of.
I’m like 25 so I didn’t grow up around hippies. It took me a while to catch on to why we should be suspicious of them. If anything slogans like “Make Love Not War,” seemed very antifascist. I am ashamed to admit to such ignorance, but life has forced my hand. As we sit on the precipice of American fascism I am confronted by the signs we all should’ve seen in 2013.
Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. You probably don’t get how hippies are like hipsters other than that they both have the “hip” prefix. I will elucidate in time. First we have to focus on how the hippies are like nazis.
The song itself is pretty stupid. There’s a line about choking on organic poison gas, and another about the “suede denim secret police” who have come “for your uncool niece.” Again if you’re young and dumb like me you can be begrudgingly forgiven for thinking that the humor lies in the contrast between the violence and the peace loving image of the hippie. That’s what THE MAN wants you to think man.
So the hippies came up in a time when America still had a functional widespread counterculture instead of a bunch of transgressive shit that gets rebranded and resold as “alt” at Hot Topic. It’s also worth noting that our beloved Hot Topic stuff rarely if ever carries an actual message that threatens the status quo. Instead it inserts us neatly into our place as the angry little rebel people with hurt feelings. At most Hot Topic will support something mildy liberal. The Hippies did this to us. Stay with me.
Because you don’t read— or maybe you do I’m making a lot of assumptions here— you don’t know how the hippie movement died. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about a lot of things. Understatement of the year I know. But one of the things that book touches on is the decline of the peace loving hippie mentality and the counterculture it grew up in. You see kids there was this thing called the Vietnam War, and it actually fucked America up pretty bad. It’s hard to convince a bunch of people to dump napalm on the evil foriegners when they just want to smoke weed and have sex.
Luckly for the US we sent our metaphorical Green Berets to seek out and gut the counterculture with one swift swipe of a Ka-Bar. So the counterculture at the time was challenging fundemental aspects of American culture, encouraging rebellion in women, nontraditional relationship structures, drug use, and fermenting resentment toward capitalism. Also these people called the Weather Underground started blowing shit up because the government was being imperialist. These hippies and wackos were called the New Left and they’re a big deal but what we care about here is that they ultimately lost. The hippies were cut loose into a violent world that made war not love, and they drifted in confused agony. That’s where Hunter S. Thompson’s book came from.
A bunch of people at Kent State got shot. Protests were squashed. Critique of the war machine was deflected with personal attacks based on a smattering of random social issues and suddenly being countercultre wasn’t very fun anymore. Those hippies gave up on hippiedom, and with the rise of Richard Nixon they got real jobs and started voting like adults. Before long the hippies helped vote in Reagan and the ground work for mass incarceration was laid. When the AIDS crisis came, instead of reflecting on the values of free love and doing whatever you want, many former hippies just let the gays die.
This proves that the hippies could turn to the darkside. And this isn’t so say that all of them did. The New Left didn’t just magically evaporate, and the Black Panthers were fucking awesome right until the end. But the New Left did wane in power and the hippies lay dormant for many years trying to drown out the pains of adulthood with consumerism.
Have you seen those articles about how people who get into crystals and new age shit also get into Trump stuff? What about the stoners? Have you ever seen anything like this????
Or this???? https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4990649-rogan-hippies-artists-musicians-trump-endorsement/
My friends. The hippies have fallen. They glare at us from the depths of perdition blaming the young and idealistic, the ones who still care, the woke, for their fate. They see in us naught but dreams that were dashed in their youth. They repeat the mantra that we all get more conservative with age to soothe themselves to sleep at night. They tell themselves Trump is the rebellion because they can’t face the pain of losing and that time they brought Jerry from the commune home for Thanksgiving and their dad called him the F-slur and then Jerry killed himself later. That’s why they started the LSD and the sex movement— because life is hard. They can’t look themselves in the face now. They are the thing they hated.
Now before you say “not all hippies” please know that I do not care; this essay is building to a point about hipsters.
It’s 2013. Tumblr hasn’t sold out yet. I am not cool enough to be on Tumblr. While I’m sitting in my room wondering why goth girls have cuter clothes than me, some older millennials are cooking something up. Their getting weird mustache tattoos and dressing with suspenders and tweed. They’re way too into coffee. They’re quirky. They’re rejecting the aesthetic sensibilites of thier parents, but they’re also cool open minded people.
Or are they? They hate your music. They hate everything mainstream. They yearn for a mythic yesteryear when everything was better and cooler, when there was rock music and people hung out in person at the mall, and the 90s guys they really want it to be the 90s. Also they ditch tweed shit for flannel pretty quickly. Now how is our friendly hipster like the hippie? How do they turn to the dark side and become a fascist.
Well dear friend, let’s talk about democratic materialism. Except let’s not. So you know how when people are confronted with basically any disagreement they start trying to find a compromise? Like they just assume both sides are wrong on some level. That’s democratic materialism for our purposes.
Let’s pretend we live in a culture obsessed with democratic materialism. We don’t have to because we do. Let’s pretend a certain highly contrarian subset of the population is way too opinionated on music and hates politics. Let’s pretend they think they’re the chill reasonable guy anybody can talk to. They get into what they like to call “discoruse” (fuck that word by the way. Epictetus is dead and he’s never coming back. There is no Enchiridion 2). Let’s pretend they democratically materialize everything they touch. In such a world Elon Musk might get popular, and start saying stupid shit about doge. We might need to have conversations about women in the work place. I dear reader might not even be a real woman. I could be a mentally ill man. I mean he’ll respect me of course but I have to understand that on some level this is just biology and that as long as no one’s beating me up I should just deal. Maybe she’s a she. She might hate social media but post her “countercultural opinions” on reddit, or substack, or fucking twitter I don’t care. She might think SSRI’s cause asexuality and post about that with some aesthetic photos. MAYBE. I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT (FREYA INDIA) ANYONE IN PARTICULAR.
Maybe you think I’m panicking. Maybe you think I’m crazy.
Huh look at that:
https://www.gq.com/story/election-night-in-dimes-square
God damn it:
Look at this shit. They nicknamed it SS Style. Jo Nesbo calls it a nazi fringe in one of his crime novels (Midnight Sun). I didn’t even know it was a nazi thing when I read that book. BUT I KNEW IT WAS THE FUCKING HIPSTER HAIRCUT.
Now that I’ve singlehandedly killed the American Left (again) with this stupid post we can rebrand as the New New Left and this time something will actually happen. Shout out to all the freaks who might try to kill me over the next few years. Here’s a song for you. And for all of you saying it couldn’t happen here.
