A sense of alienation and diminishment has spread far beyond the original student protesters, and now includes vast numbers of people whose core values have more to do with things like church and military service than anything associated with Woodstock.

Like their hippie-radical predecessors, these newly-radicalized red state Americans are quick to spot ways that the “powers that be” are arrogantly out of touch with people like them—and they’ve been likewise slow to see how affronts to a sense of personal significance are almost inherent in the scale on which contemporary media-centric life takes place.  Even if they were able to make this connection, they’d face the same difficulties as anyone else in trying to arouse and gird the body politic to do battle with an abstraction.

They’ve had no problem, though, in identifying a more tangible enemy:  the sorts of people who launched the Counterculture in the 1960s, who are now said to be entrenched as a “liberal elite” or “deep state” in academia, the arts, the media, and much of government.  Lefties such as these provide natural targets for red staters, who for years have felt that they and their values were being dismissed and pushed aside by the forces of Counterculture.

As the jihadists have shown us, there is no better target for contemporary rage than people at whose hands we have felt the sting of marginalization or dismissal.

At the same time, red staters have not been shy about adopting 60s leftist techniques for gaining the attention of the media—and through them, the public.  They’ve shown comparable gifts for dramatic gestures of alienated rejection of the status quo, even to the point of characterizing their objective as “revolution” (as Newt Gingrich did in describing the Republican resurgence of the 1990s).  The Counterculture’s tropes have simply proved too well attuned to our age’s feelings of anger at belittlement for anyone to pass up.

Former adherents of the Counterculture may find it odd to see their themes co-opted in the service of this ongoing red state counter-Woodstock.  And to clear-eyed observers of many persuasions, what has been even more remarkable is the speed with which virtually everyone has rushed to proclaim himself outside of and fed up with The Establishment.  Even George W. Bush, the scion of an old, patrician New England family and the son of a President, managed to run—successfully—as an outsider.