In the years that have elapsed since the 1960s, the negative effects of hyper-scale in the contemporary world have only become more intense and afflicted more people.

Increasing numbers of local and small businesses have been driven out of existence by economic mega-entities, leaving more and more people toiling in vast corporate anthills whose ways of operating can make their employees feel like they’re trapped in a giant Dilbert cartoon.  Meanwhile, as they have chased career opportunities from one region of the country to another, people have further deprived themselves of roots and connections.

All the while, the bigger their wide screen TVs have gotten, the smaller people have come to feel in relation to a “media world” that is presumed to be the ultimate determiner of significance in our time.  

The grip of celebritocracy on our psychosocial order is becoming ever more pervasive, with celebrities increasingly occupying a place analogous to that of the nobility in medieval times as the only people perceived to count for much of anything.  It doesn't much matter to us how they have achieved their name recognition--it could have been through the cheesiest of reality TV shows, where they may have been chosen specifically for their ordinariness or crudeness.   Once they are anointed as celebrities, the world hangs on their every word.  Meanwhile, we are all becoming less and less interested in what genuinely knowledgeable non-celebrity experts have to tell us about our world, and ordinary folks are finding themselves on the verge of becoming outright invisible.

At this point in our social history, the specific types of tribal behaviors and symbols that vented a sense of diminished alienation in the 1960s tend not to be as broadly engaging as they once were.  As many former radicals’ main concerns have shifted to raising and providing for families, the Counterculture’s anti-materialist mindset has come to seem onerous and no longer appropriate.   But at the same time, 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.

To date, newly radicalized “red state” Americans have not proven any more proficient than their hippie-radical predecessors at discerning a connection between a generalized sense that the "powers that be" are arrogantly out of touch with people like them,  and the affronts to a sense of personal significance that are  almost inherent in the scale on which contemporary media-centric life occurs.    Even if they were able to make this connection, they would face the same difficulties as anyone else in trying to arouse and gird the body politic to do battle with an abstraction.

They have had no problem, however, in identifying a more tangible enemy:  the same sorts of people who launched the Counterculture in the 1960s, who are now said to be entrenched as a “liberal elite” 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 media and public attention.  They have shown comparable gifts for dramatic gestures of alienated disenfranchisement, 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 feeling 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.