The 1960s liberation movements planted the roots of later right-wing libertarianism

Evidence

Even in the earliest work on class (and classlessness) we already see Stuart struggling to formulate adequate forms of periodization: “Where does the ‘old’ end, where does the ‘new’—the real, not the superficially new—begin, in this maze of gradual accommodations?” This concern is driven by an attempt to identify the significantly novel aspects of the New Times of the day, while nonetheless recognizing that one or another form of newness is, by definition, a historical constant. … In “The Hippies: An American Moment” (1968) we find him distilling from the alternative lifestyles of that “progressive” culture an important part of the genesis of the individualist consumerist cultures that reemerge in quite different—and politically regressive—forms in the “me-decade” of the 1980s, themes revisited in his later work on the politics of Thatcherism. Thus, to take one emblematic British example, in that later period, Richard Branson transformed himself from his initial status as a cool, schoolboy-hippie entrepreneur into a scion of international capitalism. … Here Stuart’s prescient analysis chimes with that of Tony Judt, who (several decades later) argued that, in the same process through which the New Left rebelled against both the injustices of capitalism and the constraints of collectivism in the 1960s, simultaneously with the liberatory flowering of a variety of identities, individualism—the assertion of every person’s claim to maximize private freedom and “the unrestrained liberty to express autonomous desires”—became the watchword of the hour. As we have seen in recent years, libertarianism can be articulated just as effectively to a Right as to a Left politics. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 57

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s economic-thought thread: how cultural rebellion seeded the individualized consumer capitalism of Thatcherism and Reaganism. — connects to: Sixties egalitarian communes seeded postmodern authoritarian fundamentalisms — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 543; Right-wing survivalists inherited the sixties’ apocalyptic vision and language — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 998; The property-rights movement predates Reagan and grew from suburban land-use fights — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 47 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the counterculture as unwitting midwife of neoliberal individualism, tracing the genealogy from hippies to Richard Branson to libertarian right.