The hippies were the third broad group of dissenters to mainstream American values, though they were also sometimes called the "underground." Like the New Left and the rights-based dissenters, hippies were deeply critical of the society that their parents accepted. The hippies sympathized with the political positions of their fellow dissenters yet rarely used politics as a means of expressing their rejection mainstream values. Politics, they claimed, was the game played by conventional adults, and they wanted no part of elections, lobbying, protests, and other common ways to bring about social change. In fact, they wanted no part of what they called "establishment" culture at all, believing that permanent legal and civil organizations were too concerned with material goods, too competitive, and too dominated by anxiety and corruption. Hippies wanted a new society basedon peace, love, and pleasure. Members of the hippie counter-culture expressed their dissent through personal expression—they dressed differently, wore their hair differently, listened to different music, talked differently, and used different drugs than their parents. Some hippies formed small groups and lived together in various kinds of small, self-supporting communities called communes.
Before There Were Hippies…
Some members of the previous generation had a lifestyle that anticipated the 1960s' hippie counterculture.
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