I'm thinking in particular of Adam Curtis' argument in the third episode of Century of the Self, "There Is A Policeman Inside Our Heads - He Must Be Destroyed", that the counterculture of the Vietnam War period, with its emphasis on being an authentic Self and its hostility to established institutions, made possible the rise of anti-scientific neoliberalism in the late 1970s.
I've hashed this out with Naso before, who holds to the more traditional view that Reaganism/Thatcherism was partly a reaction against the counterculture. But I view it dialectically: conservatism before the late 1960s - like liberalism - had pretentions to being an objective, administrative public philosophy. Reaganism differs from Eisenhower's Man In The Grey Flannel Suit-style Modern Republicanism in being more concerned with the individual than with the public weal.
What do you think? A plausible genealogy?
I think that it works to a certain extent. After the sixties, you can see increasing trends away from 'collectivist' political thinking and towards a more 'individualist' style, on both the left and right. On the left you had the decline of the power of trade unions and the influence of more 'socially liberal' thinking in areas such as gay rights, women's rights; generally placing an emphasis on the rights of the individual and liberating him or her from oppressive social institutions and mores. On the right, you simultaneously (if you look at the United Kingdom as an example), devotion by politicians to ideas such as empire, social traditionalism, paternalism also go out of fashion, and are gradually replaced by a more 'libertarian' outlook, emphasising the power of the individual against the state and supporting the reduction of government regulation of and intervention in the economy. Many of the people who were in the vanguard of such movements (especially on the left) belonged top the 'baby boomer' generation, who caught the full-blast of the sixties 'counterculture' (though one should not overrate its impact, since it was actually a movement limited to a rather small number of people).
However, I don't think that one should dismiss the continuity of the left and right from before to after the sixties. I mean, the political right has been using individualist rhetoric since the war in the UK (and probably longer in America). After all, many of the figures who were absolutely key to the neoliberal victory in the 1980's had been around on the political scene for a long time, and often came to hold the political views that they put into practice even before the 1960's (for example, Reagan formulated his own political ideas in the 1940's and 1950's). Meanwhile, the left has been talking about the liberation of individuals from what they see as oppression for God knows how long. So I wouldn't see the rise of individualist rhetoric as being something descended from the 'counterculture', but as something whose prominence rose due to the changes in society that occurred during the 1960's and (probably more importantly) the 1970's.
