What Is The 1960s Countercultural Movement?

Despite their antithetical behavior and beliefs, 1960s countercultural movements and fundamentalist Christianity can both attribute their success in the 60s to the same generational disconnect brought about by postwar suburbanization and the cultural standards that were expected of suburban life.
Suburbanization was, in its early phases, seen as an island of stability that “highlighted the values that made some Americans more desirable than others” (Cheng, 59), which, in the eyes of most postwar suburbanites, ignoring any racial biases which were undoubtedly present, were “those who conformed to the archetype of middle-class heterosexual nuclear families were seen as more fit for residence in the suburbs than those who deviated from that norm.”
What Nixon sought to show by means of the suburban home was that the American Dream of domestic and political coupled with the social and economic mobility was available to all. (Cheng, 62)
Yet, to the generation raised in this behaviorally homogeneous paradise, it simply wasn’t worth the price; without a proper basis for comparison, the safe, stable life their parents had worked so hard to provide for them consisted solely of the numerous behavioral restrictions that came with it. As this new generation grew older, they began to chafe under suburban expectations of proper behavior, culminating in the rise of counterculture. Based on the work of Joan Didion, who interviewed numerous participants in and associates of the counterculture, the movement seems to have been made up of spoiled, sheltered kids trying in vain to rid themselves of their “Middle-class suburban hangups” (Didion, 89). Remarking on one specific interviewee, named Max, Didion writes “Max sees his life as a triumph over ‘dont’s’” (Didion, 88), and that he “dropped in and out of most of the schools and fashionable clinics in the eastern half of America, his standard technique for dealing with boredom being to leave” (Didion, 88). Yet, Didion doesn’t seem to think that this is just another horde of rebellious youths wandering
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically equipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. (Didion, 123)
In other words, Didion is arguing that some mysterious process that occurred during the given time period, when the process of suburbanization was in full swing, prevented the generations which had been born during that time period, almost universally in the suburbs, from learning how society and those who live within it should function. In the absence of this knowledge, the children of the suburbs had to take desperate measures to satisfy their senses of self and of belonging. However, not all drifting, disgruntled youths went down this path. While many of their elders shared the perception of the counterculture as a group of spoiled, naive kids busy wasting time and ruining their lives, Reverend Chuck Smith saw an opportunity to grow his