A blaming the sixties industry has emerged for academics and journalists alike. Conclusions about the exact legacy of the sixties have fuelled the debate on political correctness in the United States and elsewhere. And, from the perspective of the Right, sixties radicalism is seen to have caused a crisis in higher education, to have undermined the Western literary canon, to have produced a moral relativism and a debased democracy, to have fostered a predatory economic individualism and to have eroded family life in particular and community life in general. On the other hand, the view from the Left that sixties values have been appropriated, domesticated or have disappeared altogether has gained the status of commonsense and is used as the basis for the death of the sixties narrative.

According to Jameson, this ‘shorthand language of co-optation’ is omni-present on the Left and far from adequate as a theoretical framework. This is especially true as it is applied to explain the demise of sixties radicalism. And, in the ‘looking back at the sixties’ literature, a significant portion of the blame is laid firmly at the feet of the counterculture. The story tends to revolve around the figure of simple and gullible hippies easily beguiled by the entrepreneurs in their own midst. It is a perspective which relies on a portrait of an ever-absorbent, artful capitalism capable of assimilating all dissent.