I think I would have made a pretty good beatnik. I feel beat – as in tired – most of the time. But there was more to this 1950s subculture than feeling worn out from staying up too late. Beatniks were big into jazz, a musical style I love.

The beatniks were the counter culture of their times, and cast a jaundiced eye on the social and artistic norms of the day. They were “hip” while the rest of society was “square.” Beatniks gathered in coffee houses to play bongo drums and recite poetry while everyone else was watching Donna Reed and Leave It To Beaver.

Though they denied culpability, the beatniks were widely credited with inspiring the hippies of the 1960s. The name “hippies” is based on the word “hip” and like the beatniks, the hippies rejected the mainstream values of society’s “squares.”

Mainstream society, on the other hand, saw beatniks — and especially hippies — as undisciplined radicals who were threatening everything from the Protestant work ethic to sexual conventions.   In many ways, though, the divide was between conformists and non-conformists, and when the Vietnam War began taking the lives of more and more young Americans, the buds of non-conformity burst into full blossom.

Indeed, it was the “flower children” – the hippies — who proclaimed that Americans should “make love, not war.” And while their influence on ending the Vietnam War has been greatly exaggerated, they did succeed in fundamentally altering the fabric of American society (though not to the degree they hoped).

While most hippies evolved into yuppies, embracing capitalism with the same passion with which they had once opposed it, the societal rifts the hippies created echo to this day. In fact, historian Rick Perlstein attributes today’s seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the Left and the Right to President Richard Nixon’s exploitation of the societal unrest that characterized the 60s.

Nixon proclaimed himself the champion of the “Silent Majority,” positioning himself as the protector of middle class values against the onslaught of rebellious youth. Nixon’s amorality, which came fully to light with the Watergate scandal, allowed him to pit one group against another without any qualms, and the cracks dividing us widened as a result.

Perlstein explores that era through a series of three books, Before The Storm, Nixonland, and most recently, The Invisible Bridge. On one side of society stood those who considered it their patriotic duty to, in Perlstein’s words, “question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders.” On the other side were those who believed in “America the innocent.” And where Nixon left off in engaging this second group, Ronald Reagan took over. Reagan’s message of American exceptionalism appealed to voters “beat” by years of disruption and malaise. His election, though, began this nation’s decades-long slide towards Tea Party radicalism.

Reagan is remembered as “the Great Communicator” for a reason. He offered an optimistic national narrative that Americans could rally around. Unfortunately, Reagan’s folksy vignettes obscured his anti-union, anti-tax and anti-regulation agenda. Most Americans, Perlstein maintains, didn’t understand that voting for him was voting against blue collar workers in favor of corporations and the very rich.

It’s ironic that both the beatniks and the hippies, who rebelled against conservative morality and materialism, laid the ground work for our current Gilded Age. But in forcing America’s political pendulum too far to the Left, they unwittingly insured it would one day swing just as far to the Right.