Political Memes

That movement was largely a place for young liberals, interested in resistance to Vietnam, to go and be useless and not become socialist. It was a means of keeping them separated from a growing militant resistance to the apartheid in America (Malcom X, Black Pathers, etc).

If you're smoking weed and telling everyone "just give peace a chance" you can stand idle as the violent state attacks black neighborhoods for mass incarceration and condemn "violence on all sides". Which is just allowing the violence of the oppressive state to be justified.

Being against bad things while telling everyone else "not yet" when they try to fight to stop the bad things. That's American liberalism in a nutshell.

Hell, listen to Kings frustration.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice

Or in song form by Phil Ochs: https://youtu.be/3cdqQ2BdgOA

Pointing to historical examples that liberals of the past failed on is hard for modern day liberals though. They know the Jim Crow south was bad. They know the Vietnam war was bad. But they're unable to realize it until after the fact. Israel took them 2 years of genocide to start acknowledging.