I warned you... I feel a little Al Gore coming on...
First of all, the hippie movement was only superficiallya political movement. The clear motive of the movement (at least, clear to all those who have come any closer to the hippie/yippie ideology than watching an actor playing a hippie get stoned on the televised astroturf or listening to what Rush Limbaugh has to say about them), is to increase individual liberties, to the point of near-total (if not complete) dismantling of the government. Basically, Yippies and hippies like to enjoy themselves however they want to, without our puritanical sensibilities getting passed off as legitimate laws and preventing them from being proud, happy human beings with the perfectly natural desires to get high, get laid, and not have to pay to take a **** . Anarchists, if you're that sort of person. The politics of the hippies were ostensibly communist, where everyone shares in everything, including both labor and resources, but it's clear they dissaproved of the sort of authoritarian fascistic government required to start up a proper communist nation by their reaction to our own capitalist authoritarian government.
Ecofreaks, on the other hand, are an increasingly quasifascistic group who believes that humanity as a species is wreaking havoc on nature (everything not humanity), and that their goal in life is to minimize the human footprint on the world as much as possible. On occasion, ecofreaks adopt parts of hippie culture, first of all because the minor hippie philosophy promoting humanity in a natural state, second because both groups opposed similar factions, and finally because even ecofreaks want to enjoy themselves a little (though not too much, that might hurt something or make them look bad). Fascists, not anarchists. Opposide ends of the spectrum, were the spectrum noncyclical.
Anyone ELSE wanna say it? I haven't made anyone look like a complete putz yet, but the next person to fail to at least think will feel the brunt of my logical/rhetorical wrath.

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Purveyor of spurious wisdom.