Anti-establishment
Based on Wikipedia: Anti-establishment
The Rebels Who Became Knights
In 2003, Mick Jagger knelt before Queen Elizabeth II and rose as Sir Michael Philip Jagger, Knight Bachelor. The frontman of the Rolling Stones—a band that had built its identity on sneering at the British establishment, on being the dangerous alternative to the clean-cut Beatles—had become part of the very institution he once helped define himself against.
This irony cuts to the heart of what anti-establishment movements really are: not fixed positions, but shifting relationships with power. The rebel of one generation becomes the knighted elder statesman of the next. The radical ideas that once shocked polite society become, over decades, the new common sense. Understanding this dynamic helps explain why the term "anti-establishment" has meant such different things at different moments in history.
What Exactly Is the Establishment?
Before we can understand opposition to something, we need to understand what that something is. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington offered a useful definition when describing what a newly elected president must do to actually govern. The establishment, he explained, is a coalition—not a shadowy cabal, but a network of influential people across government, business, media, law, and finance who collectively shape how society operates.
This includes key members of Congress, senior bureaucrats, executives at major banks and corporations, partners at prestigious law firms, foundation leaders, and media figures. A president might win an election by millions of votes, but those votes become almost irrelevant the day after election day. What matters then is the ability to work with—or against—this interconnected web of institutional power.
The establishment isn't necessarily evil or good. It's simply the existing order of things: the people who run institutions, the norms those institutions follow, and the assumptions they operate under. Being anti-establishment means challenging some or all of this—questioning whether the current order serves everyone fairly, or whether it has become self-serving, corrupt, or simply outdated.
The Word Itself
The term "anti-establishment" in its modern political sense first appeared in 1958, coined by the British magazine New Statesman. But the concept is far older than the word.
There's even a tongue-twister version: antiestablishmentarianism. This unwieldy term—sometimes stretched to antidisestablishmentarianism in word-length competitions—refers to the political philosophy of opposing established power structures. You're unlikely to hear it in actual political conversation, but it does capture something important: that being anti-establishment isn't just a mood or an attitude, but can be a coherent worldview with its own logic and principles.
When the Left Owned the Term
For most of the twentieth century, anti-establishment politics came primarily from the left. The pattern was set during the tumultuous year of 1968, when protests erupted across the globe—from Paris to Prague, from Mexico City to Chicago. The protesters were largely socialists, anarchists, and left-wing radicals who saw the existing order as capitalist, imperialist, and fundamentally unjust.
In the United States, the anti-establishment movement had roots in the 1940s and 1950s, though it wouldn't fully flower until the following decade.
Many World War II veterans returned home changed in ways their society didn't want to acknowledge. They had witnessed horrors and inhumanities that made ordinary civilian life feel hollow. The government told them to resume "normal lives," but many struggled with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder—though discussing such psychological wounds was considered unmanly at the time. Some of these restless veterans founded the outlaw motorcycle club Hells Angels. Others helped create the Beat Movement, that loose collection of poets and writers who rejected mainstream American values and were derided as "Beatniks" for being "downbeat" on everything. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the movement's key figures, later wrote an autobiography connecting his Beat sensibility to his wartime service.
A quieter skepticism was spreading through the broader population too. Trust in government took a major blow during the Gary Powers U-2 Incident of 1960. President Dwight Eisenhower had repeatedly assured Americans that the United States was not conducting spy flights over the Soviet Union. Then the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Powers, proving the president had lied. The general mood of dissatisfaction found voice in Peggy Lee's 1969 song "Is That All There Is?"—a weary, laconic meditation on the emptiness of modern life.
But this dissatisfaction remained diffuse until the Baby Boomers came of age. Suddenly there were millions of young people, raised in comparative prosperity, who had the time and education to question what their society was doing. The Beats had called them "little hipsters." Soon the world would know them as hippies.
The 1960s: When Everything Was Questioned
"Anti-establishment" became the buzzword of the 1960s because the decade seemed to question everything at once.
The Vietnam War dragged on with no clear goal and no end in sight. The Cold War demanded constant military spending while schools crumbled and poverty persisted. The Space Race consumed billions that critics argued could have been better spent on Earth. Racial segregation remained entrenched a century after the Civil War. Drug laws imposed harsh sentences for marijuana possession while alcohol remained perfectly legal. The education system seemed designed to produce conformity rather than thinking.
Young people asked these questions. Their parents—dubbed "Middle America"—often heard accusations rather than questions, and saw a generation of spoiled, drugged-out, sex-crazed slackers who didn't appreciate what they had.
The debates could turn angry fast. A young person might ask: "Why do we spend millions on a foreign war and a space program when our schools are falling apart?" The response would come: "We need to keep our military strong and ready to stop the Communists from taking over the world." Bumper-sticker philosophies clashed. "Make love not war" met "America, love it or leave it."
As the decade progressed, anti-establishment identity became encoded in everyday choices. T-shirts and blue jeans replaced collared shirts and slacks—not because jeans were more comfortable, but because parents didn't wear them. Marijuana was favored partly because alcohol was what the older generation drank. Living simply in deliberate poverty was more "honest" than striving for a house in the suburbs. Rock and roll, played loud, drowned out easy listening music. Draft resistance was reframed as passive resistance rather than cowardice. Even dancing changed: free-form movement replaced steps learned in ballrooms.
This wasn't just fashion. The emphasis on freedom opened space for conversations that had been suppressed for generations. Sex, politics, religion—topics forbidden in polite company—became subjects for open discussion.
The Liberation Movements
Out of this ferment came a wave of liberation movements that transformed American society. Second-wave feminism pushed beyond the voting rights won by earlier generations to challenge patriarchy in the workplace, the home, and the culture. Black Power, Red Power (for Native Americans), and the Chicano Movement rejected the patient, respectable approach of earlier civil rights efforts in favor of militant demands for justice now. Gay liberation, sparked by the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, brought sexual orientation out of the shadows.
What distinguished these movements from earlier reform efforts was their rejection of respectability politics—the idea that oppressed groups should prove their worthiness by behaving in ways that dominant society approved of. The new movements didn't ask for acceptance; they demanded rights.
Concrete programs followed: Equal Opportunity Employment requirements, the Head Start Program for early childhood education, enforcement mechanisms for the Civil Rights Act, school busing to achieve integration. Society was changing.
But change produces backlash. The same freedom that allowed radical ideas to spread also allowed conservative reactions to organize. New religious movements emphasized traditional values. Private schools sprang up that were segregated in fact if not in law. Anti-gay and anti-abortion campaigns mobilized. Extremists on all sides got more attention because conflict made for better television.
In many ways, the angry debates of the 1960s created the template for modern American political warfare—including right-wing talk radio and organizations devoted to "traditional family values."
The Term Fades, Then Returns
By the 1970s and 1980s, the term "anti-establishment" seemed to fade from common use. Society had changed enough that the old establishment no longer looked quite the same, and neither did its opposition. Many former radicals had joined mainstream institutions. Others had dropped out entirely. The culture wars continued, but the vocabulary shifted.
The historian Howard Zinn, in his influential book A People's History of the United States, traced how establishment power operated across American history—from William McKinley's 1896 election through the rise of socialism in the early twentieth century, from the general strikes of 1919 through the Cold War, from the 1963 March on Washington through Vietnam and Watergate, through the administrations of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. Zinn showed how even when apparent outsiders won power—even when Black political leaders were elected—the establishment proved remarkably resilient at limiting real change.
The term roared back in 2011. The global financial crisis had discredited the existing order. Anti-austerity protests swept Europe. The hacker collective Anonymous launched online campaigns against powerful institutions. The Occupy Wall Street movement pitched tents in lower Manhattan, targeting what it called "the 1 percent" and fighting for "the 99 percent." The sinister Guy Fawkes mask from the film V for Vendetta—with its frozen smile and pointed beard—became the global symbol of anti-establishment protest.
The Great Inversion
And then something strange happened. The term "anti-establishment" migrated from left to right.
Starting around 2015, populist movements on the right began claiming the anti-establishment mantle. Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate developer and reality television star, released a campaign video titled "Fighting the Establishment." Britain's Brexit campaign, urging withdrawal from the European Union, positioned itself as a revolt against distant elites in Brussels. Nationalist movements across Europe adopted the language of rebellion against the powerful.
This represented a profound shift in meaning. For decades, the establishment had been associated with conservative values: traditional religion, capitalism, military power, social hierarchies. Being anti-establishment meant challenging these things from the left.
But many on the right came to feel that major institutions had been captured by progressive values. Universities taught ideas they found alien. Corporations promoted diversity initiatives. Media outlets seemed to share a liberal consensus. Government bureaucracies implemented regulations they opposed. For these disaffected conservatives, the establishment now meant something like "woke capitalism" or "the liberal elite"—and being anti-establishment meant opposing that.
The journalist Sarah Kendzior argued in QZ that by this point the term "anti-establishment" had "lost all meaning." When a billionaire who had been a fixture of tabloid coverage for decades could present himself as fighting the establishment, perhaps the word had stretched beyond usefulness.
Yet the underlying dynamic remains real. People across the political spectrum feel that major institutions don't represent their interests. The question is which institutions, whose interests, and what should replace the current order.
Around the World
Anti-establishment movements have taken wildly different forms depending on local context.
In Argentina, Javier Milei built a coalition called La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances) around opposition to Peronism—the dominant political tradition founded by Juan and Eva Perón in the 1940s. In Australia, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party and the United Australia Party have challenged the two-party system from positions that mix economic nationalism with cultural conservatism.
In Canada, Maxime Bernier founded the People's Party after breaking with the Conservative Party, arguing that the mainstream right had abandoned its principles. When former prime ministers Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney accused him of dividing the political right, Bernier responded that he was trying to reach the roughly twenty percent of Canadians who had given up on voting entirely—people who felt no existing party represented them.
Italy has seen anti-establishment movements on both left and right. The Five Star Movement, founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, defied traditional categories—advocating direct democracy, environmental protection, and hostility to professional politicians. The League, formerly a northern separatist party, reinvented itself as a nationalist movement. In 2018, these two very different anti-establishment forces won enough votes to form a coalition government, making Giuseppe Conte prime minister.
Meanwhile, the left-wing coalition Power to the People brought together communists, socialists, feminists, pacifists, and environmentalists in explicit opposition to capitalism and neoliberalism. Their manifesto called for "real democracy, through daily practices, self-governance experiments, socialisation of knowing and popular participation." They won over 300,000 votes but elected no representatives—a reminder that anti-establishment energy doesn't always translate into anti-establishment power.
In Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador's 2018 presidential victory was widely described as anti-establishment, representing a rejection of the parties that had dominated Mexican politics for generations. In Paraguay, Paraguayo Cubas and his National Crusade Party won nearly a quarter of the presidential vote in 2023 on an anti-establishment platform.
Iceland's Pirate Party—yes, that's its actual name—has brought anti-establishment politics into parliament, advocating for digital rights, direct democracy, and government transparency. The name itself is a form of anti-establishment theater, reclaiming a label that copyright industries had used as an insult.
The Literary Rebels of Bengal
Anti-establishment movements don't only happen in politics. In 1960s India, a group of writers calling themselves the Hungryalists became Bengal's first counter-culture literary movement. Writers like Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Subimal Basak, Falguny Roy, and Tridib Mitra produced work so provocative that the government filed court cases against them.
Their dissenting voices challenged not just political authority but literary conventions—the comfortable assumptions about what writing should be and do. This tradition continues today in both Bangladesh and West Bengal through what's called the littlemag movement: small, independent magazines that operate outside mainstream publishing and maintain a space for radical ideas.
Britain's Satirical Tradition
The United Kingdom has developed its own distinctive tradition of anti-establishment expression, channeled largely through satire rather than direct political action.
The 1960s satire boom produced institutions that continue to shape British culture: the comedy of Peter Cook, the magazine Private Eye (still publishing), television programs like That Was The Week That Was and Spitting Image. These weren't revolutionary movements—they operated within the system, making money from audiences who enjoyed watching the powerful mocked. But they created a permanent space for irreverence toward authority.
Later figures like the comedian Ben Elton, the novelist John Mortimer (creator of the barrister Rumpole of the Bailey), and the writer Will Self continued this tradition. The 1960s television series The Prisoner, with its surreal exploration of individual freedom versus social control, became a cult classic that continues to influence anti-authoritarian storytelling.
The street artist Banksy represents a contemporary version of this tradition, though his work blurs the line between anti-establishment politics and counter-cultural art. Is he challenging power or just commenting on it? The ambiguity may be the point.
Even the tabloid newspapers, in their relentless coverage of royal scandals, have been described as having an anti-establishment effect—weakening traditional deference to the monarchy, even if their motivation is simply selling papers rather than political transformation.
The Establishment Absorbs Its Critics
Which brings us back to Mick Jagger on his knees before the Queen.
The establishment has a remarkable ability to absorb its critics. Roger Daltrey of The Who—another band that defined 1960s rebellion—became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. The radical ideas of one generation become the mainstream common sense of the next. The protesters grow old, get tired, make their peace with power, or simply find that the world has changed around them.
This doesn't mean anti-establishment movements fail. Many of the changes demanded in the 1960s actually happened: legal racial segregation ended, women entered professions previously closed to them, gay relationships gained legal recognition. The establishment changed because it was forced to change.
But the establishment itself persists, in new forms. There are always networks of powerful people, institutional norms, and conventional assumptions that shape how society operates. And there are always those who see these arrangements as unjust, outdated, or simply wrong.
The phrase people once used was "fighting the man." They talked about "selling out to the establishment" as a form of betrayal. They spoke of "tearing down the establishment" as if it were a building that could be demolished.
But the establishment isn't a building. It's a pattern of social organization—and patterns can be changed, even transformed, but they can't simply be torn down and replaced with nothing. The real question has always been: what comes next? What new arrangements will replace the old ones? And how long before those new arrangements become the establishment that a new generation rebels against?
What It Means Today
In our current moment, according to research from the Pew Research Center, anti-establishment sentiment fuels movements across the ideological spectrum in Western democracies. The Brexit referendum, nationalist movements across Europe, left-wing insurgencies within social democratic parties—all tap into the same reservoir of dissatisfaction with how things are.
The word itself may have become so stretched as to be nearly meaningless. When both socialist movements and nationalist movements, both left-wing protesters and right-wing populists, all claim to be fighting the establishment, the term tells us less about political positions than about a shared sense that something is deeply wrong with how power currently operates.
Perhaps that's enough. The specific policies and ideologies matter enormously—they lead to very different worlds. But the underlying impulse—the belief that current arrangements serve insiders at the expense of everyone else, that major institutions have lost touch with the people they're supposed to serve, that fundamental change is necessary—this impulse keeps recurring across time and across the political spectrum.
The establishment, whatever form it takes, will always generate its opposition. The rebels will sometimes win, sometimes lose, and sometimes end up kneeling before the very power they once defied. The cycle continues.