I'm not sure if they actually meant former hippies or just people from the same generation who are getting the anti-establishment excitement out of their systems now after having been out of it at the time. They may just as easily have been right-wing during the Summer of Love and not just this past Summer of Hate.
I don't know about the demographic. On TV, when I see actual Tea Party people (who identify themselves as such), they're pretty much always white and usually men . . . and usually fairly crazy. But there are a lot of people under 25 in there.
Makes me think: The Daily Show romped on Glenn 'Was That Ironic?' Beck the other night for railing against socialism and communism and public property and taxes and government . . . and then explaining that nobody TOLD him these universal truths; he learned it by himself, in a library, where the books are free.
And that is staggeringly stupid and hypocritical. But what The Daily Show missed is that when Beck was using his blackboard to talk about how Evolution and Revolution are the same, he misspelled Evolution as "Evotution".
You are the darwinian weakest link.