This has been particularly effective in the UK and I’m seeing this attitude rise in the US.

It's not rising in the US. It started here in the 60s. Anti-Communists used the Hippies as scapegoats in order to get the working class to stop supporting labor leaders and the New Deal coalition and start voting for radically right wing conservatives like Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan.

John Dolan, the War Nerd, wrote an excellent article in the Exile that touches on this.

http://exiledonline.com/reagan’s-cheshire-snarl/

Brian, IQ or no IQ, was not going to UC Berkeley or anyplace else. None of those kids were going to Berkeley. None of their parents wanted them to. Some of those parents were sick monsters like Brian’s dad, or my friend Calvin’s dad, who once interrupted Calvin’s sleepover birthday party to chase Calvin around the yard with the inevitable belt. Most of the others were just standard human issue: mean, dumb, resentful. They didn’t want the fanciful pre-Raphaelite hippie enclave of Berkeley to exist. That it should not merely exist but talk back to their appointed masters, the real-estate developers and car dealers who were the anointed of California, provoked these people to insane rage.

Dolan's friends who "were never going to Berkeley" grew up to be the Chuds we know and love today.