Although historians disagree over the influence of the counterculture on American politics and society, most describe the counterculture in similar terms. Virtually all authors—for example, on the right, Robert Bork in Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Regan Books,1996) and, on the left, Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987)—characterize the counterculture as self-indulgent, childish, irrational, narcissistic, and even dangerous. Even so, many liberal and leftist historians find constructive elements in it, while those on the right tend not to.

In their book America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin note several enduring social changes resulting from the movements of the 1960s. While acknowledging the gains of the political right since the 1960s, the authors point out that "conservatives had little success in reversing larger social trends that the New Left and the youth culture had helped set in motion." This is particularly true with respect to race, gender, and the environment. Isserman and Kazin argue that feminism has fundamentally changed gender relations, that the civil-rights movement has diminished racism and helped foster a multiracial popular culture, and that most Americans support environmental protection.

Drawing on Daniel Bell's "cultural contradictions of capitalism," David Farber in The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994) roots his analysis of the 1960s in the struggle between two contradictory sets of values: the work ethic and the ethic of consumption. The former required discipline, delayed gratification, good character, hard work, and acceptance of a hierarchical workplace organization, while the latter promoted license, immediate gratification, and "an egalitarian, hedonistic pursuit of self-expression." Aspects of cultural radicalism could be found on all sides of this contradiction. In insisting on their own music, clothing, and food, radical youth were simply inventing new forms of consumerism, not overthrowing economic and political institutions. Environmentalists, by contrast, sought to deliver the nation from what they saw as a destructive cycle of production and consumption.

In their books about the 1960s, historians Terry H. Anderson and M. J. Heale are generally positive about the cultural impact of the period. Anderson in The Sixties (New York: Longman, 1999) cites surveys from the 1970s and 1980s suggesting that the ethical systems of approximately 30 million people were altered by the combined impact of the reform and protest movements of the 1960s. These people are "more flexible, introspective, and tolerant, especially concerning race, living arrangements, and personal behavior." Heale in Sixties in America: History, Politics and Protest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001) offers a British perspective, noting that the 1960s "bequeathed a richer and more varied cultural life and more tolerant moral attitudes, although these countercultural traits were to coexist uneasily with a shriller assertion of identity politics."