The big difference is that the 60's was a decade of optimism, while now we're in a period of pessimism. It was the high-water mark of modernism, where historians tended to conflate historical progress with economic and social progress, when in reality there's no reason the two can't go in opposite directions.

To quote the late Hunter S. Thompson:

*There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.*

Today our economic futures look comparatively bleak, grand global projects like space exploration and multi-country federations like the EU seem further away, not closer. As society has continued to stratify, the civil unrest we see today comes from darker places than it did in the 60s, the prevailing feelings are those of cynicism, resentment and disenfranchisement.