In challenging the alleged moral strictness of the establishment of the older generation, the young activists were also in direct confrontation with the puritanical values enshrined in much working-class respectability, and to which the parties of the Left always paid lip-service. According to the ethos of traditional socialism, permissiveness was associated with bourgeois libertines. The dominant and dubious assumption of social-democratic and communist leaders was that their working-class supporters - had they been asked - would have expressed a strong contempt for sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.