I don't know with certainty why the counter-culture revolution of the '60s failed (if it failed and didn't evolve into something else), but it seems to me several factors contributed to the anti-establishment movement's foundering.
I think the war in Southeast Asia and the hours upon hours of media coverage of casualties and fatalities coalesced opposition. As the war wound down and the draft was rescinded, campus protests against the actions in Vietnam dwindled, or at least became less urgent.
Colleges and universities began to embrace alternative narratives and founded departments to share viewpoints -- Black Studies, Feminist Studies, etc. These were seen as wins by those committed to challenging the academy's hoary Western canon.
Though Johnson was gone, Nixon was still around to draw fire from "malcontents," at least for the moment. His unintentional self-immolation would remove another target for radicals to "kick around." Revolutions need a villain or villains, and Ford, though chastised for pardoning Nixon, was not viewed nearly as negatively as his two more immediate predecessors, after all, he was president when we pulled out of Saigon.
Some marked "improvements" in American social structures meant the marches, demonstrations and riots of the '60s were seen by many, perhaps hastily, as no longer unnecessary. Urban renewal campaigns that grew out of Johnson's War on Poverty and Nixon's punctuating installation of Affirmative Actions' Philadelphia Plan in 1969 were making measurable differences in the quality of life of the American public, particularly the urban poor, some said.
At the same time, the shocking assassination of public figures in the mid- to late-60s took the wind out of vocal reactionaries, for a while, and gave the perception that the nation was "progressing" -- passing through the fire, if you will.
And, the national soundtrack of protest was changing, becoming more radio-friendly. Helen Reddy's I Am Woman in 1972 was pivotal, I think, as was Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, the year before. Affirmation took the place of the more strident "burn baby burn" of the protest era, and, perhaps regretably to some, made room for Disco Inferno (1976) and a solid decade of platform shoes and sateen blouses.
I don't know if we're entering or have entered a new era of revolution, but the conditions that fueled the movement 60 years have resurfaced -- fatter and fiercer.
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