Lisa McGirr

In Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Lisa McGirr argues, California “conservative activists and the movement they forged are essential to understanding the rightward shift in American politics since the 1960s. Far outside the boundaries of respectable politics in the early 1960s, the Right expanded its influence on the national scene in the late 1960s and 1970s and vaulted to national power with the Reagan landslide of 1980” (pg. 5). She suggests “that it is only within the context of the Cold War; postwar demographic transformation; the dynamics of economic, cultural, and political change; and their cumulative impact on the values and beliefs of ordinary people that we can uncover the process by which the modern American Right was made” (pg. 12). McGirr continues, “Focusing on western conservatism, then, tells a somewhat different story that cannot be subsumed under the North-South civil rights dichotomy that has so much dominated our narratives of the 1960s” (pg. 15).
McGirr writes, “Orange County had a higher proportion of homeowners than the nation as a whole – and this high rate of home ownership contributed to a germinating conservative political culture. The weekends spent remodeling, landscaping, and improving property, along with concerns over property taxation, all reinforced a conservative ethos” (pg. 43). She continues, “The middle-class men and women who populated Orange County found meaning in a set of politics that affirmed the grounding of their lives in individual success and yet critiqued the social consequences of the market by calling for a return to ‘traditional’ values, local control, strict morality, and strong authority” (pg. 53). According to McGirr, “The right-wing revival was not an irrational, momentary outburst of psychologically maladjusted men and women, as liberals hoped and believed…the resurgence of grassroots mobilization on the Right was a result not of strength but of a lack of political power and influence within national politics, and even conservatives’ chosen party” (pg. 66). These grassroots campaigns were anti-communist and pro-free enterprise. They were composed mostly of the middle class and those who aspired to it while trying to preserve their white, Christian, middle class status. The John Birch Society was one example.
Discussing Barry Goldwater, McGirr describes how some middle class, white, anti-communist Christians picked him as their mantle-bearer as his unlikely defeat of Rockefeller proved the possibilities of grassroots politics. Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater, however, which led to anger toward liberals. McGirr writes, “The cultural criticisms of Orange County’s conservatives responded to the discontents created by the dynamics of capitalism. Orange Countians lamented the decline of family authority, the emphasis on change and innovation, the undermining of community, and the decline of the importance of locality – all of which resulted from the growth of large-scale institutions and the concentration of economic and political power that are part of the functioning of a free-market economy” (pg. 163). This fostered a worldview that was very middle class, white, Christian, and patriotic. The conservatives opposed big government, viewing it as the liberal replacement for god. Further, they were anti-Civil Rights as a result of the opposition to big government. All of these views relied on an “other” to demonize, either communists, liberals, atheists, or someone else.
Discussing Reagan, McGirr writes, “From the start, Reagan set a different tone for his campaign than Goldwater had, working to build a new model of conservative respectability that would enable him and other conservatives after him to become viable electoral contenders” (pg. 196). Reagan was less extreme than Goldwater due to his decreased militancy, but was equally distrusting of government. Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial win and Nixon’s 1970 presidential win were in no small part thanks to Orange County and its history of political activism, with a conservative surge stemming from the uncertainty of the 1960s. This led to a final move away from more extremism, conspiracy theories, and groups like the John Birch Society and toward single issues that were more successful in motivating people, including liberals, to support conservative causes. These included free speech, abortion, sex education, and others.… (altro)