Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.

Rating:
Summary: From Red-Baiting to Reganomics
Review: A marvelous cultural history of conservative political and religious activism in Orange County, CA circa 1960 to 1980, Suburban Warriors evocatively renders the rise of New Right and the SunBelt, and argues persuasively that Orange County, CA was at the epicenter of the conservative revolution of the late 20th Century. Combining interviews with activists with larger demographic analsyses of the immigrants who came to populate the area during the post-WWII economic boom, along with an economic history of the growth of the area, McGirr deftly points a portrait of a time and a place and a people who were uniquely ready to create a new post-modern, politically conservative future. But it is her description of how it was done that makes for the most compelling reading.

McGirr is particularly good at pointing out certain ironies that undercut the Conservative agenda. For instance, she notes that Orange Country was and is anti-tax (anti-egalitarian, anti-collectivist, anti-communist, anti-Federal government interference, anti-fair housing), but that the boom it enjoyed in the 60s was fueled primarily by federal defense spending. The Rugged Individualist, Boot-Stapping Entreprenuerial Businessman was in many ways beholden for his economic success on government expenditures. More recently, Orange County, following it's own free-market, low/anti-tax philosophy went backrupt due to investments in esoteric stock market products, investments the County felt forced to make because of budget shortfalls.

She also notes that the conservative philosophy spawned during that era partook of two incompatible philosophies: social conservatism (the moralizing, anti-sex education in schools, anti-abortion beliefs) and libertarianism (the Ayn Rand inspired Objectivist movement was particularly strong in Orange County). She notes that these philosophies share many of the same values, but that they have different endpoints. She also notes that while social conservatives battled government or "secular humanists" interference in their lives, they also attempted to get the McGuffey's Reader into their local classroom (textbooks from the 1920s which had lessons about God and morality). In addition, she notes that the conservative position on property rights -- the property owners' rights are absolute (which justifies race discrimination in the renting or selling of property)-- fails to recognize the "natural rights" assigned to citizens by the US Constitution: equality under the law.

These examples may make it sound as if McGirr is a liberal. I apologize if that is the case. She may well be, but if she is, it is difficult to discern it. Indeed, McGirr does us all a great favor by demonstrating it is possible to write about the often deep divisions in US politics fairly, with respect and insight. Balanced, deftly told, deeply researched, SUBURBAN WARRIORS may cause liberals to reexamine some of their deeply-held prejudices against this movement, it goals and its philosophy. The Left is just as guilty of demonizing its enemies as the Right. McGirr does such a splendid job of maintaining distance and objectivity that even a "liberal" can better understand the beginnings of a movement that was often dismmissed in its early days as nostalgic at best, and at worst, pathological.

(A confession: I grew up in a liberal suburb adjacent to Orange County and so part of my enthusiasm for this book is related to my nostalgia for that time. We were liberal Easterners from New York, who came to California to eventually take advantage of the post-war boom and eventually, the terrific, free, state-sponsored college education system -- which came to an end under Reagan before we could do so. I don't blame Reagan, by the way, we had moved to New York State by then where the old liberal promises were still, at least to a degree, in place.

Rating:
Summary: Rhetorical, but ok
Review: I had to read this book for a history class. It provides enough incite on the origin of conservatism in Orange County, but to me, she overemphasizes her status as a historian. Instead of telling one point just once, she repeats it again in another segment, which, as a reader, I already knew because she said it before. She is non-biased in her approach of the conservative uprooting, yet she does seem to make them out to look like the enemy rather than a large group of people that were encouraging enrollment for causes they believed in. I recommend it to anyone who likes to read the word "Knott" over and over again.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: McGirr's book traces the rise of what I would call the (white, middle-class) suburban right and the Christian right, beginning in the early 60s. The new right coalesced around anti-Communism, laissez faire capitalism, states' rights and local government, the "traditional" family, Christian values, individual economic responsibility, and low taxes.

It was the suburban Christian right that first brought these views together. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President in 1964 against Johnson, was an early exemplar of new right views. However, his strong opposition to the Civil Rights acts won him the lower South and, along with his virulent anti-Communism, helped him lose the rest of the country.

The suburban Christian right shed the virulent and conspiratorial anti-Communism that they initially directed at domestic enemies; south-eastern politics moved away from the New Deal order and shed legal segregation and overt biological racism; they all joined their Christian and conservative forces and formed a conservative coalition behind Ronald Reagan.

McGirr's is a "bottom up" analysis that begins with the grass roots social base of the suburban Christian right, using Orange County as a prototypical case study. She also examines the interplay of grass roots leaders, rank and file members, regional business elites, and national intellectual and political leaders.

The book doesn't delve into how the suburban right teamed up with south-eastern conservatives, but their shared Christianity, shared social conservatism, and shared opposition to civil rights, busing, and affirmative action makes it fairly easy to guess what that part of the story in general looks like. However, McGirr's would be a better book if she examined some of these connections, at least briefly. This is what makes the book good but not great.

Post-script: Today, the Cold War is over, terrorism has replaced communism as America's global enemy, and George W. Bush has combined the Christian right with the post-Cold War, neo-conservative, neo-imperialist right. Bush has tried to combine anti-terrorism, neo-imperialism, and Christian conservativism without provoking Christian-Islamic antagonisms--antagonisms already strained by Christian conseravtive and neo-conservative support for Israel. These topics would make an interesting post-script to McGirr's book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent History Lesson -- Wake-Up Call for America/World
Review: The author gives accurate accounts of historical events, which, as the title reveals, did lead to an explosion of ultra-concervatism in America. The similarities to an uprising of the "majority" in depression era Europe are transparent. Rationalization of racial discrimination and segregation, along with many other subtle (yet presnt) injustices are a trade mark of "Christian Concervatism", which clearly (if denyingly) embraces white supremacy.

McGirr is particularly good at pointing out certain ironies that undercut the Conservative agenda. For instance, she notes that Orange Country was and is anti-tax (anti-egalitarian, anti-collectivist, anti-communist, anti-Federal government interference, anti-fair housing), but that the boom it enjoyed in the 60s was fueled primarily by federal defense spending. The Rugged Individualist, Boot-Stapping Entreprenuerial Businessman was in many ways beholden for his economic success on government expenditures. More recently, Orange County, following it's own free-market, low/anti-tax philosophy went backrupt due to investments in esoteric stock market products, investments the County felt forced to make because of budget shortfalls.

This book, like all other literature exposing the flaws of extremisms (especially extreme concervatism), either through satire (Al Franken), comedy (Mel Brooks) or factual, award winning literary works (Michael Moore), will add to the balance of available information. History often repeats itself, and thus is frequently forwarned or foretold by visionary writers who can decipher the writings on the wall. Lisa McGriff is one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: The author gives accurate accounts of historical events, which, as the title reveals, did lead to an explosion of ultra-concervatism in America. The similarities to an uprising of the "majority" in depression era Europe are transparent. Rationalization of racial discrimination and segregation, along with many other subtle (yet presnt) injustices are a trade mark of "Christian Concervatism", which clearly (if denyingly) embraces white supremacy.

McGirr is particularly good at pointing out certain ironies that undercut the Conservative agenda. For instance, she notes that Orange Country was and is anti-tax (anti-egalitarian, anti-collectivist, anti-communist, anti-Federal government interference, anti-fair housing), but that the boom it enjoyed in the 60s was fueled primarily by federal defense spending. The Rugged Individualist, Boot-Stapping Entreprenuerial Businessman was in many ways beholden for his economic success on government expenditures. More recently, Orange County, following it's own free-market, low/anti-tax philosophy went backrupt due to investments in esoteric stock market products, investments the County felt forced to make because of budget shortfalls.

This book, like all other literature exposing the flaws of extremisms (especially extreme concervatism), either through satire (Al Franken), comedy (Mel Brooks) or factual, award winning literary works (Michael Moore), will add to the balance of available information. History often repeats itself, and thus is frequently forwarned or foretold by visionary writers who can decipher the writings on the wall. Lisa McGriff is one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The best part of McGirr's book about Orange County conservatism and the rise of the New American right is the first chapter on the setting. She discusses how Orange Country boomed under the post-war military buildup. One of the wealthiest counties in the country, thoroughly dependent on federal largesse, anti-communist ideology conveniently covered up that embarrassing fact in endless cant about individualism and the corrupting effects of the welfare state. In particular this homogenous county was peculiarly dispersed in its geography, encouraging an atomization and emphasis on consumerism that limiteed the development of a real community feeling. Into this vacuum the paranoia of the John Birch Society and a revived Fundamentalism rushed in. Instead of the rural communities of the South, or the anglophobic minorities of the Midwest, the banner of the radical right would be held by unequivocally modern upper middle class technicians and entrepreneurs of the warfare state. One could go, as McGirr does not, about how this wealthy stratum got government subsidized highways and tax deductions for their mortgages, while their racial exclusivity was backed up by Federal and State Housing authorities. Meanwhile a new Southern elite was subsidized by the state as it shucked off its black tenants. After getting so much power and wealth from the New Deal State, the radical right indignantly denounced it the minute the government tried to make a few measures to help the poor its plight it had helped to worsen.

The flaw in McGirr's book is that it does not really emphasize the essential selfishness of this posture. There is the occasional ironical mention of the role of the state and how evangelicalism never really faced the innate radicalism of the free market. But otherwise this is a book heavily dependant on the centrist consensus which, being naturally opportunist and prone to move to the winning side, tends to view Reagan's success as a victory against the "elitism" and "radicalism" of the Democrats. The flaws in this account are numerous. When Alan Brinkley, in a contribution to a fetschrift on the sixties repeats Kevin Phillips' assertion that the Nixon-Reagan victory was a triumph of the "middle class revolt," one must ask in what way were the Democrats and Liberal Republicans tribunes of the undeserving poor? Allan Matusow's The Unravelling of America makes it quite clear that the main beneficiary of LBJ's Great Society was the middle class. Peter Novick points out that more than two-thirds of New Yorkers though that civil rights were going "too fast" in 1964, before the Voting Rights Act.

McGirr's account is not helped by her narrow focus. She concentrates on those Birchites and Goldwater activists she was able to interview 30 years after the event. Now if I was being interviewed after the fall of Communism, I probably wouldn't volunteer my belief that Eisenhower was a Soviet agent, or that I opposed open housing because I don't like black people. There is not enough critical analysis of these interviews. At one point McGirr says Orange County residents rejected George Wallace because he was pro-union, which is fantastic. When McGirr writes about conflicts over abortion, or divorce or pre-marital pregnancy, I would have liked some discussion of how these things actually happened in Orange Country, rather than reading pious Conservative rhetoric about them. At one point McGirr quotes that Fundamentalist and Evangelical Protestantism boomed in the seventies and eighties because many people found secular values uninspiring. But does this not assume a Protestant valuation of the situation? A non-Protestant, after all, may find Fundamentalism uninspiring and turn to secular values. Clearly something more is involved than the relative merits of the two ideologies. A contrast with Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis reveal McGirr's weaknesses in every respect. Sugrue is far more critical, far more detailed and far more sophisticated. He starts his narrative in the late forties becuase he is aware that industrial decline and racial segregation started there. By contrast McGirr starts in the late fifties, and although there are brief mentions of the campaign against open housing, the homogeneity, the anti-union atmosphere, and the class structure are taken more or less for granted. Ultimately, this is a disappointing book.

Rating:
Summary: Absorbing,Thorough Analysis Of Neoconservative Ascent !
Review: This book represents both a fascinating study of the evolution of `60s politics as well as a historical attempt to document and explain the perplexing fact that a country flirting with the danger of a social and political revolution from the left suddenly veered so much farther to the right toward a broad-based popular conservatism. Herein Lisa McGirr, a gifted author and Harvard professor comes closer to making her prose swing than one would expect of a book of this type. Meanwhile, she also spins a convincing argument regarding the origins of the American neo-conservative revival in the late `60s and early `70s. At the time, domestic conservatism had been badly eclipsed by the burgeoning youth culture and their radical leftist notions. To her credit, the account rendered here is not only academically spirited, but is written in a way that makes this serious work of scholarship accessible to the general public.

She focuses meaningfully on the activities within a specific congressional district, in Orange County California, where, she argues quite persuasively, the seeds of the neo-conservative revival were most fruitfully planted and sown. Within this district, literally thousands of affluent and educated suburban "warriors" combined to launch a powerful movement destined less than a decade later to propel Ronald Reagan into the White House. In the process they also helped to chisel a new agenda into the granite pillars of the American pantheon, one that helped to define the very nature of domestic political battles for decades to come.

This book gives us a graphic and detail introduction to these hearty, healthy and enthusiastic warriors; housewives arguing political strategy over coffee and Danish, young and well-educated defense engineers arriving to live out the American dream, impressionable young religious workers convinced that the only way to save the country and themselves from Hellfire and brimstone was to work fervently against the designs of the "godless democrats". From this well-detailed work we begin to see how the movement came into being, how it organized itself, what motivated the individuals as well as what their evolving political agenda became and why.

McGirr demonstrates that this was far from being a movement of marginalized or isolated extremists; on the contrary, from the beginning it was more accurately characterized as an intensely enthusiastic enterprise, one formed and energized by the social, economic, and political elite, people with both means and motive for becoming involved to better control their own futures as well as those of the country at large. In what is perhaps her best set of insights, she demonstrates how these young and innovative neo-conservatives established a new set of political philosophies and precepts, forged in a alloy of Christian fundamentalism, misguided nationalism, and more traditional true conservatism (i.e. an old-style libertine attitude).

This is a seminal work, an effort at true scholarship which dares to look at Rosemary's baby in the face by searching through the afterbirth of the not so immaculate birthing of modern neo-conservatism. What she discovers and demonstrates along the way may often upset our traditional notions of what happened and why, but it never fails to inform or edify us as to what transpired or why. This is an interesting and worthwhile book, and one that I can heartily recommend. Enjoy!