Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) [Paperback]

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.

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.

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!