Suburban Warriors

In Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001), an American historian of the twentieth century Lisa McGirr looks back on the discontents of different American demographics, most critically the intersection of whites and the middle class. McGirr focuses on the suburbia of 1960s Orange County, California as a microcosm of what she describes as a campaign to recover a conservative identity that extolled waning imperatives of Christian morality and self-focused liberties. McGirr aspires to make sense of the more recent rise of new far-right movements through this same framework of white nationalism. The book has received attention for anticipating more recent developments, including the alt-right movement which has backgrounded the Trump campaign and presidency.

McGirr begins by characterizing the political climate of the 1960s. She argues that this decade was the first in which white nationalist reactions to the federal government gained a characteristic momentum, which still maintains its grip on public discourse in the twenty-first century. In the 1960s, many white Americans felt that the government was evolving into a secular surveillance state. Seeking a scapegoat for this nebulous, white nationalist, discursive insecurity, they pegged the Eisenhower and later, Kennedy administration for leaning too liberal. Searching for a figure to remediate their anxieties, they landed on Barry Goldwater, an Arizonan senator. Goldwater became a contender for the 1964 presidential election, implying in his campaign platform a return to America’s Christian roots, particularly by leveraging the religious language of the Founding Father era. McGirr contends that the white middle class was terrified that the United States was due to collapse should it renege on these moral foundations.

McGirr next turns to Orange County. Though it cannot be considered a perfect example of the new right’s political evolution, she suggests that we can use it to learn a lot about the party’s logic and values. She begins with the end of World War II, when the county’s Native American ranchers saw their land being bought out or encroached on for housing development. Later, as tensions increased between the United States and the Soviet Union, the land was further appropriated for the uses of the Department of Defense. Part of the effect of these two changes was a population explosion, from barely 100,000 in 1940 to 2 million during the Cold War. As military and arms production facilities proliferated, workers flocked from all over the country to live in Orange County. Entrepreneurs began to piggyback on this influx of industry, further accelerating the development of a huge middle class. The prominence of the American war machine helped engender a conservative capitalist culture in the region, which somewhat complemented the Native citizens’ individualist ideology. With the onset of the Cold War, the region became even more strongly opposed to communist ideology than before.



With the creation of what was virtually a new society in the vacuum created by the capitalist war machine, this new middle class seized ownership of the laws and customs that would define them. Most of their ideas were empirical, based in the grievances and ideals of stay-at-home moms and white-collar dads. Different groups organized to implement the laws they wanted to see in their society. This started in the public school system. Mothers rallied against several aspects of the state-governed school system and ultimately catalyzed Barry Goldwater’s rise to the presidential campaign. McGirr thinks of these emergent solidarities as grassroots conservative movements that happened to resonate with a larger, contemporaneous national conservative movement. This movement came to reject the New Deal, “welfare state” rhetoric, and union rights.

In the end, Goldwater failed miserably to become president. However, the fact that his supporters were able to help him rise so quickly to prominence galvanized future efforts to restore middle class white nationalist values to their overwhelmingly central position in American politics. Though many of these efforts failed, the ones that stood the test of time went on to powerfully inform the conservative life that exists today. McGirr shows that one political movement’s momentary success or failure does not necessarily correspond to the eventual success of the ideas of which it is composed. Suburban Warriors showcases the power of grassroots organization to transcend party and geography, often unpredictably and transformatively so.