Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr

This blog is set up to stimulate a discussion of Lisa McGirr's work Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. I am experimenting with a different way of opening up discussion for our class on the 30th. I will be adding more topics as the week goes by, so as everyone reads the book they can be thinking of specific areas that we can discuss in class. The pages on the left are topics to begin with. The more interaction we have on-line the better our class discussion can be.  Please add comments here, or on any of the topic pages.

Lisa McGirr describes the “conservative insurgency” of the late twentieth century by closely examining Orange County California people and politics in her book Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.[12]   McGirr’s thoroughly researched social history of a political movement gives historians detailed insights into the factors which defined the growth of the conservative movement, while her writing style makes the material accessible to the lay reader. McGirr believes the conservative growth from the fringe extremists of the 1960s to a major political force of the 1980s was founded upon an already established conservative culture which reshaped and adapted itself to forces of modernity. The transformed conservative ideas grew into a national movement through the work of grass root activists of suburban counties, like Orange County, California. She uses Orange County, California as a lens to investigate this process because Orange County’s highly active conservative atmosphere serves as a prototype environment which magnified the “socioeconomic, cultural, and political patterns” that made conservatism a success in other communities.[13]