Is McGirr biased?

Throughout the work McGirr uses phrases and words that demonstrate her East coast liberal condescension and contempt for conservatives and their ideas.

For instance, in the introduction she states, “This book, then, advances a new perspective on the conservative insurgency of the recent past.”[12] Using the term “insurgency” gives the connotation that conservative thought is a rebellion against proper liberal thinking.

When discussing social problems she displays her dislike of capitalism by saying the “free market and the deep class divisions it generated” caused the “social breakdown of families, for drugs and for social violence.”[257]

McGirr presents radical thought as the mainstream conservative thought by extensively quoting someone she interviewed, Mary Haller. The reader is lead to assume Mary was a regular conservative activist. It isn’t until the epilogue that McGirr informs the reader that Mary’s “self-described “extremism” placed her on the fringe of the Right and was hardly typical.” [267]

In the introduction of the book McGirr said she wanted to show that the movement was not populated by the angry rear-guard of a bygone way of life, but by highly skilled white collar middle class workers. [7-9] After presenting convincing research of this premise her bias would not allow her to say educated, white collar workers made up the movement. Her conclusion was that those conservative ideas “resonated with many middle-class and lower-middle-class men and women.” [272]

Lisa McGirr may have wanted to eliminate the liberal disdain for conservatives but her contempt for them, and their ideas shows through.

What do you think? Is McGirr's bias showing through?

Comments

[Matthew]

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[Eron Ackerman]

I thought McGirr maintained a pretty even-tempered tone, using neutral terminology wherever possible. While the term "insurgency" may evoke a sense of militancy and extremism (especially since the term has been used regarding the sectional violence in Iraq), I'm not sure how much more neutral a term she could have used other than perhaps "resistance" to the hegemony of liberal elites, which may have gone too far in the other direction. The fact that she abstained from terms like "far Right" and "radical Right" evinces at least a sincere effort at impartiality.

Concerning McGirr's unqualified ascription of class divisions and crime to the "free market," I agree that she made this claim too casually as if it were self-evident and required no further explanation. She might, for example, have drawn on "Freedom Is Not Enough" to discuss discriminatory hiring practices, or noted the role of fiscal disparities between public schools in wealthy suburban versus poor urban school districts. Nonetheless, I think her main point there is well taken: that conservatives denounce social problems as evidence of immorality but do not seek to account for the underlying social causes of those problems. Implicit in conservative appeals to individual responsibility (and from my experience this still holds true today) is a model of society composed of 'free' and 'equal' "individuals" fully capable of controlling their respective economic destinies and overcoming the obstacles and social pressures that confront them on a daily basis. Conservative appeals to end federal welfare, in turn, rest on either a staunch faith in the good will of individuals and private organizations to help their fellow man and cure our social ills without government intervention, or (and I have not encountered this view so much) a callous disregard for the fate those born in underprivileged circumstances.

As far as McGirr's sources go, I actually thought that, if anything, her use of personal interviews some thirty or forty years after the fact might have led to some bias in the other direction. After all, how many of these conservatives would still admit if they once harbored racist or anti-semitic sentiments, much less wild conspiracy theories that never came to pass?

As for the last point, I don't think McGirr's statement that ideas of the Right "resonated" with middle- and lower-class people was intended as a denial that educated middle-class people led the conservative movement. McGirr merely wanted to account for the movement's broad popular appeal. Furthermore, in distilling the aspects of conservatism that resonated with the masses--opposition to big government, fear of the decline of traditional Christian morality, etc.--McGirr succeeds in further distancing the mainstream base of the Right from some of the more zany and fanatical ideas of conservative spokesmen that have come under fire from liberal critics seeking to dismiss the qualms of the conservative movement as a whole.