Mini-Review: Suburban Warriors

Today, California is one of the truest-blue states in the union. A Republican presidential candidate is about as likely to carry California as a guy named William T. Sherman is likely to win an election in Georgia. Yet in the dim and distant past, California—at least parts of it—was conservative. Do you think it was sheer coincidence that both Nixon and Reagan called the Golden State home? Lisa McGirr’s short but comprehensive “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right” returns California to the center of the right-wing universe.

As California was to the rest of the nation, so was Orange County to California. Once a sleepy backwater dotted with citrus farms and the occasional oil well, the OC underwent explosive growth—no pun intended—during World War II. Weapons manufacturers, eager to take advantage of the cheap land and convenient location, snapped up thousands of acres on which to build their factories. The resultant influx of workers hyper-charged Orange County, transforming it into a suburban megalopolis.

Many of these new migrants hailed from the south or Midwest; they came to Orange County carrying suitcases in their hands and conservatism in their heads. Once there, they meshed well with the old-timers, the oilmen and ranchers suspicious of anything resembling “big government.” The migrants also blessed Orange County with a touch of that old-time religion. Churches, especially evangelical ones, multiplied during the 1940s and 1950s.

What did these people believe? According to McGirr, they embraced the very same—sometimes contradictory—policies that underlie modern conservatism. Government was the problem, not the solution. The word “tax” should always be followed by “cut.” The decline of public morals was more than a nuisance; it threatened the very fabric of the nation. Communism was not an economic ideology—it was an anti-Christian theology and very possibly the anti-Christ itself.

These Orange County conservatives adopted as their slogan the principle “Organize, organize, organize.” At first they worked within pre-existing institutions, radical right groups like the paranoid John Birch Society. Eventually, however, they shed this extremist skin and began to take over more mainstream organizations. The California Republican Assembly changed rapidly from a moderate stronghold to a bastion of the far right. Political institutions were supplemented by religious ones; the first conservative mega-churches arose, not in the Deep South, but on the beaches of Orange County.

At first, they suffered defeat. Many of the Orange County conservatives wore out their shoes campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964. When he lost in landslide, some of the OC activists withdrew from politics, but most kept right on working. Two years after the Goldwater debacle, the conservatives helped put Ronald Reagan in the California governor’s mansion. And two years after that they played a part in the astonishing comeback of Richard Nixon. The ultimate triumph came in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president.

The contours of this story have been explored before—the rise, defeat, and redemption of American conservatism. But McGirr tells it in a microscopic level. She interviews the men and women who went door to door for Goldwater and organized coffee klatches for Reagan. “Suburban Warriors” transforms the conservative movement from a vast, faceless philosophy into many-headed hydra, a people-powered movement that has endured, despite its setbacks, up to the present day.