One of the more important books in the recent wave of scholarship on the rise of the New Right, Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors focuses on the conservative stronghold of Orange County in an attempt to understand the social and economic reasons for its fervent embrace of Goldwater-Reagan republicanism. While drawing on prior studies that have focused primarily on the disgruntled swing vote (the race-conscious, welfare-loathing Reagan Democrats), McGirr's book devotes "more attention to social forces, to regionalism, to enduring political traditions outside the liberal consensus, and to the political movements that ordinary men and women create." As such, Warriors "seeks to illuminate the world of the men and women who rejected the liberal vision and instead championed individual economic freedom and a staunch social conservatism. In short, then, this book explores the Right as a social movement." (12)
McGirr traces several conservatizing influences at work in the formation of Orange County, despite the federal largesse (mainly in Defense Department dollars) required first to develop and later to maintain the region. One on hand, the early influence of conservative Protestantism had given Orange County a reputation for a strict, individualistic moralism even by the turn of the century. The defense boom of WWII and beyond encouraged the influx of anti-tax, pro-business land and real estate speculators (among other types of free-market worshipping entrepreneurs and "cowboy capitalists"), culturally conservative, Eastern Establishment-loathing Midwesterners, and rabidly anti-Communist and pro-military defense contractors. In the cultural atmosphere of staunch individualism that followed, the connective tissues of community were sorely lacking - a lack quickly remedied by the explosion of evangelical, Pentecostal, and fundamentalist churches throughout the area.
What with all the anti-tax, anti-East, anti-government and anti-liberal sentiment pervading Orange County, all this tinder box of cultural conservatism required was a spark to set it alight............
