Andrew S.

Terrell
Spring 2010

Précis: McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Social historian Lisa McGirr challenged the consensus that generalized the New Right as

an anti-modernist movement in her monograph Suburban Warriors. She argued that right wing

ideology became mainstream during the 1960s and culminated in the California Gubernatorial

and U.S. Presidential elections of Ronald Reagan after a period of postwar anti-communist, tenet

affiliation of the Old Right. McGirr examined conservatism through a study of localized ideas

and actions of ordinary citizens in Orange County, California as a “stronghold” of the New

Right. In doing so, she also attempted to put into context the national citizenry and realization

that many of that era related to the beliefs and vantages of Orange County conservatives. She

identified these conservatives as socially mobile, white, educated, middle-class citizens in

defending her comparisons between those of Orange County and America at large. Her attempts

to better explain the evolution of the right wing adds a new depth to postwar political party

scholarship, likely due to her bottom up methodology of social history. Specifically, McGirr’s

explanations for the rise of the New Right from its irrationally-fervent, anti-communist stance

laid on the unifying forces against big government and moral decline shared by many in 1960s

America. As she showed, the Right succeeded in combining traditional, conservative values to

modernist trends during the 1960s and 70s which allowed an increase of influence across the

country’s political arena. Overall, McGirr’s localized study of Orange County is a worthy

addition to scholarship, but some may contend that it lacks sufficient evidence in relating the

county’s population to the national populace.

Would her study have benefitted from additional context of the conservative coalition

during FDR’s administration and the 1945-1960 period? Did McGirr downplay racial questions

and problems in her narrative, and does this diminish credence for her assertions?