But his network of supporters in Southern California didn't give up or go away after that crushing defeat. McGirr tells how, bloodied but unbowed, they rallied behind Ronald Reagan and propelled him into California's state house in 1966. By electing Reagan governor -- thereby putting him on the path to the White House -- Orange County's right-wingers played a key role in what ultimately became a national political shift.
By the time Reagan became governor, however, the concerns of Orange County's right-wingers were themselves shifting. Dirty hippies were running amok at Berkeley, sex education was in the schools, and pornography was on sale at the corner newsstand. Blacks were rioting in Watts and domestic law-and-order issues seemed more pressing than an imminent invasion by the Russkies (though there were still those who blamed the commies for all of America's problems). The coalition that defined grassroots activism in Orange County started breaking apart. The businessmen-types especially opted out. With one of their own running the state, and with increased conservative power in the GOP, they no longer saw grassroots education or activism as their main concern. Directly petitioning or greasing the wheels of power was more of an option. But even as the Orange County coalition fell apart, a version of its conservatism went national. By 1980, that California right-wing nut Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States.
As McGirr indicates, a fault line every bit as large and active as the San Andreas ran through the Orange County right. That fault line is more relevant than ever to the very broadly construed national coalition of libertarians and conservatives. It's the disjoint between the libertarian belief in unbridled freedom from a powerful state and the conservative belief in using state power to fight international communism or enforce traditional morality. The communism question is moribund; the morality question lives on and is a source of constant tension between libertarians and conservatives. Conservatives, for example, tend to crave state action to halt the availability of porn and "illicit" drugs; libertarians do not. A similar rift is growing over foreign and trade policy, too, with conservatives tending to favor military engagements (some are even calling to make China our adversary in a new Cold War) and withdrawing from commerce with "immoral" countries.
McGirr more or less sloughs over the importance of the libertarian-traditionalist splits in the coalition she writes about, noting that although they sometimes "looked at one another with discomfort and suspicion...libertarians and social conservatives shared enough grievances against their common enemy, the liberal Leviathan, to forge a political movement." (She does note that some Orange County anti-communists were annoyed at Hoiles' Register for taking a consistently libertarian line against waging war on the Soviets.) One wishes she might have looked more closely at the nascent tension between the two factions, especially since it is clearly an issue in today's politics.
Still, Suburban Warriors is a welcome addition to contemporary American history. It is the first long look at activists who have been woefully understudied, given their influence on the course of recent politics. It also helps show that the American pageant is far richer than we're usually told; the '60s, it turns out, were even more of a social and political cornucopia, a home to a wider range of anything-goes weirdness, than many ever acknowledged. Surely, it enhances our understanding of the period to recognize that even as the Yippies were trying to stop the Vietnam War by levitating the Pentagon, right-wing suburbanites in Orange County were girding themselves to fight the centuries-old Illuminati conspiracy.
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