McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

== Summary ==
McGirr’s
Suburban Warriors traces the
grassroots conservatism that emerged on the margins in the early 1960s and how
it began to move fully into the mainstream of political life by the end of the
decade, transforming the modern American right and the nation in the process. Meeting
in small groups and starting study groups and “Freedom Forum” bookstores,
working with the Republican Party and filling the rolls of the John Birch
Society, middle class men and women attempted to turn back liberal dominance and
became the “grounded forces of a conservative revival – one that transformed
conservatism from a marginal force preoccupied with communism in the early
1960s into a viable electoral contender by the decade’s end.” (4) This book
studies this phenomenon through the lens of Orange County where its
conservative movement was the nucleus of a broader “conservative matrix evolving
in the Sunbelt and the West.” There southern Californian suburbanites along
with their counterparts in the Sunbelt recast the party from a moderate
Republicanism into a far more conservative mold, shaped by southern and western
experiences and the Cold War military complex that made Orange County. Their
story is fundamental to the rightward shift in American politics since the
1960s, a shift that has transformed the relationship between state and federal
power and the regulatory systems of the New Deal welfare state. It is thus a
book about the making of the modern right and the forging of late 20th
century politics in the U.S. McGirr argues that these conservative activists
and their ideas – religious worldview and apocalyptic strands of thought that
challenged tenets of modernism – took hold amongst a highly educated and modern
group of men and women. Their conservatism was thus a mixture of traditionalism
and modernism, “a combination that suggests the adaptability, resilience and…
intractability of the Right in American life.” (8) They were opposed to liberal
“collectivism” (state organization of economic and social life) and celebrated
laissez-faire capitalism, nationalism, and supported the state only in
upholding law and order.