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Cargando... Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001)por Lisa McGirr
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Good, but not great: McGirr's book traces the rise of what I would call the (white, middle-class) suburban right and the Christian right, beginning in the early 60s. The new right coalesced around anti-Communism, laissez faire capitalism, states' rights and local government, the "traditional" family, Christian values, individual economic responsibility, and low taxes.It was the suburban Christian right that first brought these views together. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President in 1964 against Johnson, was an early exemplar of new right views. However, his strong opposition to the Civil Rights acts won him the lower South and, along with his virulent anti-Communism, helped him lose the rest of the country.
The suburban Christian right shed the virulent and conspiratorial anti-Communism that they initially directed at domestic enemies; south-eastern politics moved away from the New Deal order and shed legal segregation and overt biological racism; they all joined their Christian and conservative forces and formed a conservative coalition behind Ronald Reagan.
McGirr's is a "bottom up" analysis that begins with the grass roots social base of the suburban Christian right, using Orange County as a prototypical case study. She also examines the interplay of grass roots leaders, rank and file members, regional business elites, and national intellectual and political leaders.
The book doesn't delve into how the suburban right teamed up with south-eastern conservatives, but their shared Christianity, shared social conservatism, and shared opposition to civil rights, busing, and affirmative action makes it fairly easy to guess what that part of the story in general looks like. However, McGirr's would be a better book if she examined some of these connections, at least briefly. This is what makes the book good but not great.
Post-script: Today, the Cold War is over, terrorism has replaced communism as America's global enemy, and George W. Bush has combined the Christian right with the post-Cold War, neo-conservative, neo-imperialist right. Bush has tried to combine anti-terrorism, neo-imperialism, and Christian conservativism without provoking Christian-Islamic antagonisms--antagonisms already strained by Christian conseravtive and neo-conservative support for Israel. These topics would make an interesting post-script to McGirr's book. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century. Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism. While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens--and often upsets--our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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McGirr writes, “Orange County had a higher proportion of homeowners than the nation as a whole – and this high rate of home ownership contributed to a germinating conservative political culture. The weekends spent remodeling, landscaping, and improving property, along with concerns over property taxation, all reinforced a conservative ethos” (pg. 43). She continues, “The middle-class men and women who populated Orange County found meaning in a set of politics that affirmed the grounding of their lives in individual success and yet critiqued the social consequences of the market by calling for a return to ‘traditional’ values, local control, strict morality, and strong authority” (pg. 53). According to McGirr, “The right-wing revival was not an irrational, momentary outburst of psychologically maladjusted men and women, as liberals hoped and believed…the resurgence of grassroots mobilization on the Right was a result not of strength but of a lack of political power and influence within national politics, and even conservatives’ chosen party” (pg. 66). These grassroots campaigns were anti-communist and pro-free enterprise. They were composed mostly of the middle class and those who aspired to it while trying to preserve their white, Christian, middle class status. The John Birch Society was one example.
Discussing Barry Goldwater, McGirr describes how some middle class, white, anti-communist Christians picked him as their mantle-bearer as his unlikely defeat of Rockefeller proved the possibilities of grassroots politics. Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater, however, which led to anger toward liberals. McGirr writes, “The cultural criticisms of Orange County’s conservatives responded to the discontents created by the dynamics of capitalism. Orange Countians lamented the decline of family authority, the emphasis on change and innovation, the undermining of community, and the decline of the importance of locality – all of which resulted from the growth of large-scale institutions and the concentration of economic and political power that are part of the functioning of a free-market economy” (pg. 163). This fostered a worldview that was very middle class, white, Christian, and patriotic. The conservatives opposed big government, viewing it as the liberal replacement for god. Further, they were anti-Civil Rights as a result of the opposition to big government. All of these views relied on an “other” to demonize, either communists, liberals, atheists, or someone else.
Discussing Reagan, McGirr writes, “From the start, Reagan set a different tone for his campaign than Goldwater had, working to build a new model of conservative respectability that would enable him and other conservatives after him to become viable electoral contenders” (pg. 196). Reagan was less extreme than Goldwater due to his decreased militancy, but was equally distrusting of government. Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial win and Nixon’s 1970 presidential win were in no small part thanks to Orange County and its history of political activism, with a conservative surge stemming from the uncertainty of the 1960s. This led to a final move away from more extremism, conspiracy theories, and groups like the John Birch Society and toward single issues that were more successful in motivating people, including liberals, to support conservative causes. These included free speech, abortion, sex education, and others. ( )