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.