1. I'm glad that McGirr didn't compromise her integrity by playing the stupid "fair and balanced" game of braindead "impartiality." It seems that she has attached words like "tirade" to at least half of the quotes from conservatives in the book, and she's not afraid to make these people look like the idiots they were. Good for her.
2. Not much pigment in that cover photo, huh?
3. On a related note: McGirr's treatment of race is a bit funky. Throughout the book, she says several times that OC conservatives weren't as obsessed with race as conservatives in other parts of the country, largely because the OC was essentially all white. She even creates this odd geography where race is important on a north-south axis, but not an east-west axis. (14-15) Umm . . . doesn't that geography privilege a very particular way of looking at race (ie as a southern or southern and northern urban problem)? And moreover, who says that race isn't an issue just because black people aren't around? White people are raced, and so the lovely little middle class bubble that these people exist in is a racial space. Further, the move away from anticommunist hysteria to "law and order" hysteria among these conservatives is deeply impacted by race. It's striking that McGirr is comfortable suggesting that race was at the heart of the conservatism of the (working class, ethnic) Reagan Democrats, but is much less comfortable with attributing those kind of motivations to her better educated, more WASP-ish subjects in OC.
4. Although Reagan may have called JFK a commie in 1959 (189), the Professor Brothers disagree:
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Colin, my God. Where do you find this stuff?
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