Suburban Warriors

In the back of my mind while reading this book, I was trying to assess the question of whether or not this was a social movement like the ones that we have been reading about. It might be easy to write these Orange County conservatives off as a bunch of crazies from the sidelines of politics as was suggested that the Liberals did at that time, but McGirr certainly proves that they were much more than that. I’d like to say they were a social movement based upon the information provided for Orange County, but the hesitation comes from not knowing how representative this trend is for the country as a whole. There had to be differences in the kinds of conservatives that existed throughout the country, unless I am misinterpreting the whole thing. Is it that there were the hard core types of conservatives in Orange County, but Republicans generally elsewhere?

Also, I’d like to know what those Orange County residents who stayed with the Democratic Party felt about all of this activism in their area and how strong was the Democratic Party in California. McGirr did say that overall there were more Democrats and Republicans, but she makes it sound as though the Democrats were powerless to prevent conservative growth. My Italian (like really Italian-born in Italy and came over on a boat), Catholic, staunch Democratic Great-grandparents moved to Costa Mesa, CA during the immediate postwar years to retire and I cannot help to think that they would have been appalled by these activists and the way that they were influencing local governments. It would be interesting to know how people like them, in a sense outsiders, felt amid this conservative society. McGirr makes the early work by the conservatives sound fanatical and intense that it could have been unsettling for those who did not agree with their views.