Reading and Discussion Questions
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors
Introduction and General Themes
1. Why does McGirr insist that a case study of the Orange County grassroots
right in the 1960s helps us to understand the national political landscape
at the end of the twentieth century?
2. What is the advantage (or disadvantage) of studying the right as
a “social movement” rather than studying the institutional
history of the Republican Party or focusing on leading conservative politicians
and intellectuals?
3. How would you describe McGirr’s perspective on her subject?
What does she say about how her perspective differs from those of other
scholars who study the American right?
4. Do you agree that the Orange County case is “a prototype”
for national developments? Why or why not? Are there local, state, or
regional factors that make it sensible or hazardous to generalize from
Southern California to the United States at large?
5. How do you explain why the political right, which was considered a
failed and marginal phenomenon during the 1960s, succeeded in the 1970s
and 1980s?
Chapter 1
6. What large political, economic, and demographic developments shaped
Orange County conservatism?
7. What special role did churches play in generating a new sense of
community in Southern California? Why was this the case? Why did it matter?
Chapter 2
8. Describe a few of the events and organizations that mobilized Southern
California conservatives against the communist threat in the late 1950s
and early 1960s. Why does McGirr identify the 1961 School of Anti-Communism
as notable? What forms of subversion were especially alarming to Orange
County activists?
9. What national organizations played significant roles in right-wing
mobilization during these years?
10. What does McGirr have to say about the role of women in the right-wing
mobilization?
11. What role did Catholics and the Catholic Church play?
Chapter 3
12. What did Goldwater activists do in Southern California that helped
them to consolidate their political influence long after their defeat
in 1964?
13. What did Goldwater supporters think of Richard Nixon?
14. How did Southern California conservatives react to the civil rights
movement? Do you think their advocacy of “states’ rights”
and “law and order” was synonymous with advocacy of segregation,
racism, or anti-Semitism? Why or why not?
15. What were the main reasons why Goldwater appealed to Southern California
voters? Why did the Goldwater campaign create divisions between “liberal,”
“moderate,” and more “conservative” conservatives?
16. Goldwater won Orange County, but his defeat nationally was described
in the 1960s as the death knell for political conservatism. Why do you
think it looked this way at the time? Does it appear differently in retrospect?
Chapter 4
17. What did liberal intellectuals like Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter
have to say about conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s? What does Lisa
McGirr think they overlooked?
18. “The two central principles of the Right’s message were
thus an antistatist libertarianism and a normative conservatism.”
(p. 149) Explain what this means and compare this to the political vision
of liberalism in the 1960s.
19. Why do you think that conservatives who objected to the concentrated
political power of the federal government did not also object to the concentrated
economic power of private corporations? Why did they oppose the expansion
of the welfare state but support the expansion of the military? Are these
contradictions in right-wing thought?
20. What tensions existed between social/religious conservatives, free
market advocates, and libertarians? What unified these various conservative
constituencies? How did their commonalities and differences shape the
history of the right in the 1960s and after?
21. How did conservatives respond to the United Nations? Did their fears
of “world government” reflect their view of politics within
the United States?
22. How did conservative mobilizations around education symbolize the
shift on the right from anti-communism to anti-permissiveness over the
course of the 1960s? Why did this change occur? What might this tell us
about assessments of the 1960s as either a “good” or “bad”
watershed?
Chapter 5
23. What role did the mobilization of students on the left (for example,
at the University of California, Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement)
play in California politics after the 1964 presidential election?
24. Why was Reagan able to win the California gubernatorial election
in 1965, so shortly after Goldwater had lost the presidential race?
25. What developments in the Democratic Party in 1965 and in the following
years influenced conservative politics?
26. Who was George Wallace?
27. Why and how did Nixon win the presidency in 1968?
Chapter 6
28. McGirr identifies a trend toward “new social issues”
among conservatives at the end of the 1960s. What exactly does she mean?
Why were these social issues important in defining the conservatism of
the 1970s and 1980s?
29. How did Orange County conservatism reflect the progress of a consumer
society in the late 1960s?
30. What was the 1978 Briggs initiative?
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