It was right here — in the shadow of Disneyland, near Richard Nixon’s birthplace and the Newport Beach Pier — that the Republican Party began its dramatic march to the right.
It’s what gave America President Ronald Reagan. And the Tea Party. Ballot measures denying social services to undocumented immigrants and banning same-sex marriage. The hard-right flank in Congress eager “to burn the whole place down” and, perhaps, the first candidate of any party to be the leading presidential nominee who also faces 91 felony counts, threatens judges and suggested that a four-star general’s actions were “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
You’re welcome, America?
As the California GOP convention got underway near the happiest place on earth Friday, and Donald Trump devotees faced off bitterly with Donald Trump demonizers in the streets of Anaheim, and the federal government poised for a shutdown, we turned for some perspective on how we got here to “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” by Harvard historian Lisa McGirr.
McGirr chronicled the New Right’s rise from Orange County to the state to the nation, “from ‘nut country’ to political vanguard…. from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism.”
These “Suburban Warriors” were women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses, members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education, pro-life Democrats who couldn’t stay with a pro-choice party, she writes. They were new arrivals working for defense contractors and worshipping in the region’s evangelical churches. They were successful entrepreneurs who forged political and social philosophies anchored in nationalism, Christian fundamentalism and western libertarianism.
With like-minded suburbanites in the South, these suburban warriors transformed the…
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