The Orange Revolution.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right - Review

How "nut country" conquered America

For such a perfect place, Southern California's Orange County breeds a lot of dissatisfaction. The sprawling county located between San Diego and Los Angeles seemed so quintessentially American that Walt Disney chose it as the home for Disneyland. The weather is nearly ideal, if sun, sea breezes, eternal blue skies, and year-round mild temperatures are your bag. It's a land of fruit groves, gorgeous beaches, and tract houses in planned suburbs carved out of rolling hills.

Yet this prosperous and Edenic scene was the breeding ground for a radical '60s counterculture that indelibly stamped America. It was home to a conspiracy of militant malcontents who, while never representing a majority of Americans' concerns, raised such a well-organized fuss that they took over a major political party. American politics and culture would never be the same.

This counterculture wasn't the one exemplified by those loud, dirty kids from Northern California, who made such a splash with their sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Orange County's was a suburban counterculture of housewives, engineers, dentists, businessmen, and veterans who embraced a hardcore conservatism that combined libertarian disdain for centralized state power with unyielding anti-communism and moral traditionalism. They may have dressed straight, but their beliefs were no closer to the American norm than Wavy Gravy's.

Orange County was the place, after all, that once boasted mass ocean baptisms by the legendary "Jesus Freak" leader Rev. Chuck; high school auditoriums filled to the rafters with thousands of kids excused from classes to attend Fred Schwartz's traveling "School Anti-Communism" (Schwartz authored that thrift-store classic, You Can Trust the Communists--To Be Communists!); and school boards that banned UNICEF Halloween coin collections and any mention of the United Nations in the classroom. In 1968, Fortune quite casually--and not without evidence--condemned Orange County as "nut country." The combination of rabid anti-communism, staunch social conservatism, and anti-Washington sentiment placed the county's right-wingers far outside the postwar consensus, both intellectual and popular.

Lisa McGirr, a historian at Harvard, guides us through Orange County conservatism's rise and influence in Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. She makes a good case that standard political histories of postwar America concentrate too much on North-South divisions, and on race relations as the one vital issue. If we really want to see the true heart of postwar political change, she suggests, we should look closely at the pleasant...