Book Review

Tracing the Rise of Right: Suburban Warriors and the Origins of American Conservatism

While liberalism was ascendant during the tumultuous 1960s, the American suburbs witnessed a silent revolution: the emergence of a grassroots conservative movement.

Orange County in the 1960s.

As the legacy of the New Deal welfare state became entrenched with the construction of a warfare state during the Second World War and early in the Cold War, the triumph of liberalism seemed an uncontested reality for several decades. The 1950s and 1960s saw the inexorable march of liberal America with epochal changes in modern society, social norms, and legal rights, while formerly disenfranchised groups like Black people, women, and minorities gained wider representation in the political system and public service. The progressive march of history led many thinkers and what was then called ‘consensus’ scholars of the era to view conservatism as a bygone relic of the past, locked in a losing battle against the overwhelming forces of the modern industrial age.

Richard Hofstadter, one of the consensus historians, dismissed conservatism as a paranoid style, even phrasing it as a “pseudo-conservatism.” The historian describes it as a “product of the rootlessness and…