This week’s reading material describes how important the “bottom-up” approach was to the conservative movement. Lisa McGirr’s book Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right describes how a division of the Republican Party that was often ridiculed and marginalized becomes the dominant force that eventually elected the first conservative candidate for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan. McGirr describes how the movement lived in obscurity because “their mobilization has been overshadowed by the more flamboyant Left and its movement culture…The left-wing and liberal movements of the period dominated the airwaves and newspapers; indeed, the sixties were the heyday of liberal social change.” McGirr contends that scholars like Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset helped inforce the ridicule and marginalization of the conservative movement by spreading their liberal pluralism by casing this far Right group “as a marginal, embattled remnant fighting a losing battle against the inexorable forces of progress.” However, due to the success of Reagan, scholars are now conducting more historical and sociological studies of the movement, primarily focusing from a national level…show more content… McGirr’s book focuses on the “bottom-up” approach by turning the focus on the “women and men who built the movement and of the communities from which they sprang.” She explores the conservative movement as a social movement and how it occurred, but instead of centering on the state or national level she focuses it on the local level, mainly from Orange County,
