Suburban anticommunist thrills

In Suburban Warriors, Lisa McGirr describes the vivacious energy produced around anticommunism in 1960s Orange County. Ordinary residents, convinced of an “imminent communist takeover,” created social networks, screened anticommunist films, listened to speakers at the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, all in the fervored sense of an impending apocalypse. McGirr attributes the particular shape of the anticommunist agenda to Fred Schwartz, anticommunist orator given to statements about “communist plans for a flag of the U.S.S.R. flying above every American city by 1973” (quoted in McGirr 61). Doubtless, the people McGirr describes were genuinely worried about their children’s education being corrupted by Communists, and the threat of nuclear war certainly gave anticommunism heft. And as McGirr demonstrates, the atmosphere of anticommunism in Orange County was shaped by a defense industry that fed on anticommunist hysteria, as well as a disconnected social environment that lead residents to seek community wherever it was proffered, first in right-wing churches, and second, in right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society. Still, though, one gets the sense that for many of the people in McGirr's study, anticommunism provided a great deal of thrills. Inasmuch as the landscape of Southern California is disconnected and anticommunity, it's also simply boring, and the fiery rhetoric of anticommunism--the sense of being a "warrior"--had to offer a sense of adventure.

This is a brilliant book, which nicely articulates social fabric out of which political adventuring emerges. McGirr nicely delivers on the contradictions of her title; out of the sleepy, uneventful suburbs emerge Don Quixotes fighting Communist windmills that they see everywhere. This is the adventurous impulse I find operating in conspiracy theory, the bedroom transformed into a bunker, the garage transformed into a meeting place for rebel cells (literally, JB founder Welch modeled meetings after Communist cells). Communism certainly serves as the ultimate conspiracy for the residents McGirr describes, though of course when one reads David Bennett’s The Party of Fear, one recognizes that the pattern of thought which frames anticommunism—stealthy enemies at work everywhere—is similar to that which emerges around other shadowy enemies-Catholics, anti-abolitionists, the Illuminati, Masons—throughout American history. This sense of thrill is an aspect of conspiracy theory that I keep trying to draw out: that as much as conspiracy theory offers answers, as much as it offers its participants meaning, it also offers them a rush--the rush at seeing connections between the local ACLU and a Communist takeover, the rush of connecting events in China to one's backyard, the rush of being in the know, or at least of imagining oneself in the know.