Orange County was the place, after all, that once boasted mass ocean baptisms by the legendary "Jesus Freak" leader Rev. They may have dressed straight, but their beliefs were no closer to the American norm than Wavy Gravy's. 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. 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. American politics and culture would never be the same. 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. Yet this prosperous and Edenic scene was the breeding ground for a radical '60s counterculture that indelibly stamped America. ![]() It's a land of fruit groves, gorgeous beaches, and tract houses in planned suburbs carved out of rolling hills. The weather is nearly ideal, if sun, sea breezes, eternal blue skies, and year-round mild temperatures are your bag. ![]() The sprawling county located between San Diego and Los Angeles seemed so quintessentially American that Walt Disney chose it as the home for Disneyland. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, by Lisa McGirr, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 395 pages, $31.95įor such a perfect place, Southern California's Orange County breeds a lot of dissatisfaction.
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