Michael Harrington famously observed that 1970s America seemed to be ‘moving vigorously left, right, and center all at once’. Today, the nation (much like the rest of the world) seems even more roiled by economic crisis, social unrest, and culture clashes. Tea Party members don tricorn hats to assert, as the group's actual name suggests, that they have been (like the Founders were) ‘Taxed Enough Already’; Republican voters in the 2012 presidential primaries fickly moved between contenders in a failed effort to deny the most moderate candidate, Mitt Romney, the nomination; 99 Percent Movement protesters camped out for months in solidarity with those who brazenly started to ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in September 2011; and moderate voters still enthusiastically turned out for rallies to drum up support for Barack Obama, who had far larger audiences when he had proclaimed in 2008 that ‘Yes, We Can’!Footnote ¹

Yet, journalists covered all of these popular expressions of political discontent with cynicism that called into question whether any of these dramatic demonstrations of outrage represented authentic grassroots insurgencies. Reporters dismissed the Tea Party as artificial ‘astroturf’ rolled out by well-financed lobbyists, blamed Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and the twenty-four-hour news cycle for rank-and-file Republicans' capricious radicalism, questioned the political legitimacy and effectiveness of squatting in city centres, and attributed the passion of Obama's 2008 constituency to the inability of twitter, facebook, and other social media hegemons to sustain political groundswells.

The nagging questions about elite power and social unrest that animate contemporary politics also present themselves when today's historians gaze back on the twentieth-century American social movements, larger-than-life legislators, and politics in general. As such, recent work on post-1968 intellectuals, the modern conservative movement's earlier grassroots, and social scientific inquiries into the American Tea Party raise the following questions: Who was the dog? The tail? And who was actually being wagged?

The most recent historical monographs on the modern right's grassroots, investigations into its post-1968 maturation, and studies of contemporary popular revolts offer tantalizing answers. Scholars, to be sure, continue to disagree about what figures, movements, and issues were the most important. Nonetheless, throughout these literatures has been a reassessment of the power struggle between the nation's political and intellectual elite and the metropolitan and rural insurgents whose grassroots qualities seem to be organic. Taken together, it seems increasingly clear that over the course of the twentieth century the common folk's ideological metaphors and institutions became mainstream, co-opted by top-level pols and thinkers, or absorbed into parties and think tanks. None of that happened in an automatic fashion. Power and the struggle for it ran throughout tectonic shifts in twentieth-century and millennial America's politics, economy, and society.

Accordingly, this recent scholarship speaks as much to the United States' past as the larger practice of history since the 1970s. The return of business, economic, and political narratives to the historical profession's foreground has, on one hand, been reflective of the contemporary, worldwide crisis in governance, capitalism, and social stability. Yet the best of this literature does not wrongly malign or lament the socio-cultural turn but instead utilizes its methods to reinvigorate dry topics of pressing importance. In the case of American history, a new cohort has used social historians' toolkit to interrogate thoroughly and respectfully the kind of twentieth-century movements, institutions, and elections that once seem inexplicable but whose consequences are visible from even the most casual glimpse of today's newspaper headlines. Scholars, for example, now have a much clearer picture of past white rebellions against liberal civil rights, religious, education, and farm policies, which continue to enrage voters across the political spectrum. And yet, recent research also reveals that historians do not always bring the same rigour and compassion to people whom they find distasteful. In those cases, historical knowledge often regurgitates old narrative frameworks, which offer an incomplete picture of the past and threaten to enrage lay audiences in a manner that fuelled earlier insurgences.

Noted historian Daniel Rodgers's recent and well-received work is an example of the latter. He asserts contemporary unrest to be the result of an ‘age of fracture’, when a range of ‘intellectual assumptions that had defined the common sense of public intellectual life since the Second World War were challenged, dismantled, and formulated anew’ (p. 2). The era Rodgers christens and attempts to define in Age of fracture (2011) is remarkably short: starting around 1970 and ending abruptly in 11 September 2001, when society's fragments ‘would have to be reassembled on different frames, the tensions between self and society resolved anew’ (p. 271). Because ‘ideas moved first’ (p. 11) and then down, Rodgers uses this era's politicians, pundits, and thinkers to probe how the relationship between the self and society was reparsed in presidential speeches and in intellectual debates over economic policy, power, race, gender, pluralism, and even time. Their words, he asserts, were what shaped and defined this period. Whereas the prevailing mid-nineteenth-century wisdom was that the self was ‘a free-standing, autonomous production of its own will and ambition’, the mid-twentieth-century consensus considered a person ‘born into social norms’ and ‘sorted out according to their place in the social structure’, leading to the conviction that ‘[s]ocieties divided up people into castes and classes, even as they aggregated them under the pressure of the mass media and mass society's ways of life’ (p. 4). Political and institutional facts substantiated this intellectual conviction from the 1930s and through the 1950s, a thirty-year ‘era of consolidation’ that unravelled after 1970, when one increasingly ‘heard less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice’ (p. 5). Yet, Rodgers does not begin this shift in the tumultuous 1960s, an era defined by student, civil rights, and feminist movements for peace, equality, and opportunity as much as policymakers' larger ambitions to wage a ‘War on Poverty’ domestically whilst battling for ‘Hearts and Minds’ in Indochina. This decade was ‘a moment of break but the regrouping around a different set of premises and themes … was the work of the era that followed’ (p. 4).

Words, as the linguistic turn emphasized, did much of the work to reorient American definitions of the self and society. Rodgers refuses to blame the late-twentieth century transformation of American social imagination on the country's conservative movement, a refreshing break from a dominant trend in post-war American history.Footnote ² Instead, he shows presidents, academics, and activists from across the political spectrum adopting a range of new metaphors to confront a sustained economic crisis, escalating inequality, and a more heterogeneous society, in which women and minorities demanded and were legally entitled to equal opportunity. The most powerful trope was the fluid market because ‘Choice, provisionality, and impermanence; a sense of the diffuse and penetrating yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history … were the emergent intellectual themes of the age’ (p. 144). Americans across the political spectrum had seemed to turn their backs on an economy that the government, big business, and the trade union movement managed. This tripartite arrangement had overseen the country's remarkable post-war growth. But economists increasingly conversed in a language of efficiencies and equilibriums and forcefully sidelined those experts who continued to discuss power (and therefore class) – leading American Keynesian John Kenneth Galbraith included. His books, once bestsellers, were increasingly left behind on shelves now stocked with the works of free-market scions like Milton Freidman (pp. 77–9).

But few academics discussed class and power in the familiar post-war terms after 1970. Sociologists, whose discipline had previously ‘explained why individuals had no choice to make’ (p. 89), increasingly embraced economists' rational-choice models to rethink the very nature of the self's relationship to society and historians forged the new social and labour history fields while repeating the mantra ‘race, class, and gender’ (p. 93) in work on the common folk who had been missing from textbooks. Rodgers asserts that the myriad of stories discovered actually destabilized these (largely leftist) scholars' analytical language of class. They were still, to be sure, preoccupied with their subjects' conflict with and resistance against a white, Protestant, capitalist hegemon but researchers now looked to culture to probe individual consciousness. Class soon went missing and power was instead best articulated and found in discussions of race and personal experience. Cultural and ethnic pride in the many struggles for justice initially swelled but uncovering how individualized the American experience had been soon made once monolithic categories meaningless, including race, class, and gender.

Identity soon seemed ‘inherently multiple and malleable’, which made it divisive (p. 140). The feminist assault on the very idea of womanhood proved particularly inflammatory because this epoch's infamous culture war ‘was a battle over women's acts and women's and men's natures' (p. 145) that resorted the electorate into new voting blocks. The most potent seemed to be the reawakened evangelical Christian right, who spoke in a language of nostalgia that blurred the line between past and present. Rodgers found this ‘Wrinkle in Time’ (p. 223) effect to be pervasive, whether among the everyday Americans who reenacted past military conflicts, among the economists who always had their eye on the future, among the politicians who argued over the Founders’ intent even before legal theorists began to probe the Constitution's original meaning, and even during the wars over history that ended dramatically after historians and secondary school teachers attempted to come up with a national standard for teaching high school survey courses.

Yet, Age of fracture seems to be parsing an age of fruition when considered in light of the long history of American populism, which has done much to question the relationship between the dog and its tail. Inquiries into the character and trajectory of American populism actually owe a debt to the social histories that Rodgers and countless other scholars have maligned. True, as Rodgers notes, most scholars devoted fewer pages, if any at all, to class conflict, much to the frustration of heavy-weights Tony Judt, Eugene Genovese, and Christopher Tomlins. Tomlins famously lamented this trend in the field of labour and legal history in his 1995 essay ‘He who rides whom: recent “new” histories of American labour law and what they may signify’, in which he asserted that the focus on identity had morphed into a preoccupation with social citizenship, which failed to capture the economic power struggle central to all of American history.Footnote ³

Yet the study of politics, class, and power hardly disappeared, no matter what contemporary scholars now almost reflexively assert. Lawrence Goodwyn's Democratic promise: the populist moment in America (1976), Nelson Lichtenstein's Labor's war at home: the CIO in World War II (1982), Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal: industrial workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (1990), Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the urban crisis: race and inequality in postwar Detroit (1996) and other books that redefined the field of American history at the high-water mark of social history and Rodgers's Age of fracture were revelatory because gender and race (which included discussions of the role of ethnicity in defining whiteness) were shown to have been vital to the shopfloor struggles that spilled over into dramatic conflicts over politics, rights, and entitlements that transformed the nation's economy, state, and society. These and other well-regarded monographs carried the burden of sustaining political-economic inquiries before their millennial flowering as, what Sven Beckert and Jeffrey Sklansky have proclaimed to be, a new history of capitalism, which has fixated as much on the power of the ruling elite as those challenging their authority.Footnote ⁴

Rodgers, in fact, provides the context for these seminal studies of class conflict: the displacement of post-war consensus scholars. Academics like Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell reigned over and produced the weighty tomes that defined Rodgers's post-war ‘era of consolidation’, a set of decades that their students have shown to be anything but a consensus period. These post-war liberal intellectuals attacked a ‘Radical Right’ that they considered ‘pseudo-conservative’ and dismissed the American left as of the world but never really in it. Hofstadter and his contemporary Robert Wiebe were equally derisive of the actual late nineteenth-century Populist party, which grew out of the farming alliances in the American South and West and won the admiration of a remarkable range of middle-class reformers, factory workers, women's groups, and genuine radicals. Wiebe embraced elite Progressives who created the order that prefigured the seemingly hegemonic New Deal power-sharing arrangements that would manage the post-war world. Thus, he disdained the backwards Populists, whose 1892 Omaha platform demanded the nationalization of transportation and communication services, a graduated income tax, a federally administered sub-treasury plan to raise crop prices and provide farmers with credit, and the use of ballot propositions and the direct election of senators to make America more democratic.Footnote ⁵

New Left historians pushed aside Hofstadter and Wiebe when they rehabilitated the Populists in accounts that blended social and political histories, accenting them with a deep respect for language, rhetoric, and metaphors. Lawrence Goodwyn famously reimagined heartland unrest as a genuine grassroots critique of late nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Democratic promise's farmers were visionaries whose radicalism arose out of a draconian system of credit that left them impoverished, was nurtured by the lecturers who spoke at meetings across rural America, and resulted in a movement culture that transcended the divisions region, race, gender, and party imposed on agrarians. For Goodwyn, the Populists represented the chance for democratic reform that the country's two-party system prevented and was lost when a faction tethered the movement to Democrat William Jennings Bryant's ill-fated 1896 campaign. Goodwyn crucified those in the shadow movement that traded revolution for the coinage of silver but only partially absolved the nation's small farmers. True, no historian would now leave the movement out of the US history survey and many scholars continue to admire the Populists who embraced rabble-rousing women lecturers, bedeviled elite Southern Democrats, and retreated into the potent reform wings of the two major parties after 1896. Yet few scholars still consider these white farmers to be as racially inclusive as Goodwyn intimated. The Populists, after all, had embraced ‘separate but equal’ segregation (then considered a progressive position) and favoured excluding immigrants.Footnote ⁶

Numerous New Left historians (often white student radicals, civil rights crusaders, and feminist firebrands) never ignored class and political conflict. They and their successors instead embraced social history to deconstruct a myriad of far-reaching workplace and political groundswells, which could not be neatly categorized on a continuum with a clear left, right, and centre or captured in the bifurcated language that millennial politicians and pundits used to describe themselves and their imagined constituencies. New Left scholars first gazed left and found the country's socialists and communists to be far from the marginal utopians whom Bell had described. James Weinstein's Ambiguous legacy: the left in American politics (1975), for example, showed socialists to have made a real impact in American cities and towns because they often set aside their Marxist campaign rhetoric to tend to the mundane affairs of governance. Labour historians writing in Steve Rosswurm's The CIO's left-led unions (1992) underscored how important communists had been to the labour movement: radicals had organized workers into unions, made no-strike pledges to get federally guaranteed membership agreements, and prodded their membership to elect Democrats on election day.

Power politics and institutional might were hardly absent from this scholarship. As in Goodwyn's Democratic promise, the well-spring of radical reform was almost always crushed, co-opted, or absorbed under the hegemonic forces of party politics, capitalist intransigence, or federal recognition. Indeed, according to the generation of new labour historians whom E. P. Thompson inspired, the crusading militant union culture of the 1940s (the inspiration for George Lipsitz's 1994 Rainbow at midnight: labor and culture in the 1940s) seemed to have died at the post-war bargaining table, where lawyers facilitated the routinized negotiations that put them at the movement's helm, not the rank-and-file nor their radical leadership.Footnote ⁷

After Ronald Reagan's 1980 election and the 1994 Republican Congressional victories (often referred to as the Republican Revolution), historians refocused their attentions on the right itself to chart the collapse of liberalism and the left. The first two major books after Ronald Reagan's election, Leo Ribuffo's The old Christian right: the Protestant far right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (1983) and Alan Brinkley's Voices of protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (1982), uncovered an elite and popular devotion to principles and figures at odds with the New Deal in its supposed heyday.Footnote ⁸ A wholesale reconsideration of the strength and reach of post-war liberalism soon followed, an historiographic turn reflected in the essays in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle's seminal Rise and fall of the New Deal order (1989).Footnote ⁹ All of these scholars went on to produce pioneering books on the failure of liberalism with an eye toward the doors New Dealers and Great Society liberals had left open for a political counterinsurgency opposed to wholesale economic reform, trade unionism, secularism, left-wing radicalism, racial equality, and a powerful regulatory state.Footnote ¹⁰

Scholars also looked at conservatives themselves. Only recently have historians delved into the right-wing powerbrokers who seemed to have bamboozled the white working class into voting against their economic interests. Thomas Frank made this argument famous in What's the matter with Kansas? How conservatives won the heart of America (2004). This reasoning can be found throughout scholarly narratives written before and after his bestseller, even after he was handily refuted in the work of political scientist Larry Bartels and historian Kim Phillips-Fein, whose Invisible hands: the making of the conservative movement from the New Deal to Reagan (2009) provided a far more nuanced explanation of corporate executive's top-down revolution.Footnote ¹¹

But the first tidal wave of books on conservatism scrutinized its white grassroots and resisted seeing these men and women as pawns in party politics. The community studies that characterized much of the post-1994 scholarship on the right deployed the very methodology that New Left historians had developed to chart left-wing struggles from below and probe the very definition of what it meant to be white, as defined by one's ethnicity, class, and gender. To be sure, as historian Eric Arneson pointed, much of the scholarship on whiteness coming out of the new labour and political histories rested on ‘highly problematic’ ‘assumptions, interpretive styles and techniques, and methodologies pursued by cultural historians’. Heavyweights David Roediger, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and Neil Foley tended to use ‘arbitrary and inconsistent definitions of their core concepts while they emphasize select elite constructions of race to the virtual exclusion of all other racial discourses’. Still even the skeptical Arneson admitted that rigorous research into the complexity of white identity offered an extraordinary window into the fabric of American life and politics. That was certainly true for Gerald Zahavi's remarkable 1996 ‘Passionate commitments: race, sex, and communism at Schenectady General Electric, 1932–1954’, which highlighted that the Communist party's dedication to racial and gender equality proved important to these radicals' marginalization and increasing unpopularity with the white unionists who created the staid International Union of Electrical Workers. A decade later, Phillips-Fein noted that General Electric's stridently conservative managers delighted in such dissension. They were hell-bent on breaking shopfloor solidarity, a point reflective of her generation's efforts to bring the lessons of the socio-cultural turn to bear on histories of business and politics.Footnote ¹²

Class, power, and struggle hardly disappeared when historians began researching the backbone of the early conservative movement, the white middle-class post-war suburbanites. They were foremost among the 40 per cent of Americans who voted for 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. He had brazenly assailed the managed economy and social safety net that enabled the white ethnic working class to seem middle class at home even though their collars remained blue on the job. At first, historians considered his defeat evidence of a transcendent liberalism; now, scholars contend that he solidified the base of support for Reagan's 1980 victory. Identity, language, and culture all promised, as Lisa McGirr and Becky Nicolaides stressed, to explain this glacial right-wing revolution, whilst simultaneously advancing scholarship past the dismissive consensus era tracts that had failed to notice a brewing anti-liberal counterinsurgency from below, or (more accurately) from the middle.Footnote ¹³

Such projects led historians to identify more than a Populist moment but a populist tradition, which traded in powerful analogies deployed by and persuasive to the common folk. The language of the many versus the few defied the labels of left, right, and centre in much the same way that Schenectady electricians and thoroughly modern suburban warriors did. Contrary to Rodgers's contention that probing identity revealed paralyzing inconsistencies detrimental to understanding class or power, populism provided an explanation for how grassroots rebels (across time and party affiliation) crafted metaphors that built coalitions. These uprisings bedevilled liberals proclaiming there to be a consensus in their favour, yoked a range of discontent into broad movements that transformed (not fractured) America, and rarely fitted neatly into the categories that ideologues and politicians had made for themselves. Michael Kazin identified this powerful rhetorical tradition as The populist persuasion (1995), whose David-and-Goliath metaphors punctuated demands for national independence, a farmers' sub-treasury, the prohibition of alcohol, Depression-era industrial unionism, militant post-war anti-communism, 1960s student radicalism, and the 1970s conservative counter-revolution against labour-liberalism. Just like the market metaphors in Age of fracture, many tried to use this moral authority to shatter the political status quo that a discrete few actually seemed to control (and when they did – it was generally brief).Footnote ¹⁴

The descriptor populist has since peppered social-cultural investigations into grassroots rebellions. Neither power nor class was absent from this scholarship, which included sweeping accounts of a twentieth-century protest tradition, which seemed to David Horowitz to be Beyond left and right (1997), and community-level investigations of progressive housewives, small businessmen, middle-class taxpayers, or welfare recipients. For example, the entire framework Robert Johnston used to investigate Portland's early twentieth-century middle class depended on separating petit-capitalist independent proprietors from the new corporate elite and the industrial working class. Populist also described the white, working-class renegades in Kevin Kruse's White flight: Atlanta and the making of modern conservatism (2005). They first voted into office a city business elite, who desegregated public services that Atlanta's white working class used. City fathers did so in the name of stopping federal civil rights intervention, appeasing black voters, and attracting investment. The result was not only a white exodus but also a reaction against racial moderation that dethroned the Delta's post-war political establishment and reconfigured the political configuration and red-state rhetoric of the post-industrial South. Populism also colours the recent renaissance in the history of America's left marked by the publication of Doug Rossinow's 2008 Visions of progress: the left-liberal tradition in America, Michael Kazin's 2011 American dreamers: how the left changed a nation, and Jonathan Bell's 2012 California crucible: the forging of modern American liberalism.Footnote ¹⁵

The most recent work on past white rebellions against liberal civil rights, religious, education, governmental, and agricultural policies continues to embrace populism as an explanatory tool for movements, institutions, and elections that seem inexplicable but whose consequences are palpable from reading about their fruition in Rodgers's work and their continued transformation during the Great Recession. The best books in this literature, however, use social and cultural specialists' methodologies to delve deep into communities, insurgencies, and movements that quite often started out as grassroots rebellions but were actually integrated into mainstream politics by elites, often the ones responsible for the discontent that sparked these low-level rebellions in the first place.

Co-option often proved more difficult and fraught than terms like ‘astroturf’ suggest. That certainly was the case for America's foremost political paradox: California. The Golden State is among the nation's bluest, yet political scientist Daniel HoSang notes that this liberal bastion's voters have passed a slew of racist and anti-immigrant ballot referendums, much to the dismay of governors and state legislators in both parties who have depended on California and US Supreme Court justices to defy direct democracy. Racial propositions: ballot initiatives and the making of postwar California interrogates some of the state's most infamous post-Second World War ballot initiatives, starting with those grassroots rebellions against state laws to end segregation on the job, at home, and in school and concluding with aggressive assaults on immigrant rights. HoSang seeks to understand why some arguments and policy justifications triumphed over others. His answer: an overarching ‘political whiteness’ hamstrung civil rights activists. Mainstream post-war definitions of progress presupposed the liberal ideals of rights, freedom, opportunity, and equality. Yet, even as California became a majority–minority state, a plurality of registered voters (still overwhelmingly white) had ‘a gaze on politics constituted by whiteness’, which ‘constantly disavows its omnipresence and insists on its own innocence’. This white political subjectivity set ‘the terms and boundaries within which such liberal commitments could be expressed – a liberalism that was always already racial’ and defined by evolving metaphors of inclusion, exclusion, and innocence during referenda campaigns that simultaneously transformed Golden State politics (pp. 20–1).

HoSang shows that initiatives were public spectacles that did not fracture the electorate but actually unified voters, including some minorities and immigrants, behind regressive policies. In the early post-war initiatives against desegregation, white businessmen, real estate agents, and affluent parents set the terms of political debate as they gathered signatures and then laboured to convince a voting majority to stop the creation of bureaucracies to oversee hiring decisions, to defend their property values by asserting their rights to sell and rent to whomever they wanted, and to prevent all California children (not just those who were white) from being bused out of their neighbourhoods in the name of integration. These middle-class activists' appeals matured during each campaign. In the late 1940s, they quickly jettisoned overtly racist, inflammatory rhetoric, which appalled the majority of Californians, and instead used inclusive, seemingly colour-blind arguments that implicitly spoke to the rights of white suburbanites, who believed that they had not caused America's historic apartheid and should not, therefore, become the faultless victims of top-level social engineering.

These arguments bedevilled white liberals, who found themselves on the defensive and unable to tender arguments outside the terms of political whiteness that constrained their progressive tendencies. Those favouring housing desegregation hesitated to admit discrimination existed and instead emphasized how negligible the effect on white homeowners would be if policies continued. This defensiveness persisted during the 1980s and 1990s when immigration referenda roiled California. Political whiteness kept civil and immigrant rights groups from mounting effective challenges against those Californians (many of them Democrats and self-identified liberals) opposed to bilingual education, in favour of voting materials printed in ‘English Only’, desperate to stop illegal aliens from using public services, and confident that affirmative action – the American version of positive discrimination – did more harm to minorities than good. At stake was California's fiscal future, the safety of its taxpayers, and the rights of its law-abiding citizens. Political whiteness's seemingly colour-blind clarion calls even spoke to some Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans, proving it ‘can be inhabited by those who do not identify as white’ (p. 194). The only ones who resisted were top Republicans and Democrats, President Bill Clinton included. Leaders ignored or recoiled from these initiatives out of political expediency, only joining the fray after Golden State rebellions began to make headlines across the country (much to the delight of activists who hoped their direct-democracy solutions would be aped elsewhere, maybe even introduced in Congress).

Even though Racial propositions underscores how powerful and transformative grassroots rebellions were to long-standing political debates, HoSang almost proves Rodgers's assertion that scholars can no longer grapple with power outside the confines of race. HoSang's introduction lays out a sophisticated racial reinterpretation of liberalism that will hopefully inspire other scholars to see ideologies as inherently racialized. Yet HoSang's argument is hardly supple enough to interrogate fully Golden State politics. The single explanation for voter support, repeated ad nauseam, is an all-encompassing, hegemonic political whiteness, which all Californians, regardless of their gender, class, party, and, in some cases race, shared. This claim hardly squares with the New Left's pioneering exploration of whiteness, much less the recent sophisticated portraits of white suburban housewives desperate to have some influence over the values that their children learned in school, white evangelical entrepreneurs who spent time and money building the religious organizations that remade post-war American politics, or the nation's multi-cultural conservatives, who were hardly the unreflective, almost self-loathing, voters whom HoSang made them out to be.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet the richly detailed case-studies of these Racial propositions makes clear the importance of money and power to promote arguments for racially exclusive, colour-blind policies. White and minority liberals vigorously objected to them but rarely had the war chests to reframe the terms of debate, much less set them. Indeed, this book implicitly tells the story of how white mid-sized businessmen, independent realtors, and middle-class parents inadvertently created the multi-million dollar direct-democracy industry, which arguably does more to govern contemporary California than the state assembly or governor. Post-war initiatives were ad hoc affairs, which grew in sophistication as the Golden State sprawled. Only in the late 1940s did a progressive coalition of civil rights, labour, and religious groups put forward a demand for a state-level Fair Employment Practices Commission, which an African American assemblyman and liberal white Republican Governor Earl Warren could not get through the legislature. The electorate seemed receptive but proved itself easily swayed by top California businessmen who veiled their segregationist impulses behind claims that new hiring rules were anathema to the American principles of free enterprise. In HoSang's narrative, this market-oriented language was hammered out from what seems to be a regional urban business elite, who had begun to hone their colour-blind free-market rhetoric a generation before it would come to define Rodgers's Age of fracture.

Money helped sustain, perfect, and spread these nascent arguments against consolidation-era liberals. In 1964, real estate agents organized volunteers to gather signatures and disseminate literature against a fair housing law; by the late 1970s, desperate affluent parents opposed to busing used their wealth to pay professionals to get petitions signed and mail directed to receptive voters. By the 1980s, Washington-based US English had to finance much of the ‘English Only’ campaigns, which depended on the expertise of Thomas Gann, the well-regarded ‘Master’ behind well-orchestrated initiatives to slash taxes and limit government spending. Outside influence only increased. Money from donors across the country was needed to help place initiatives on ballots in this heavily watched bellwether state.

Labour, civil, and immigrant rights groups rarely had the reserves to mount effective campaigns, leaving the offensive to mainstream liberals and Democrats who tendered defensive arguments against the solutions proposed, not the problems business owners and affluent suburbanites identified. Progressive groups made their case better in California courts. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, both sides had lawsuits ready to be filed immediately after election day in order to dull the outcome. Golden State direct democracy thus became both farcical and trendsetting. The public pageants HoSang described had little to do with the presidential speeches Rodgers interrogated. The headline-making initiatives resulted from the power of well-monied political operatives and lawyers who used their influence to sharpen and wield the sword of political whiteness, a political subjectivity whose pre-eminence depended in part on the particular men and women who marshalled their substantial resources to reach voters susceptible to its seductive claims of innocence and inclusion.

HoSang's all-encompassing, uniform political whiteness also looks far different in two other recent books on post-war Southern California, which have more fully harnessed the lessons of the socio-cultural turn to produce far richer accounts of American politics. Both emphasize the importance of identity in forging a political movement and worldview capable of frustrating California liberals and countering demands for civil justice.

Gender takes centre stage in Michelle Nickerson's 2011 Mothers of conservatism: women and the postwar right but hardly displaces race. Southern California's affluent right-wing housewives were not only white but their crusades to defend their property rights, keep progressive education out of public schools, and further conservative Republican causes ‘conflated the problems of racial and bureaucratic outsiders’, even though women sometimes ‘buried unspoken assumptions (well, usually unspoken), about the interests of non-whites and consequences that would result from racial mixing’ (p. xxii). Female political fervour was hardly unique to the right. The hardship and political turmoil of the Great Depression had actually provoked ‘a new female political sensibility’, a ‘Housewife populism [that] spanned the political spectrum, encompassing the attitudes and activism of women on the left and the right’ (p. xiv). This generation of women tended to be ‘more child-centered and education-focused’ (p. 89) but maternalism does not capture their worldview. They were guardians of their communities, not just their home, protecting both against enemies characterized as ‘outside elites who aimed to exploit that community’ (p. xv). Nickerson traces the white, affluent, feminine populism so crucial to modern conservatism back before the white, liberal second-wave feminists came to the fore in Age of fracture. Gender was reworked during the Depression, when upper-class women abandoned elitist condemnations of the New Deal and the trade union movement. Middle-class Los Angelinas followed suit after the war, describing themselves as a benighted bulwark against all-powerful school boards, federal bureaucrats, and communists.

Conservative homemakers did much of the groundwork to forge the metaphors behind HoSang's political whiteness and Southern California's gendered political culture. They, like their middle-class counterparts on the left and in the centre, were hardly the wilting privileged flowers imprisoned in what Betty Freidan famously called The feminine mystique (1963).Footnote ¹⁷ Right-wing women printed tracts in their garages and then drove all over Southern California delivering them to study groups, high-profile talks, and conservative bookstores, more than a few of which were manned by women. As with the Populist party decades before, literature and lecturers were the lifeblood of this uniquely female activism. Women devoured the words of the right's intellectuals, who assailed liberalism and communism in person or in the pages of dog-eared copies of National Review, Freeman, and Human Events. Housewives gained a sense of the issues defining the growing anti-liberal moment and were thus able to ground their very local struggles against progressive education and mental health initiatives in high-level discussions of ‘states' rights, internationalism, nationalization, and other terms that expressed shared interpretations of the forces shaping racial transformation in America’ (p. xxii). A few of these women even went to Washington to protest schooling trends, which they considered contradictory to the principles of American individualism.

Conservative mothers had reason to be alarmed. Liberal educators assumed racism and rabid anti-communism to be symptoms of mental illness, fodder for the consensus big-wigs who already considered the right crazy and for the progressive teachers who believed that they were best equipped to teach values along with the ABCs. Southern California's conservative mothers fought for their authority as parents but also for their place in the growing faction that displaced the Republican party's liberal leadership. Housewives were the hostesses, booksellers, and cheerleaders whom Goldwater's 1964 presidential run needed. Yet his handlers clearly misunderstood this conservative sex when they produced an inflammatory documentary film entitled Choice, whose vulgar scenes enraged women more than it inspired them to campaign for him. Yet, women's activism, as Nickerson emphasizes, only increased after his defeat, particularly over the single issues (like abortion) that defined the gendered culture wars in Age of fracture and continue to animate the white, female-dominated Tea Party.

Nickerson's housewives also helped establish the neighbourhood churches that became the expansive religious organizations thoroughly enmeshed in the 1970s culture clash and important to Reagan's 1980 victory, the end point of Darren Dochuk's ambitious 2011 From bible belt to sunbelt: plain-folk religion, grassroots politics, and the rise of evangelical conservatism. By the 1960s, these houses of worship, along with affiliated para-church organizations and Christian schools sprinkled throughout Los Angeles's sprawl, realigned Southern California evangelicalism with the Southern Baptist religious tradition. This sunbelt cross-connection simultaneously brought Southern evangelicalism from the margins of American political and religious life to the mainstream. Laymen, preachers, and entrepreneurs began their errand to redeem the hedonistic Golden State in the 1930s, when the Great Depression uprooted them from the western south. The outskirts of LA's shantytowns were, as Dochuk expertly shows, a world away from the Dustbowl that the country's plain folk had left and the affluent suburbs that these enclaves would become.

Defence spending, of course, underwrote Southern California's sprawl but plebeian evangelicals transformed its politics with a herrenvolk democracy that took inspiration from Jesus and Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. Their worldview was nonetheless ‘Grounded in life experience on the geographical fringe’ and ‘exhibited a general hostility toward any aristocracy of ‘wealth, privilege, or political preferment’ seemingly flaunted by elites in cities, as well as an ingrained assumption of white racial superiority and the blessedness of small government and the ‘common man” (p. 9). Fragmented LA actually strengthened plain-folk resolve to protect their traditions because community was as important as individualism to Southern Christians. Yet, evangelicals did not look backward to recreating the Ozarks but forward to redeeming the Golden State, a new frontier for Christ. They anchored themselves into the secular crabgrass jungle neighbouring hedonistic Hollywood by hastily building street-corner churches to preserve the religious traditions that they had transported across the country. Itinerant preachers also came west to strength their congregations' resolve to bear collective witness in post-war LA. Forging a Christian community in sprawling LA was expensive, particularly as evangelicals girded themselves against the seductive lure of welfare programs and the restrictive zoning measures and permits that leading California liberals deployed to frustrate the just-replanted Southern religious culture. Thus, Christian schools, colleges, and radio stations were both a proactive step to provide spiritually-grounded education for opportunity and advancement but also a defensive measure against white mainline Protestants, liberals, and progressives, who detested Southern mores and sought to force the plain folk to assimilate into Southern California's mainstream white culture.

This early culture clash actually pushed the evangelicals away from California's labour-led Popular Front and toward the state's urban business elite, whose post-war free-market metaphors had frustrated civil right's activists' demands for fair employment. LA evangelicals were hardly duped into siding with the wealthy. The plain folk did in fact face a concerted secular assault on their beliefs and backgrounds. Yet, they also rethought their relationship to the rich as they became prosperous from the hard work and individual initiative that reaped more dividends in Southern California's defence industries than either ever had in rural America. Reward became divine so long as the fruits of affluence went toward furthering the Christian mission. In the 1950s, evangelicals opened their wallets to support radio programmes, bookstores, para-church organizations (like the well-organized Campus Crusade for Christ, still in existence), and schools, which spread the gospel along with conservative arguments against trade unionism, federal power, and desegregation.

The powerbrokers at the helm of national conservative organizations hardly foisted these ideas on Southern evangelicals. Soul searching produced this new populist gospel of wealth, which began to position the evangelical cause with the goals of the more mainline Protestant and secular business conservatives trying to orchestrate the top-down revolution in Phillips-Fein's Invisible hands. Cultural assimilation was a part of this realignment. Christian leaders and educators deftly taught the laity to embrace more mainstream habits of dress, leisure, and colour-blind conservatism to make the devout into respectable foot soldiers in the highly publicized elections and ballot initiatives that advanced the broad conservative cause. During the mid-1960s, evangelicals actually ‘desegregated their pews, built interracial “mission churches”, and held Race Relation Sundays’ (p. 279), during which there was an exchange with Black Baptist churches to discuss openly race, racism, and civil rights with African American preachers, like E. V. Hill. His hard-scrabble Southern upbringing had made him more sympathetic to white evangelicals than to students eager for Black Power. Youth also perpetuated these evangelicals' distinctly California ethos. Christian Baby Boomers embraced the student left's style but not their critique of capitalism, which made these young ‘Jesus People’ an asset to perpetuating the core values of their parents' faith and politics while both were under attack during the culture wars, a tumultuous period before evangelical ambition helped the conservative movement reach its 1980 fruition.

Dochuk's and Nickerson's scholarship exemplifies how thoroughly interrogating identity (as the previous generation of historians had done so well) offers a better explanation of the inter and intraclass political conflicts that evolved into late twentieth-century culture clashes. Both spotlight Marie Koenig's personal odyssey, which exemplifies how multi-faceted post-war political whiteness was and why a distinct constellation within white, urban Southern California would grow in national power and prominence and thereby redefine American populism, politics, and whiteness. Nickerson profiles Koenig as one of the housewives who had no interest in staying at home. She had grown up in a Louisiana household devoted to Governor Huey Long, who defined the Southern form of fascism that California liberals feared. Two years of college coursework and some secretarial experience helped her find work when she joined her sister in Los Angeles during the Second World War. Koenig prospered in California, first as a unionized secretary, who quit out of frustration with organizers. She happily accepted work with Spiritual Mobilization, ‘an institution that led her into the conservative movement’. Koenig soon became a volunteer because marriage and childrearing kept her from remunerative work and she found herself desperate ‘to get out of the house’ (p. 57).

Koenig seems to have spent considerable time in a host of conservative, cultural, and women's professional organizations. ‘I just felt that certain things had to be done’, she explained at the end of her life, ‘I was just a plain, ordinary patriotic America’ (p. 59). Yet, Koenig's appearance in Racial propositions shows that, by the 1980s, she was actually ‘a well-connected conservative and freelance publicist’ (p. 139) with the resources and contacts needed for organizations eager to fund and pass regressive anti-immigrant ballot initiatives. Yet, she was best integrated into conservative circles, which did not consider illegal immigration among the most pressing issues of the day. Koenig's plain-folk Christian cohort were now among California's anti-communist economic elite, who feared Soviet influence in Latin America and relied on immigrants to keep labour costs down and their domiciles clean.

Koenig's cameos in From bible belt to sunbelt underscore just how much political power and moral authority the plain folk extracted from their hard scrabble past to triumph during ballot initiatives and presidential campaigns. Dochuk noted that Koenig had lost her mother at age three and her father at age six. Her grandparents raised her, telling her that the family could trace its roots back to President Andrew Jackson, a Southern folk hero to poor whites who credited him with providing landless whites with the right to vote. Religion and politics cast an equally long shadow over her childhood. She attended church services and youth programmes weekly but her true calling was politics. At age eight, she wrote and delivered a public tribute to Long, whose 1935 assassination devastated her but also strengthened her commitment to his populist principles. Indeed, Koenig did not just quit her Hollywood job: she took it upon herself to document her communist-led union's ‘immoral, unjust, and un-American’ practices and handed over harassment reports signed by other frustrated employees to studio executives (p. 136). Twenty years later, she devoted herself to a new political hero, Barry Goldwater, who depended on affluent women (like Koenig) to use their time and money to support his cause. Yet, Koenig and her domestic comrades-in-arms were enmeshed in Goldwater's 1964 presidential bid because they belonged to and helped finance the evangelical churches, in Koenig's case Lutheran (Missouri Synod) Church, and para-church organizations (like Koenig's former employer Spiritual Mobilization). Both religious institutions had helped groom the plain folk for mainstream party politics. Her husband's success as a financial planner also afforded her the time to volunteer and build her reputation as a political strategist as California direct democracy became dependent on outside donors, paid organizers, and pre-emptive lawsuits.

Dochuk's and Nickerson's respectful treatment of Koenig exemplifies how fully interrogating race, class, and gender has actually enabled scholars to understand better the politics and power that enabled grassroots critics of the status quo eventually to redefine national debates. A mother's moral authority over her community can clearly not be underestimated, both in its ability to energize housewives and give credence to their colour-blind defence of parental authority and property rights. But Dochuk also offers two new categories to understand whiteness's post-war transformation: region and religion. Historians have long asserted that the CIO's commitment to industrial democracy and the New Deal social welfare programmes to ensure affirmative action for ethnic whites assimilated the Jewish, Catholic, and ethnic working class into a homogeneous middle.Footnote ¹⁸ Not so for poor Southern evangelicals, whose separation from mainline Protestant churches and their Dixie origins disgusted Popular Front radicals. For example, noted anti-fascist Carey McWilliams, who was most famous for denouncing the racism endemic to California's Factories in the fields (1939), considered the plain folk a scourge on the LA area. The liberal-left crusade against the Christian plain folk convinced migrants that there was no place for Christ in progressive circles or the trade union movement. Hence, evangelical entrepreneurs and preachers had the power and prestige to guide their flock's careful assimilation to Golden State culture. Plain-folk religion remained intact, though its style, manner, and metaphors changed to blend into urban, white California and ultimately transform US politics.

The free-enterprise conservatism embedded within evangelical, housewife populism also transformed rural white America in ways that a hegemonic political whiteness cannot fully explain. Shane Hamilton's exceptional Trucking country: the road to America's Wal-Mart economy (2008) offers perhaps the best lens to probe the dynamics between power politics and white populist rebellion: the unevenly regulated trucking industry. Hamilton reorients twentieth-century history around farm policy because abundant, cheap food is one of the overlooked symbols of America's post-war abundance. Fully stocked shelves depended on the expansive federal bureaucracies that set and enforced federal farm policies, technological innovations that enabled agribusiness executives to cut labour and transportation costs between fields and suburbs, and the former small landholders and field hands who drove the fruits of industrial agriculture all over the nation.

Supermarkets symbolized a post-war prosperity confined to suburbia. The twentieth-century laws, solutions, and innovations tendered to solve finally the persistent late nineteenth-century Farm Problem proved malignant (sometimes unintentionally) for rural America. New Dealers, for example, had embraced trucking as a means to break the power of railroad executives, who had helped crush the late nineteenth-century Populists who dared to demand the transportation network's nationalization. Liberals had also exempted foodstuffs from 1930s shipping regulations, a loophole that post-war appointees to the Agriculture Department used to undermine intentionally New Deal reforms in the name of free enterprise. These free-market conservatives studied and promoted technological innovations that moved meat-packing operations out of union-friendly Chicago, breaking these Second City slaughterhouses' long-standing stranglehold on beef production, but inadvertently created a whole new cattle monopoly situated near the ranches in the interior West. These packers limited competition, controlled food supply, and set labour costs. Hence, American agriculture hardly fractured after every sector of American trucking was deregulated in the late 1970s. Agribusiness actually consolidated its power and operations.

Trucking country is as much a work of social history as it is policy and business history because high-level decisions, mundane technological innovations, and asphalt supply chains transformed the countryside, the home of independent country truckers. These desperate drivers made industrial farming possible and profitable. Hauling appealed to those small farmers who barely scraped by before the Depression but still resisted permanently picking up stakes for the opportunities sprawling Los Angeles offered. They were certainly willing to use the roads New Dealers built and improved to haul produce, meat, and dairy on the cheap. Farming interests prevented the New Dealers from regulating this ‘wildcat’ trucking. Haulers hardly wanted the federal or union interference oversight would have brought. Hamilton's Midwestern farmers distrusted the central state and organized labour as much as Dochuk's Texarkana plain folk.

Servicing suburban supermarkets hardly civilized the increasing number of rural white men who could no longer turn a profit from their fields. Truckers were once thought to be the uniformed, clean-cut ‘Knights of the Road’ (p. 108), on whom motorists could depend for roadside repairs and warnings of dangerous conditions ahead. By the 1970s, the majority were still family men but these ‘Kings of the Road’ had embraced a lawless, tough-guy, social-outcast ethos, as potent and widespread as the affluent Christian conservatism espoused by the well-manicured housewives who did their shopping around their political commitments. These ladies would never lunch at trucker pit stops, full-service stations where haulers could shower, nap, and proudly ‘choke and puke’ (p. 201) a meal that was quick and cheap enough to fit within the cost calculus of agriculture executives, retailers, and consumers; all wanted food delivered fast, fresh, and damn-near free.

Gender, race, class, and region combined to define roadside culture and these haulers' politics. Indeed, these men remade rural America and federal policy in reaction to the widening divide between town and country. By the 1970s, haulers had no illusions about their independence. The farmers who took to the roads during the Depression may have laboured under the fantasy that they were still working for themselves, but some, just a few decades later, openly described themselves as ‘slaves to monopoly’ (p. 187). These men made peace with bearing the cost of inexpensive groceries by reimaging themselves as independent ‘asphalt cowboys’ who remained defiant ‘in an era of big business, big government, big labor unions, and, of course, big meatpackers'. Rural America's new icons rode big rigs because ‘standing tall in the saddle’ ‘made the job worth doing’ (p. 146).

This bravado also nurtured some drivers' self-described radical conservatism, a worldview that included a contradictory array of political positions that Hamilton labels neopopulism. Long-standing faith in the free market cut through their disparate distaste for discrimination, corporate capitalism, taxation, welfare, drug use, and abortion (as well as support for poverty reduction programmes, animal rights, and unions – except for the infamously corrupt Teamsters who organized truckers in other sectors). Independent drivers consequently considered deregulation their salvation, a means to break the power of Teamsters, food processors, and bureaucrats. Soaring seventies fuel prices proved incendiary, sparking highway protests and Congressional inquiries in a moment, as Rodgers and Hamilton point out, when regulation was criticized from the left, right, and centre. The entire hauling industry's 1980 deregulation did little to help the drivers who had come to Washington to ensure passage. Just a few years later, they complained that reform had ‘created more gypsies than the market can bear’ (p. 234). Competition only increased after the North American Free Trade Agreement's (NAFTA) 1994 passage. Yet, drivers never proved themselves the clueless red-state denizens, whom Thomas Frank described in What's the matter with Kansas? Drivers decried Reagan-era increases on federal trucking fees and have remained frustrated with both parties, neither of which seem to acknowledge or offer much relief from the perils of a high-speed, low-wage life led between farms, factories, distribution centres, and strip malls.

The Great Recession forced a reckoning of sorts. Unemployed, uninsured, and bankrupt Americans are now likely to be white, a sea change in postindustrial America where being white, more often than not, still guaranteed opportunity (if not affluence). Shock best described this discovery. The blogosphere went wild once journalist Hannah Rosin's The end of men: and the rise of women (p. 2012) publicized the twisted gender norms in deindustrializing communities, where laid-off white men refuse to embrace service work that is hardly lucrative but provides enough to transform wives into breadwinners. This income is hardly enough for one person to survive on, as liberals and progressives pointed out after conservative pundit Charles Murray's Coming apart: the state of white America, 1960–2011 appeared in 2012. Murray rejected income inequality as an explanation for the breakdown of white working-class families, where marriage, church attendance, and a Protestant work ethic seemed in short supply. He instead blamed the liberal welfare state, an odd declaration since Princeton economist, Noble prize winner, and New York Times editorialist Paul Krugman often demanded Democrats reckon with how little their party has done for white and minority workers.Footnote ¹⁹

The populist (largely white) outcry coming from the Tea Party hardly has much faith in these journalists and academics (not to mention politicians). These millennial populists also will not be wagged, as the single best study of this insurgency makes clear. Harvard political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's The Tea Party and the remaking of Republican conservatism show self-described Tea Party Patriots to be in rebellion against the big conservative media outlets, political institutions, and corporations that reached fruition during Rodgers' Age of fracture. These white rebels are also the most infamous critics of President Barack Obama, his tepid stimulus bill, and landmark health care legislation, popularly known as ObamaCare. ‘Taxed Enough Already’ parties were small, genuinely grassroots, colourful affairs, which made for great television in the new era of the unyielding twenty-four-hour news cycle. Tea Partiers (generally older white Americans) fastened unused tea bags to their clothes (sometimes Revolutionary costumes), brandished dog-eared copies of the Constitution, and perplexingly demanded the government stop interfering with Medicare, the national health insurance scheme for the elderly. Patriots, though small in number, made headlines. The right-wing media lauded them as the conservative movement's shock troops, the ordinary Americans taking a stand against the un-American forces of spending, taxation, and big government. The mainstream, liberal, and left-wing press (like their predecessors in Rodgers's consolidation era) dismissed protesters as retrograde, racist, morons, who may have been able to quote the Founders but had not grasped the very basics facts of history or current events.

Skocpol and Williamson, in contrast, approached these fed-up Americans with the skill, respect, and vigour found in the best histories since the socio-cultural turn. They considered this small upsurge's growth into a complex social movement a remarkable case-study of interest to academic theorists and political organizers who puzzle over how to use websites, emails, and tweets effectively. The first Tea Party protests came after CNBC reporter Rick Santelli's fabled February 2009 rant against the Obama administration's plan to shore up the imploding mortgage industry. He demanded a ‘Chicago Tea Party’ of ‘capitalists’ because ‘The government is rewarding bad behavior’ (p. 7)! The clip went viral, inspiring conservative radio jocks and bloggers as well as ordinary Americans eager to protest the just-elected president's policies. Social networking brought these citizens together, introducing social conservatives more focused on moral and cultural issues (like abortion) to the everyday secular libertarians, who stressed freedom and choice in all matters. Tensions existed over the role of government in personal affairs. Nonetheless, clusters of outraged whites generally agreed that they needed to defend the principles of free enterprise. Small crowds gathered in a handful of cities on 27 February 2009 to protest; six weeks later, hundreds of thousands rallied on 15 April, when tax returns were due.

Skocpol and Williamson caution that coverage skewed this movement, which appeared far larger and more boisterous than it was. Those who shouted loudest made headlines but they were a cantankerous minority, who often attended televised rallies but not local meetings. Plus, only one fifth of voting-age Americans strongly agreed with Tea Party principles. Roughly 1,000 local Tea Parties existed and 800 remained active in summer 2011. Most local groups are quite small with only a few dozen attendees; those with larger rosters usually have just a handful of true activists. Membership is overwhelmingly older, white, and male, though women are often leaders. Patriots are also relatively well-educated and economically comfortable but painfully aware of how precarious their middle-class existence is. Members bristle at charges of flagrant racism because they consider their anger directed at politicians who keep giving away revenue to those who have not earned it. Tea Partiers' insistent cry of ‘I Want My Country Back’ bespeaks their outrage that the government old-age provisions that they have paid into over their lifetimes will disappear because Democrats want to extend benefits to immigrants, minorities, and young people, who have not spent years working on the assumption that they will someday retire. Patriots also want the Republican party back. Tea Partiers (even those who belong to the Republican party) generally consider themselves to the right of most Republicans, and set their sights on being ‘watch dogs’, who would force party allegiance to the Tea Party's brand of American conservatism.

Yet, Skocpol and Williamson also uncover the truth behind liberal-left assertions that the Tea Party is more astroturf than grassroots. Actually, it is a perplexing mix – as historians have shown past populist upsurges to have been. There is not a single Tea Party but ‘loose ties of mutual convenience’ between ‘a gaggle of jostling and sometimes competing local and national organizations, none of them directly controlled by the institutional Republican Party’ but still ‘pushing to influence GOP office holders, candidates, and voters'. The right-wing media also played an outsized role in sewing together ragtag populist efforts and well-funded top-down machinations. Everyday Americans started local Tea Parties. Leaders generally had previous experience in politics and knowledge of social media, which helped bring folks with shared values together. Few reporters noticed, even after the 27 February protests. Only Rupert Murdoch's Fox News's stable of commentators became the Tea Partiers' ‘cheerleader in chief’ (p. 130). They directed viewers to the station's website for information on local rallies in the weeks before the Tax Day demonstrations. Conservative broadcasters lauded patriots, proclaiming the Republican Party to be these patriotic Americans' natural ally in defending the heartland against the country's coastal elite. Fox and other conservative media outlets' portrayals carried weight because ‘what America has right now is a thousand-pound-gorilla media juggernaut on the right, … coexisting with other news outlets trying to keep up while making fitful efforts, twentieth-century style, to check facts and cover “both sides of the story”’ (p. 126).

When mainstream broadcasters, such as CNN, turned their attention to the Tea Party, they effectively legitimated right-wing media claims that this small insurgency was a mass movement. It was actually liberal reporters who identified politicians such as Massachusetts Senate hopeful Scott Brown as a Tea Party leader, even though his campaign to fill the just-passed Senator Ted Kennedy's seat had tenuous connections at best. Brown welcomed the comparison in early 2010: wealthy billionaires, DC-based lobbying organizations (such as Freedom Works), and Republican-affiliated Political Action Committees (most notably the Tea Party Express) were spending millions to elect Republican candidates – much to the displeasure of Tea Party Patriots. Many, to be sure, welcomed the attention and support. Some nonetheless bristled at the policy proposals being made in their name and the manufactured rallies that Fox News, CNN, and FreedomWorks planned, which stole attention away from local meetings and grassroots initiatives. Top Republicans were equally wary. Tea Partiers relished challenging established Republicans in primaries, a tactic that enabled Patriots to purge the GOP of those to their left, which effectively pushed the Republican party further to the right of George W. Bush, dragged the Republican primary out, and produced candidates unviable for general election contests.

Skocpol and Williamson's research indicates that this latest white, populist insurgency did not result from post-9/11 attempts to rearrange a fragmented America. Tea Party Patriots instead seem to be reacting against the very hegemonic Republican party, right-wing media, and conservative lobbying contingent that suburban housewives, uprooted evangelicals, and hard-scrabble truckers had helped elite business conservatives forge in order to take their country back from liberals, trade unionists, and bureaucrats two generations before. Intriguing parallels and divergences exist between past and present. Both epochs lacked anything approximating a consensus. Plus, many Patriots are as wary of outsiders and their influence as Los Angeles's white homemakers and uprooted Southerners. Tea Partiers also proudly recount their efforts to elect Barry Goldwater in 1964, when they also refused to follow the Republican leadership's diktats in order to move the GOP to the right. The Great Recession and Obama's 2008 election has also instilled the same grassroots pessimistic persistence against destitution and liberalism that transformed the economy, politics, and culture of metropolitan California and rural America after the Second World War. True, the Tea Party's female leaders may no longer run bookstores or drive right-wing missives up-and-down LA freeways but they certainly wield free online twenty-first social networking tools to great effect, at a moment when many Americans (not just rural haulers) wonder if they can afford a tank of gas. And post-war, colourblind free-enterprise metaphors remain just as powerful now as they did when employers, real estate agents, and parents used them against fair employment, housing, and schooling policies. Yet Patriots embraced these twenty-first-century techniques and tropes because the radio networks, para-church organizations, and book clubs that white suburbanites created to make the GOP conservative now seem ineffective, unresponsive, and calcified, especially since (as HoSang showed) outside liberal lobbyists can also spend hefty sums to influence ballot initiatives or to fund court challenges. And unlike the Southern plain folk, Tea Partiers seem to have no interest in softening their diatribes, demands, and demonstrations in the interest of mainstream acceptance or a general election victory.

Thus, the Tea Party's political authority clearly eclipses its size, which is why the movement remains (like others before it) attractive to Republicans eager to rebuild their winning majority and repugnant to progressives eager for more change. Elizabeth Price Foley is clearly the former. This Florida International University law professor's The Tea Party: three principles (2012) is neither a history of the movement nor a convincing account of its beliefs. Rather, this libertarian, like so many elite conservatives, has written a manifesto in favour of limited government, US sovereignty, and originalism, which denotes a manner of interpreting the Constitution as the Founders supposedly would. She warns readers that she is not a member of the Tea Party but a former liberal, who has found in this ‘loosely united group of individuals’ (p. 220) an admirable stand against ‘the extreme positions of progressives and social conservatives – both of which seek to control individual choices for various paternalistic ends[, which] just don't resonate with most Americans; they never have, and hopefully never will’ (p. 229).

Foley offers little evidence that Tea Partiers share her concerns or detailed knowledge of case law. Indeed, her slim volume proves Skocpol and Williamson's contention that politicians, pundits, and intellectuals are dedicated to co-opting the grassroots Tea Party. Foley, for example, asserts that the Great Recession sparked this millennial rebellion against a festering anti-exceptionalism that liberals (like Obama) promoted overseas in ‘Apology Tours’. Tea Partiers, Foley contends, are proud of their country's exceptionalism, ‘shorthand for defending foundational American principles against a political correctness that has openly declared war on them’ (p. 6). Foremost among these dicta is ‘limited governance consistent with the U. S. Constitution's meaning’ (p. 20). While Foley is right to point out that Tea Partiers pointed to the Constitution's authors to oppose ObamaCare and the Wall Street bailout, she ignores their defence of the kind federal entitlements that made ethnic workers middle class and instead provides an account of the Constitution's late eighteenth-century passage that ignores fervent debate over the size, power, and authority of the central government that then presided over just thirteen states. Governance and original intent also dominate her defence of American sovereignty, the ‘right and duty to defend its geographic territory and legal independence from other nations and supra natural entities such as the United Nations’ (p. 76), and originalism, which assumes ‘the best interpretation [of the Constitution] is that which most closely matches the meaning ascribed by those Americans who originally ratified the relevant language’ (p. 64).

Foley's scrutiny of landmark judicial decisions soon becomes overshadowed by the type of over-the-top denunciations that certainly occurred at astroturf rallies but were few and far between at local Tea Party meetings. She, for example, is particularly wary of ‘internationalists’ and ‘globalists’, who seek to ‘“turn the founders upside down” and “put together what they put asunder”’ by ‘bulk[ing] up government, making it bigger and stronger, using global sovereignty, as a means to enforce certain norms or values that are only vaguely defined’ (p. 78). Jurists are on the frontlines of this initiative, including the Supreme Court justices who dared to consider international precedent when deciding recent death penalty and sodomy cases. ‘The cold hard politically incorrect fact’, Foley rails, ‘is that America judges shouldn't care what other countries think because their job is to interpret our Constitution’ (p. 118). This and other forms of ‘living constitutionalism’, Foley opines, ‘assumes that the only people who can be relied on to ‘do the right thing’ are the left-leaning Justices on the Supreme Court. The rest of We the People are presumably too ignorant, mean-spirited, or indifferent to moral suasion’ (p. 179). She is equally disdainful of liberal academics and journalists, who assume ‘If We the People can be convinced the founders were racist, sexist bastards, we won't want to revere either them or their pesky Constitution. Why should we give a hoot about what a bunch of backward founders thought about things’ (p. 189)?

Skocpol and Williamson make clear that this sort of screed does not necessarily energize Tea Partiers. Grassroots rebels certainly share Foley's sense that race does not motivate their protests but only a few tended to shout remonstrations like the ones she makes in these pages. Moreover, the Patriots Skocpol and Williamson interviewed certainly held allegiance to the Founders. Still, insurgents were equally dedicated to protecting their federal old-age entitlements, including the social conservatives who had terse words for the libertarians in their local caucuses. Many, of course, shared Foley's disdain for illegal immigration but none parsed this problem in a garbled language of globalism, internationalism, and living constitutionalism. Indeed, a number of the activists in Skocpol and Williamson's study bristled at this kind of top-down effort to claim, contort, and control the Tea Party agenda.

Patriots also had little patience for liberal indictments of their movement, the kind of dismissals that Skocpol and Williamson warn fan the flames of white populist resentment. Jill Lepore's The whites of their eyes: the Tea Party's revolution and the battle over American history (2010) is an update to the type of scholarly invective that infuriated post-war America's rural truckers, suburban housewives, and plain-folk evangelicals. At first glance, this quick read is an enterprising exploration of the Boston Tea Party, the Revolution's bicentennial, and the millennial Tea Party in order to explore what Americans have forgotten, reconsidered, or reimagined about independence from Britain. This book nonetheless reads more like an indictment of the Tea Party, much like this project's antecedents: Lepore's well-received New Yorker exposés on the populist insurrections taking place a stone's throw from Harvard Yard.Footnote ²⁰ For this much longer interrogation of political paralysis, Lepore bounces between Revolutionary, bicentennial, and contemporary Boston in order to combat what she calls ‘anti-history’ and ‘historical fundamentalism’, which together describe a conception of time that mutilates the link between past and present. These concepts are similar to the pervasive ‘Wrinkle in Time’ effect that Rodgers describes but Lepore focuses solely on the grassroots right, who ask themselves ‘What would the Founders do?’ and believe ‘if only they could see us now, they would be rolling over in their graves … They suffered for us, and we have forsaken them. Come the Day of Judgment, they will damn us.’ ‘That's not history. It's not civil religion, the faith in democracy that binds Americans together. It's not originalism or even constitutionalism’, Lepore warns, ‘That's fundamentalism’ (pp. 124–5).

Lepore lacks the sensitivity emblematic of the best work since the socio-cultural turn. She disdains the Tea Party patriots in her midst, whom she considers ill-informed bigots. She seems to delight in pointing out just how misinformed zealots are, particularly as they struggle to reconnect with a mythical exclusionary past. For example, she chides Fox News for calling Senator Scott Brown's 2010 special election victory the ‘“Massachusetts Massacre”, a reference, I guess to the Boston Massacre, although what the 2010 election and the 1770 shooting share begins and ends with the word “massacre”’ (pp. 9–10). A witty rejoinder to be sure but that is exactly the sort of liberal shaming that has inflamed white populists scratching out a living on farms, building neighbourhood churches in California, hauling milk to supermarkets, and fuming that too many pundits consider them the unthinking disciples of Brown, FreedomWorks, and Fox News. Or activists bristle at being called outright racists, including one interviewee whose girlfriend was African American. But Lepore clarifies ‘it wasn't the whiteness of the Tea Party that I found most striking. It was the whiteness of their Revolution. The Founding Fathers were the whites of their eyes, a fantasy of an America before race, without race’ (p. 95). Thus, Lepore's frequent dips back to the Revolution and the bicenntenial are a means to combat fundamentalist anti-history, juxtaposing deist Revolutionaries against civil rights and anti-war protesters whose 1770s and 1970s view of independence differed sharply from the millennial Tea Partiers.

Lepore also proves herself eager to find someone to blame for this particular cult of historical fundamentalism. Yet, she does not really seem to know whom to blame. She lauds the social historians who rewrote the Revolution to highlight the Republic's racialized founding. Antebellum histories of independence and nationhood had shown the importance of slavery to hammering out a system of government but distinguished young scholars demonstrated in the mid-1970s that slavery had actually made liberty possible. Nonetheless, Lepore proves, more often than not, contemptuous of New Left historians and their successors, who rarely write the kind of grand, sweeping, readable chronicles that Hofstadter's generation produced or the biographies of ‘heroes, larger than life’ (p. 36) that lay audiences still pick up and read. She is in fact far more derisive than Rodgers of the ground-up social histories that fractured the consensus scholar's tidy narrative by ‘uncovering the lives of ordinary people and examining conflict among groups and especially races, sexes, classes, and nations’ and, in the process, gaining ‘an inability to write for general readers and an unwillingness to examine the relationship between the past and the present, but also with a failure to provide a narrative synthesis, to tell a big story instead of many little ones’ (p. 96).

Lepore is determined to redeem Hofstadter. He, after all, ‘recognized the perils of presentism, but he believed that historians with something to say about the relationship between the past and the present had an obligation to say it, as carefully as possible, by writing with method, perspective, skepticism, and an authority that derived not only from their discipline but also from their distance from the corridors of power’ (pp. 68–9). The historical profession, she laments, had instead ‘defined itself by its dedication to the proposition that looking to the past to explain the present – and especially to solve present-day problems – falls outside the realm of serious historical inquiry. That stuff is for amateurs, toadies, and cranks' (pp. 67–8). But, in the end, this methodological resistance inadvertently enabled reactionaries to offer a white-washed history for popular consumption and political opportunism.

Lepore's anger seems misplaced. Most of the landmark books in American history over the last forty years have had an eye toward understanding the political, economic, or social paralysis during which they were written. And many of these historians fear the Texas School Board's recent efforts to align their curricula with white populist narratives, which defend anti-communist witchhunts, lionize the National Rifle Association, and leave out Thomas Jefferson (the author of the Declaration of Independence who also wanted to separate church and state). Numerous scholars have signed petitions that encapsulate the concerns of Lepore's well-educated mother, who lamented ‘This is taking us in a direction toward the way I was taught in the 1940s’ (p. 159). Yet, the fundamentalist anti-history that Lepore and Rodgers fear was not taught in the 1940s but hammered out and spread in the Christian schools founded in reaction to the liberals who lampooned and belittled those uneasy with a sprawling federal government, economic planning, and an increasingly secular society. The Texas case just represents the millennial fruition of an alternative schooling movement decades in the making.

Yet, Tea Party, housewife, trucker, or plain-folk populisms hardly seemed transcendent in the wake of Obama's 2012 re-election. Tea Partiers continued to consider free-market extremism in defence of liberty a virtue, which forced Republicans to the right in party primaries and left them unable to appeal to the rest of the electorate in the general runoff. Grassroots dogma thus remained a frustration for GOP apparatchiks desperate to control their base. Democrats were of course delighted. Liberals benefited from an imploding Republican party, whose coffers were fuller but whose backers and shock troops were divided on the very moral, economic, and political principles that once united conservative businessmen, middle-class suburbanites, and rural whites.

But Obama also appeared to have won because of the kind of organizing strategy that brought the Tea Party from the margins to the mainstream. A slew of progressive groups, trade unions among them, used left-wing news outlets like MSNBC, social media websites, and old-fashioned precinct walks to turn out the vote for Obama, Democrats to his left, and California ballot initiatives for tax equalization, marriage equality, and public education. These grassroots efforts arguably pushed the president to the left on these issues. The result was a historic victory that previewed new gendered, racialized, and class-based centrist and left-wing populisms. Hopefully, these millennial multiethnic liberal-left upsurges have caught historians' attentions. These well-orchestrated crusades (from the bottom, middle, and top) demand the kind of sophisticated interrogation begun in the 1970s and still evident today. These progressive campaigns were in fact remarkable. They co-ordinated manoeuvring with, for, and against the Democratic establishment and even prevailed over a better-funded but nonetheless fractured conservative movement, which will no doubt reorganize itself from above and below in the years to come.