Joseph Lowndes questions whether the independent truckers I write about were “central to the rise of the Right.” He suggests that truckers were mere dupes of “the architects of the modern Right,” who “selectively appropriated various forms of discontent in the land and turned it to their own purposes.” I disagree for at least three reasons.

First, as Lowndes acknowledges, my book demonstrates that the New Deal order's central pillars were built on shaky political ground. The New Deal order was always riven with contradiction and beset by factional opposition, and not just on matters of race and Civil Rights, as I show with my analysis of farm and food politics. Top-down manipulation by conservative politicians cannot be taken as the primary reason that average Americans rethought their electoral allegiance in the 1970s. Certainly, the Right effectively channeled “various forms of discontent” into electoral successes in the 1970s and beyond, but a top-down explanation that assumes false consciousness among the electorate cannot explain why antistatist discontent emerged in the first place. By paying attention to the social histories of independent truckers, I show how their antiauthoritarian politics in the 1970s emerged from a much longer and deeper interaction between state and society than a top-down political history can provide.

Second, while Lowndes prioritizes linguistic modes and intellectuals' writings as determinants of political change, I prioritize economic beliefs and actions (which are, of course, deeply inflected by culture). It is true that truckers' antiauthoritarianism—even the violent protests of tens of thousands of self-professed members of the “Silent Majority” in the 1970s, or their “achievement” in gaining deregulation of one of the nation's most important industries in 1980—cannot itself be seen as a central factor in the rise of the Right. This is not, however, what I argue in my book. I argue that independent truckers' actions, as drivers of the literal freight of the postwar U.S. economy, helped to reconstruct the nation's infrastructure in ways that undermined the strength of liberal coalitions, while opening opportunities for conservative coalitions to triumph politically. A “postindustrial” (or post–New Deal) economy in which consumers' and corporations' interests are delinked from the interests of workers or agricultural producers is one, I am convinced, in which conservative economic coalitions do not need to manipulatively “appropriate discontent” in order to achieve their political aims.

Finally, I sense that Lowndes's discomfort with my analysis of 1970s political culture is a reaction to my de-emphasis of racial politics as a causal factor in modern conservatism's rise. Here again, my social history approach defuses assumptions that otherwise make sense from a top-down perspective. The central political views of independent truckers, I show, were deeply rooted in their economic worlds—and were most emphatically not the product of demagogic manipulations by canny conservatives such as George Wallace or Richard Nixon. Perhaps I overemphasize the typicality of truckers' economic viewpoints in the 1970s, but I nonetheless remain convinced that one cannot explain the undermining of what Lowndes calls “progressive liberalism” without paying attention to the dramatic transformation of the American economy since the 1930s.