What is the history and historiography of conservative/right wing populist movements in American history?

by [deleted]
Cosmic_Charlie

A few from the 20thC:

Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors is an excellent treatment of the rise of the GOP in California, and subsequently, the US.

Less directly, but equally good is Meg Jacobs' Pocketbook Politics. Jacobs focuses on a few things, including the tendency of Americans to, as the title suggests, vote with their wallets. Great read.

John Ehrman's The Eighties does a fine job of placing Reagan at the center of an anti-New Deal coalition -- one whose birth is chronicled by McGirr and Jacobs above. It's no accident that a Californian became the poster-child of sorts for pulling apart the New Deal.

For a slightly different, but no less authoritative perspective, see Gerstle and Fraser (eds.,) The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order.

Lastly, if you can get a copy, Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore wrote a bit of a bombshell article a few years ago, called “The Long Exception: Rethinking the New Deal in American History.” International Labor and Working-­‐Class History, 74 (2008): 3-­‐32 The article argues (put here obscenely simplified) that the New Deal order of economic middleism was not a lost cause as most labor historians see it, but was rather a one-off, a weird time in a generally individualist US history. Loads of responses and one of the best conference panels I've ever seen. Tensions were high.