Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

YAF brought the “disorder in defense of order” tradition to college campuses; a rejuvenated Klan claimed responsibility for patrolling the southern border; the ultra-right John Birch Society reveled in Reagan’s victory; a hard reactionary subculture polarized itself against nonwhites, leftists, women, and queers, claiming that compensatory demands and the rigged labor-state crowded out individuals—hard-working, skilled, yet humble white male individuals who only wanted a fair shot. The amount of power American whites were willing to surrender to their black compatriots was not sufficient to yield social peace, but the idea of their increased taxes going to fund social programs that paid and trained anti-American black communist revolutionaries—a genuine phenomenon in California, as you’ve read—was more than some patriots could handle.