TP03: The Silent Majority

One of the first thing that I was hoping to get from Matthew D. Lassiter book was understanding the Silent Majority. The term has been used over the past election without great effort, but it was used speak about the majority of White Suburban population that makes up the majority of the American population. The subtitled of the book is Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. The book does not go over this subject matter until the last third of the book. The first two parts of the book to my surprise was the school desegregation conflict in Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina.

The author co-wrote a book before called Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia. The author wanted to use both the desegregation of both area to show the grassroot effort that spend by average middle class parents to get their opinion of color blind schooling system into place. The believed that busing was the against the logical policy of paying more taxes to afforded better schooling in their region. Bringing other student from outside of the region is not acceptable to them. It made sense that student should go to schools in their region and not have to travel outside of their region.

The third part of the book was the part that showed that all of this government intention to interfere into their livelihood was direct consequence of the liberal strategy. The silent majority believed that they are not racist but because they have paid extra money to live in more exclusive neighborhood. They paid higher taxes so that they could provide for their children better schools. The author was able to show that Nixon was able to tap into this group whom felt frustrated with the constant losing their way of life. The major theme is that 1968 presidential election and 1970 midterm election the Republican did not drive the “Southern Strategy”, but they were able to get the support of the former democrats that voted for George Wallace.