Matthew D. Lassiter

In The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, Matthew D. Lassiter argues, “The overreliance on race-reductionist narratives to explain complex political transformations – such as the ‘rise of the Right’ and ‘white backlash’ and the ‘Southern Strategy’ and the ‘Republican South’ – downplays the centrality of class ideology in the outlook of suburban voters and ignores the consistent class divisions among white southerners evident throughout the civil rights era. The explanatory framework of color-blindness is not intended to accept at face value the claim that racial prejudice simply disappeared from middle-class attitudes, or to disregard the many ways that its proponents benefitted from the ‘possessive investment in whiteness,’ but instead to capture a coherent way of thinking about and speaking about neighborhood boundaries and political citizenship that had become a paramount feature of suburban discourse by the second half of the 1960s” (pg. 4). He further argues, “The suburban strategies developed in the Sunbelt South, not a Southern Strategy inspired by the Deep South and orchestrated from the White House, provided the blueprint for the transformation of regional politics and the parallel reconfiguration of national politics” (pg. 6). Lassiter draws upon the work of Thomas Sugrue, Kenneth Jackson, and George Lipsitz.
Lassiter writes, “In the Sunbelt South, the emergent consensus for gradual desegregation and minimal compliance accompanied an unmistakable shift away from the public discourse of white supremacy in favor of a more complicated fusion of racial and class attitudes – a still inchoate ideology of individual rights, consumer liberties, and spatial privileges” (pg. 40-41). He writes of the open school movement, “Instead of a moral battle between integrationists and segregationists, Atlanta’s open-schools movement recast the campaign for racial justice as an internal power struggle within the white South, matching upwardly mobile suburban families against reactionary rural demagogues” (pg. 53). Lassiter continues, “The stance that moderation represented the position of reasonable people under attack by ‘extremists on both sides’ – a formulation that lumped massive resisters and civil rights activists together against the middle – emerged as a popular viewpoint in the rest of the nation before it became the dominant ideology in the metropolitan South” (pg. 99).
Lassiter writes, “The crucible of racial busing produced a populist revolt of the center across the metropolitan South, as white-collar families became the architects of a color-blind discourse that gained national traction as an unapologetic defense of the class privileges and consumer rights of the middle-class suburbs” (pg. 122). Further, “The CPA recast a legal debate over the historical burdens of racial discrimination as an ahistorical defense of meritocratic individualism by refusing even to acknowledge the public policies that created and reinforced stark patterns of residential segregation” (pg. 122). According to Lassiter, “In the courts and in the streets, the CPA employed a color-blind framework that attacked ‘involuntary busing’ as a violation of the original spirit of the Brown decision and the race-neutral requirement of the U.S. Constitution. Parents from the previously placid suburbs defended the class and consumer privileges of middle-class families and all-white neighborhoods and demanded the support of elected officials at the local, state, and national levels” (pg. 148). Lassiter continues, “Like the grassroots antibusing movement, the Republican administration refused to accept the legal finding that the artificial de jure/de facto distinction obscured the official policies that produced educational and residential segregation and the logical remedy that a fully integrated school district should contain no single-race facilities” (pg. 158). Further, “On the national stage, the mobilization of the Silent Majority depended upon a populist discourse that obscured the divisions between working-class and middle-class white voters and defined Middle America through a suburban identity politics based on consumer status, taxpayer rights, and meritocratic individualism” (pg. 198).
Lassiter writes, “As political rhetoric, the populist label of the Silent Majority concealed the socioeconomic and geographic divisions among white voters, but corporate executives and white-collar professionals and blue-collar laborers have not fit comfortably into a racially constructed electoral coalition at either the regional or the national level. Richard Nixon’s triumph in 1968 depended upon a de facto suburban strategy that targeted middle-class voters in the metropolitan South and positioned the GOP as the centrist alternative to the racial extremism of George Wallace and the racial liberalism of Hubert Humphrey” (pg. 227). Lassiter concludes, “The power of the populist vocabulary that dominated the Nixon era – Middle America, the Forgotten Americans, the Silent Majority, the New American Majority – arose from its ability to transcend the substantial divisions between working-class and upper-middle-class voters, but never more than temporarily. During the three decades following the national disintegration of the New Deal Order, both political parties have grappled with an unstable class dynamic at the center of their electoral strategies” (pg. 319).… (meer)