Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States: Conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s (Publications of the German Historical Institute)

Cambridge University Press, 4/7/2017
EAN 9781107165427, ISBN10: 1107165423

Hardcover, 422 pages, 23.5 x 16 x 2.7 cm
Language: English

Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States examines the unprecedented mobilization and transformation of conservative movements on both sides of the Atlantic during a pivotal period in postwar history. Convinced that 'noisy minorities' had seized the agenda, conservatives in Western Europe and the United States began to project themselves under Nixon's popularized label of the 'silent majority'. The years between the early 1960s and the late 1970s witnessed the emergence of countless new political organizations that sought to defend the existing order against a perceived left-wing threat from the resurgence of a new, politically organized Christian right to the beginnings of a radicalized version of neoliberal economic policy. Bringing together research by leading international scholars, this ground-breaking volume offers a unique framework for studying the phenomenon of conservative mobilization in a comparative and transnational perspective.

Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
silent majorities and conservative mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s in transatlantic perspective Anna von der Goltz and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson
Part I. Origins and Ideas
1. American conservatism from Roosevelt to Johnson Julian E. Zelizer
2. The radicalization of neoliberalism Daniel Stedman Jones
Part II. Political Mobilization and Responses to Left-wing Protest
3. Silent minority? British Conservative students in the age of campus protest John Davis
4. A vocal minority
student activism of the center-right in West Germany's 1968 Anna von der Goltz
5. Mobilizing the silent majority in France in the 1970s Bernard Lachaise
6. The silent majority
a Humean perspective Donald T. Critchlow
Part III. Conservatism and the Issue of Race
7. The silent majority
how the private becomes political Bill Schwarz
8. African-American Republicans, 'black capitalism', and the Nixon administration Joshua D. Farrington
Part IV. Religious Mobilization
9. Awakening the sleeping giant
the rise and political role of the Christian Right since the 1960s Mark J. Rozell and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson
10. Why is there no Christian right in Germany? German conservative Christians and the invention of a silent majority in the 1970s Thomas Großbölting
11. Modern crusaders
the conservative Catholic politics of resistance in post-conciliar Netherlands Marjet Derks
Part V. Languages and Media Strategies of Conservatism
12. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's 'spiral of silence', the silent majority, and the Conservative moment of the 1970s Martin H. Geyer
13. Campaigning against 'red public television'
conservative mobilization and the invention of private television in West Germany Frank Bösch
14. Talking in Europe
CDU/CSU, the British Conservative Party, and the quest for a common political language in the 1960s and 1970s Martina Steber
Part VI. Cultures of Conservatism
15. Goodbye to the party of Rockefeller
how a decidedly 'un-silent minority' pushed the GOP to embrace anti-feminism Stacie Taranto
16. Pornography, heteronormativity, and the genealogy of New Right sexual citizenship in the United States Whitney Strub
17. 1968 and all That(cher)
cultures of conservatism and the New Right in Britain Lawrence Black
Afterword
winners and losers Michael Kazin
Index.