Trump Rallies a New “Silent Majority”
Donald Trump claims that he rallies a new “Silent Majority”. For those not familiar with politics, the Southern Strategy focus on motivating the “Silent Majority” which is a racist code word for “white people.”
“It comes deeply from Richard Nixon’s basic political orientation,” said Rick Perlstein, a historian who has written multiple books on conservatism and the Nixon era, including Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.
The language of the silent majority, was a distillation of Nixon’s political philosophy, “the idea that there are two kinds of Americans — the ordinary middle-class folks with the white picket fence who play by the rules and pay their taxes and don’t protest and the other are the people who basically come from the left.”
And over time, the term silent majority was used to exclude more than just anti-war protesters. The “noisy minority,” as Perlstein called it, was fairly large. “It was black civil rights militants,” he said. “It was feminists who were supposedly burning their bras. It was students who were smoking drugs. It was rock ‘n’ roll bands. It was everything that threatened that kind of 1950s Leave It to Beaver vision of what America was like before everything literally and figuratively went to pot.”
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