![]() ![]() Lassiter explores the expectations and demands of the mostly white, middle-class southern suburban elites, and the arguments they used in struggles over school desegregation-arguments in which they defended themselves as middle-class workers, parents, consumers, and property-holders rather than explicitly as whites. By focusing on the complex interactions of race, class, consumerism, and the politics of metropolitan space, he supplants the familiar "southern strategy" interpretation with one of a "suburban strategy" driven by color-blind arguments, individualism, and free-market consumerism at the grassroots. In this engaging and important book, Matthew Lassiter recasts the history of the postwar sunbelt South. ![]() A dominant explanation for this shift, which was popularized almost as soon as it was perceived, is the "southern strategy" in which national elites consciously catered to the racist backlash against Great Society liberalism and the civil rights movement by southern whites. The idea of the Solid South evokes a region once reliably Democratic, which in recent years has become nearly as reliably Republican. Reviewed by Craig Kaplowitz (Department of History, Judson College) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. ![]() The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. ![]()
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