| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority. By Robert Mason. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xii, 289 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2905-6.)

Ronald Reagan usually gets the credit (or blame) for replacing New Deal liberalism with antigovernment conservatism as the dominant philosophy in American politics. With Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority, Robert Mason of the University of Edinburgh joins a dissenting camp that is redirecting attention to Richard M. Nixon's critical role in achieving that revolution. His book recounts Nixon's effort as president to bring about a realignment that would allow the Republican party to command the allegiance of a voting majority. Specifically, Nixon sought to pry loose from the Democratic coalition various (sometimes overlapping) constituencies that were souring on liberalism in the 1960s: white southerners; Italians, Poles, and other Catholics; blue-collar workers; and, generally speaking, the members of what was called the silent majority or middle America. To this end, Nixon exploited what was then known as the social issue: the cluster of concerns such as abortion, crime, drugs, patriotism, sex, busing (and similar racial issues) and the generational rebellion in manners and morals—all of which pitted conservative defenders of so-called traditional values against a more tolerant or permissive liberal vanguard.

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