"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 new 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"--"With his televised "Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam" on November 3, 1969, asking "the great silent majority of . . . [his] fellow Americans" for their support, President Richard Nixon popularized a label that would help to reshape American politics in powerful ways in the years to come. The voices of ordinary Americans, Nixon warned, had been drowned out by a vocal, antiwar minority responsible for "mounting demonstration in the street" that sought to impose its view on themajority and threatened the future of the nation.1 Although such an appeal to the "forgotten" "real Americans" was not new - it had long been a staple of populist politics in the United States2 - there was something about the notion of belonging to the silent majority that seemed to capture the imagination of vast swathes of the American public at that time of political and cultural upheaval. An estimated seventy million television viewers watched the carefully crafted speech, and tens of thousands of letters from self-declared members of the silent majority poured into the White House in the weeks that followed. Even the president's opponents conceded that the phrase had been "one of the most brilliant political inventions of recent years," and it entered common political discourse with astonishing speed"--