Seth Blumenthal - Children of the Silent Majority: Young Voters and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1968-1980 — at Politics and Prose at The Wharf

While 1968 is seen as a year of turbulence and cultural revolution, many younger people of the period were leery of the left, and in fact helped pave the ground for the 1980 rise of the Reagan Republicans. In his revelatory political history of a little-understood generation of conservatives that came of age in the late 1960s, Blumenthal, senior lecturer at Boston University, shows how under Nixon the Republican Party developed an innovative and effective model for a youth campaign, courting younger voters with a forward-looking agenda and remaining receptive to the younger electorate’s thinking on issues such as marijuana, the environment, and the draft.