“The ‘Silent Majority’ Is Silent No More”: Summary and Conclusion

Abstract

The primary question asked at the beginning of this book was: Why do conservatives protest? Why would people who, in many if not most cases, possess privileges in excess of those belonging to others in American society resort to the tactics of previous movements like the Civil Rights Movement that were composed of oppressed peoples fighting to achieve basic equality? In addressing this question, I moved beyond social movement theories that were built from and designed around social movements of the oppressed and downtrodden. Drawing upon elements of culturalist social movement theory (Gamson 1992; Jasper 1997; Bernstein 1997), I incorporated aspects of race theory, specifically Blumer’s (1958) theory of group position, as well as Bourdieu’s (1989, 2001b) conceptualization of capital, to better understand and examine the motivations of conservative movements. Consistent with McVeigh’s (2009) theory of power devaluation, my findings suggest that one of the motivations of these conservative movements is the preservation of existing privileges or the restoration of lost privileges.