The Silent Majority (Part 2)

Written by Classical Liberal

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(You can read Part 1 here) 

In January 1970, Time magazine put on their cover an abstract image of a man and a woman representing ‘Middle America’ as a replacement for their annual ‘Man of the Year’ award. Publisher Roy E. Larsen wrote that ‘the events of 1969 transcended specific individuals. In a time of dissent and “confrontation”, the most striking new factor was the emergence of the Silent Majority as a powerfully assertive force in U.S. society’. Larsen described how ‘the silent majority’ had elected Nixon, had put a man on the moon, and how this demographic felt threatened by ‘attacks on traditional values’.

‘The silent majority; theme has been a contentious issue amongst journalists since Nixon used the phrase. Some thought Nixon used it as part of the Southern strategy. Others claim it was Nixon’s way of dismissing the prominent protests going on around the country. Whatever the rationale, Nixon won a landslide victory in 1972, taking 49 of 50 states, vindicating his ‘silent majority’. The opposition vote was split successfully. 80% of George Wallace’s supporters voted for Nixon rather than George McGovern, unlike Wallace himself.

Nixon’s use of the phrase was part of his strategy to divide Americans and polarise them into two groups. He used ‘divide and conquer’ tactics to win his political battles, and in 1971 he directed Agnew to speak about ‘positive polarization’ of the electorate. ‘The silent majority’ shared Nixon’s anxieties and fears that changes in society were eroding normalcy.

Perlstein said the speech and the language of ‘the silent majority’ was a distillation of Nixon’s political philosophy, ‘the idea that there are two kinds of Americans — the ordinary middle-class folks with the white picket fence who play by the rules and pay their taxes and don’t protest and the people who basically come from the left’.

And over time, the term ‘the silent majority’ was used to exclude more than just anti-war protesters. The ‘noisy minority’, as Perlstein called it, was pretty extensive. ‘It was black civil rights militants’, he said. ‘It was feminists who were supposedly burning their bras. It was students who were smoking drugs. It was rock ‘n’ roll bands. Everything that threatened that kind of 1950s Leave It to Beaver vision of what America was like before everything literally and figuratively went to pot’.

The phrase ‘the silent majority’ was also used in the political campaigns of Ronald Reagan during the 1970s and 1980s, the Republican ‘revolution’ in the 1994 elections, and the victories of Rudy Giuliani.

Nixon’s polarisation survives today in American politics. According to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, ‘the silent majority’ is but one of many labels applied to the same group of voters. According to him, past labels used by the media include ‘the silent majority’ in the 1960s, ‘forgotten middle class’ in the 1970s, ‘angry white males’ in the 1980s, ‘soccer moms’ in the 1990s, and ‘NASCAR dads’ in the 2000s.

David Cameron used the term during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Cameron expressed his belief that most Scots opposed independence while implicitly conceding they may not be as vocal as the people who support it.

In just about every stump speech he gives, Trump repeatedly uses the phrase ‘the silent majority’.

During Trump‘s first Presidential campaign, he said at a campaign rally on 11 July 2015, in Phoenix, Arizona, that ‘the silent majority is back, and we’re going to take our country back’. Trump also referred to ‘the silent majority’ in subsequent speeches and advertisements. As did the press when describing those who voted for his election as President in 2016. During the George Floyd protests, Trump once again invoked ‘the silent majority’.

Sometimes he’ll ask the audience members if they’ve heard it before and point out that it’s been around for a while. And then he’ll say that ‘the silent majority’ feels abused, or forgotten, or mistreated. And usually, toward the end of his speech, Trump says that ‘the silent majority’ is back.

He rarely spends too much time explicitly defining this group, but at a recent Trump rally in Clear Lake, Iowa, several attendees still had working definitions.

‘The people that mind their own business, don’t depend on anyone else’, said Patty Hughes of Indianola, Iowa, when asked to describe ‘the silent majority’. ‘[They] don’t expect anything from anybody, and they’re kind of quiet. They don’t go around bragging. They’re not activists’.

Her husband, Larry, said, ‘They expect a dollar work for a dollar pay. They don’t want anything free, but they don’t want stuff taken away from them either. And that’s happening to us out here in the cheap seats’.

Others said ‘the silent majority’ is defined by fiscal conservatism, or disapproval of things like Planned Parenthood, or anger with government gridlock.

Perlstein also pointed out that, in some ways, the phrase is racially coded. ‘To say majority is to say minority, and everyone knows who minorities are. They are people in America who are not white’, he said.

Of course, in many ways, 2016 is not the 1960s, and multiple Trump supporters have said that they don’t think the term ‘the silent majority’ has a racial connotation. ‘I don’t think that’s true at all now’, said George Davey of West Des Moines. ‘You can look at Trump, [and the] people he hires. I’m sure he has a lot of people of various ethnic backgrounds in his companies’.

To Davey, today, ‘the silent majority’ is all about opposition to the rise of what he calls ‘PC culture’. ‘The reason why we’re silent is because we’re not allowed to talk’, he said. ‘My favorite thing about Trump is that he wants to get rid of political correctness.’

‘It all started out as anti-bullying, where all of a sudden you can’t say certain things because you’re bullying them’. But Davey said PC has snowballed, and now, he thinks people can get fired from their jobs, or sued, just for saying the wrong thing. ‘That is against the Constitution’.

Whether Davey’s opposition to PC perfectly matches Nixon’s definition of ‘the silent majority’ or not, historian Perlstein says it doesn’t matter. ‘The silent majority is always going to be a state of mind’,’ Perlstein said. ‘It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling of dispossession. And that feeling of dispossession can come about most dramatically in times when things seem to be changing, when all that’s solid melts into air’.

Britain is fast going down the toilet. Perhaps ‘the silent majority’ can stop it before it’s too late, but only if it finds its voice.

In my next article, I will offer a potential strategy to enable ‘the silent majority’ to find its voice and make itself heard.