The "Silent Majority", and Impoverished Notions of Modern Democracy
I solemnly swear that we’re not going to be doing any more post-election debriefs. Between looking at “Don’t Be A Sucker” again and discussing Israel’s nightmare of a democracy for a wee taste of what to expect in the US, I think we’ve done plenty there for now. Everywhere I look online, the pundits are still engaged in massive tear-downs of failed campaign strategy (and tear-downs of the tear-downs; why, it’s tear-downs all the way down!), paired with commentary on fresh political announcements also meant to shock and demoralize. Enough Monday-morning quarterbacking. It’s time to start coping with the long-term impact of concussive injuries on our body-politic.
This weekend, I spent time with an LRB podcast, Past Present Future, in which David Runciman uses essays and interviews to explore the history of ideas with a focus on politics, philosophy, and literature. One of his latest series is “The History of Bad Ideas”, which includes terrific conversation on topics like the Nobel prizes, taxonomy, eugenics, and Facebook friends. But it was a recent episode on “The Silent Majority” that I found especially bracing after the month we’ve thus far endured.
In it, he and Sophie Scott-Brown reflect on how the notion of a “silent majority” has been a dangerous addition to political discourse. This term has a strong history of use in the US, but Runciman and Scott-Brown also discuss how the concept fits into a broader wheelhouse of political theory, with a focus on tensions between the governed and the governors, and between active versus passive civic chores.
It took me a few listens to figure out what I found so refreshing about this episode, but I think I can give you the best sense of that “aha” moment in this exchange, closer to the end, when our hosts move past histories of philosophy and settle into a discussion about how perfunctory so much political action now feels; and also, how lacking in new “big ideas” our political cultures seem to be.
Within this context, Scott-Brown begins, and Runciman continues…
SB: The unpolitical is not a refusal of politics per se, but it’s a refusal of the political game, the political system. And it’s the idea that decision-making, social negotiations, the busy, difficult world of living together… it’s not just that it’s not represented fully, or the things we care about are not fully represented in the official system, but it’s also that the system doesn’t really have the capacity to do that because it’s so busy, as you said—it’s focused on winning and losing. It’s very dichotomized and it’s still quite binary, and actually what we find when we try to live together and we try to cooperate together is that it’s squishy. It’s messy. There are no clean answers. People have to sort of compromise in tortuous ways that do not lend themselves readily to the kind of political methods that we traditionally or conventionally look to.
So I think the idea of “silent majority” can actually be a way of saying, “Right, well, we’re the silent majority when it comes to the political process, because actually for the most part, for many of us, it doesn’t mean much, it doesn’t really work—but the minute you are willing to look closely at the silent majority you’ll see, actually, we’re a lot of very articulate minorities under this veneer of glacial silence.
R: And that to me is what’s wrong with the phrase “the silent majority”, so I totally get what you’re saying, which is that there’s a way of looking at politics which tries to get beyond where the noise is and where the focus is, particularly modern electoral politics, and recognizes (in a way that people would have done in the longer sweep of human history) that much of what passes for politics doesn’t touch people’s lives, and much of what people most care about doesn’t reach the level of conventional politics, and yet—not just Nixon and Trump, but the way the phrase “the silent majority” gets used is to take that thing, that truth—I think it’s a truth: that most of life is not political in the conventional sense, and yet most of life has great importance and significance for people in a way that touches on the big political questions. It’s about fairness, and justice, and revenge, and what you’re willing to fight for all of that, but what the phrase “the silent majority” does is, it always then tries to drag that back up to the level of “politics”.
Because that phrase, “majority”, what does it mean otherwise? It could be “the silent many”, “the silent people”, “silent lives”, all of that—but “majority” is such a political term and it feels to me emblematic of what’s wrong with democracy now, which is, we are always trying to squeeze the full range of human political experience into this narrow funnel of electoral politics, winners and losers. I said earlier on that I’d spent ten years thinking about Trump, and it’s partly because it’s invaded my consciousness and shrunk it to me not really being able to think much more than whether or not he’s going to win.
When I listened to their conversation (more than once, slipping into and out of the podcast while focusing on other tasks), I realized that Runciman and Scott-Brown were converging on the language I’ve been trying to find for my own resistance to news of this moment—because, as Runciman notes, it really does shrink a person’s sense of what democracy could be, and what political discourse should include, to spend too much time preoccupied by this gamified version of the concept.
It’s not that elections don’t matter—of course they do—but as Scott-Brown observes, the vast majority of political work most people are doing is in the “busy, difficult world of living together”, so if we’re ever surprised when a so-called “silent majority” makes itself heard at the polls, that’s on us, for failing to register all the noise this cohort is also making elsewhere, in other forms of political action.
Electoral politics doesn’t just tower over everyday political praxis; it can also consume our attention to the point that we forget the everyday praxis even exists.
With this in mind, then, let’s backtrack a bit, and go through some of the broader political theory in this episode. Is there anything in it that we might use to reframe how we move forward, now that electoral politics has brought us to such a difficult end for institutional norms and domestic readiness for the challenges ahead?
The silent majority: a weaponized term for an oft-changing concept
Runciman and Scott-Brown start in the ancient world, when there was something poetic about viewing oneself as part of a forum that included all the dead come before you (the truly silent majority of our species) and all who would come after. As Petronius wrote, abiit ad plures—and right through the 19th century, it was common enough to describe someone who’d died as having “gone to [join] the [silent] majority”.
This origin for the term is a bit unsettling, though, when one considers how the “silent majority” was then repurposed in US politics: most notably, in reference to voting blocs, whether in formal assemblies or among average citizens. Runciman and Scott-Brown don’t dwell much on the strangeness of this shift in meaning, but for me, the use of the silent majority to describe both the dead and folks voting as one suggests a kind of deadening of the self the moment it joins with a larger group.
In US history, one of the most famous applications of this term would come in the late 1960s, when hints of pro-war sentiment from labour unions and favourable public reactions to police beating anti-war protesters paved the way for then-President Richard Nixon’s famous 1969 televised address, in which he proclaimed,
And so tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. Let us be united for peace. Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.
Although prominent thinkers and activists were taking up most of the media’s airtime with overt criticism of the US Conflict in Viet Nam, background sentiment among average citizens seemed to favour this disaster of a campaign—or at least, to hate disruption on their streets more than they hated their country’s actions overseas. And so, it was to these people, who were not showing up at protests, that Nixon turned his attention, and around which he crafted his notion of having a broader public mandate for war. Nixon’s “silent majority” was made up of many different US minorities, but they seemed to share a level of annoyance in response to domestic disruptions of the peace that Nixon could use to further his own political aims—and did.
But what was this notion of “the silent majority”, and did it negatively impact local democracy for voters to see themselves as divided by this term: the activists and outspoken media representatives on one side, and the “rest” of the US on the other?
19th-century political philosophy
To explore these questions, Runciman and Scott-Brown idle awhile in 19th century political theory, as it pertains to institutional, individual, and revolutionary thought, before leaping forward to a populist use-case in US conservative politics.
(And a quick caveat for folks who haven’t read the authors: these 19th-century texts aren’t literally discussing the concept of the silent majority; our hosts are repackaging large bodies of writing that address ideal civic practice, to imagine how each philosopher might weigh in on the notion of the silent majority today.)
In Runciman and Scott-Brown’s configuration of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx:
Bentham would have regarded the silent majority as a good thing, for it speaks to a governed populace content to be ruled. If the silent majority ever felt the need to speak up, this would mark a political rupture in need of redress. (The hosts don’t get into this expressly, but Bentham was a utilitarian and regarded the state as operating in a delicate, deterrent-based symmetry with the will of the governed; for this reason, lack of conflict was a sign of a healthy body-politic.)
Mill would have regarded the silent majority as a problem: a sign of the state’s failure to cultivate a diverse range of civic participants. For Mill, wherever one might find a silent majority, what one actually has is a demographic hindered by conformity pressures from speaking, acting, and thinking as individuals. A political system that favours keeping the majority of its citizens silent is always inclined to oppression, from failing to encourage a multiplicity of points of view.
Marx would have regarded the silent majority as a state of unconsciousness in need of drastic transformation. Working-class humans only suffered because they didn’t realize how much they shared with other working-class human beings, but once they realized they were in fact the “majority”, they could seek revolutionary changes that would improve the circumstances of life for all.
John Stuart Mill, I should note, was an early and significant influence of mine; I read On Liberty in high school, and his arguments for freedom of thought, discussion, character, and action were exhilarating at a time in my pup-hood when I still believed that only when an idea was “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed” did it have any hope of staying alive. (However, I also loved the work of Immanuel Kant and Elias Canetti, so I quickly realized that Mill’s notion of a fair marketplace of ideas, where the “best” could rise through rigorous discussion to the top, did not reflect the real world, with all its competing noumenological truths and dangerous group behaviours.)
But what struck me most about this episode was where the hosts went next—when they reflected on movements like MAGA, in relation to this list.
Where might modern right-wing populism sit on this spectrum of 19th-century approaches to the silent majority? When Nixon appealed to a body of US voters whose most important political actions were a) a personal disinclination to protest his war, and b) tacit support of state suppression against anyone who did, what kind of body-politic was being theorized by political “philosophers” of his time?
I would have thought that Bentham’s model best served as a template for Nixon’s actions, and for right-wing populist leaders in recent years—but Runciman provocatively argues that Marx offers a better model for the way this body of voters has been treated, and how it has acted outside typical electoral politics.
Wait, Marx?, you might protest—the same figure that so many of right-wing movements use in their fear-mongering around so-called “cultural Marxism” and its insidious impact on modern society?
But forget the name for a moment, and just focus on the approach to political consciousness embodied in his writings. Yes, the “silent” consciousness that Marx was hoping to awaken was class-based. However, the very idea of a sleeping giant is what Marxist political philosophy shares with today’s right-wing populist movements. In both cases, there are “loud” groups in society that have been configured as the elites—always in the spotlight, always looking down on those around them—while another demographic perceives itself as being hard-done-by, marginalized and denied its due. In both cases, then, nothing less than an overthrow of the elites will bring about a new world order in which hardworking citizens can enjoy the fruits of their everyday labour without theft by those who simply want to exploit the work of others.
(Ironic, isn’t it? But hey, MAGA already loves the colour red…)
The danger of the “silent majority”
With this provocative comparison, Runciman also makes a deeper argument for why the term “silent majority” has been so destructive: because even if politicians like Nixon once succeeded in using it to give the impression of a massive political underclass undergoing tyranny at the hands of a minority… that “majority” was never uniform. It was always a false class status, which meant that it could only ever lead to confusion if the group ever ceased to be “silent” and tried to make itself heard.
From this concern about long-term fallout, Runciman and Scott-Brown then reflect on related, tacitly accepted social structures that make it hard for any other political consciousness to develop in the US context. Just as Halloween traditions tend to slip into community calendars without much conscious effort, so too does conformism readily follow the introduction of certain political ideas and habits in electoral politics.
You can tell, then, that Runciman and Scott-Brown favour Mill’s notion of reclaiming the individual from convention—but they also push past the parliamentary liberalism of his time, to wonder at how the feat of re-individuation might be achieved under the shadow of that pesky lie of a term, the “silent majority”, in modern democracy.
My idealistic answer is hyper-regional globalism: a rebuilding of democratic practice on an extremely small scale, where there would be more room to see fellow citizens as individuals, and for electoral politics to be treated as less important than everyday consensus-building among people committed to mutual aid and local uplift. (The “globalism” part would come from us still being well-enough connected to the rest of the world that we can swap strategies from other hyper-regional working groups.)
It’s a cute pipe dream, no?
But we still have this pesky matter of national politics, which is never going to go away just because I have my druthers, and which will always be amplified by a media ecosystem that is best served when it trains citizens to see electoral politics as the be-all and end-all of democratic practice—such that everything else citizens might do will be lost either to mass protests or behind that “veneer of glacial silence” Sophie Scott-Brown described, in her conversation with David Runciman.
What solutions exist for us in this messier, more dehumanizing realm of nation-states?
Solutions here certainly aren’t easy, but if they exist at all, discussions like this episode of Past Present Future wisely suggest that they will only emerge once we stop letting media circuses like this latest electoral disaster shrink our understanding of democracy to a few actions at the polls (and all the drama that surrounds them). So long as we keep playing the game on those awful terms, we’re always going to be caught off-guard by the electoral choices of people who have been political elsewhere—in their communities, around their dinner tables, at their job sites, in their economic choices—and who will continue to be more interested in awakening a sense of group consciousness there than anywhere else.
Election days, however ruinous, are not the sum total or the centre of our civic chores.
And in an age when extreme right-wingers seem to have followed Marx’s consciousness-stirring template for more effective political action, we cannot expect mainstream institutions to expand sufficiently to accommodate our dissent (as both Bentham and Mill would have us do, each in their own way).
What is required, rather, is that we quit expecting some magic “majority” to save us.
We are individuals routinely taken in by false promises of nationwide solidarity—even if that road is currently leading some of our societies toward totalitarianism.
And I’d be a fool to promise that anything can now save us from that end.
But it sure as heck can’t make things any worse, if we were to look for more signs of democracy in everyday civic action—and lean into those instead.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML