listening past the noise

It is the nature of politics for there to be pathological participants and malignant conflicts, but our political situation seems particularly toxic. Some of the most malignant elements in society have influence that is disproportionate to their numbers. Hate-fueled rhetoric that would have previously been isolated on the fringe has gained mainstream status, holding sway over otherwise decent human beings. Seemingly sensible citizens morph into to the modern equivalent of an angry mob with pitchforks.

For several decades now, an extremely loud minority claiming to be “the silent majority” has been seizing an unwarranted amount of political power. They display bumper stickers with messages like “take our country back”, not so subtly implying that we need to return to the way things were before certain groups of people were allowed to fully participate and that we need to restore an oppressive social arrangement that was enforced by frequent beatings, lynchings, and bombings. (Otherwise their narrative would be more about how moneyed interests have hijacked the political process than it is about their distaste for political correctness.) At the very least, the assumptions upon which the “silent majority” narrative is based represent a profound misunderstanding of what is going on. Perhaps the sentiments of many who identify with the “silent majority” tag actually are based on a sincere belief that they are in fact an actual majority whose wishes have been waylaid by strangely powerful liberal elitists who have somehow managed to rig the process, but that belief, though less malignant than the nostalgia for Jim Crow, is a demonstrably false belief with not so benign consequences, and it is a belief that didn’t just randomly show up out of thin air.

Promoting the idea that there is a majority of citizens who are being systematically silenced is pure demagoguery. Most of those who identify with the notion of a silent majority might be well-meaning, but there is a lot of manipulation, stoking of base emotions, and behind the scenes involvement of deep-pocket special interests. The very impetus behind the coining of the “silent majority” label is blatantly contrary to the whole idea of democracy. For not so noble reasons, anti-democratic interests can’t allow and won’t accept the legitimacy of office holders who have been duly elected by a majority of the voters. There is an implicit belief that many citizens don’t count, don’t deserve a voice, and thus need to be excluded from the process by any means necessary. So the shameless pursuit of strategies like voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering is no surprise.

A big part of the silent majority narrative comes straight out of a victim mentality. How is it that blustery, macho members of the dominant demographic group have become such sore losers and crybabies complaining that they don’t always get their way? How is that adults can cling to childish magical thinking and render themselves oblivious to any responsibility for actual consequences? Is it not astounding that they aren’t mortified by their blatant display of poor sportsmanship or horrified by coming across as sniveling weaklings when they whine about being expected to play by the rules that everybody else plays by? Why aren’t they even the slightest bit embarrassed? Does it not occur to them what dubious credibility comes with the straight-faced claim that a highly vocal minority with disproportionate political influence is a silenced and even persecuted majority?

The “silent majority” is, at best, a relatively small but incredibly noisy contingent who are drunk with their own sense of entitlement, are emboldened by the perception that everyone who is not saying otherwise agrees with them (and the menacing assertion that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously unpatriotic, unchristian, or subhuman), and are demanding a huge section of the bandwidth at the expense of everybody else. But they are also often bullies and sometimes homicidal. So unfortunately, the whole mess is not just an unseemly spectacle. We are well into a serious danger zone rife with acts of intimidation, threats of violence, and actual violence.

It is somewhat understandable, given the general sense of frustration and fatalism that is endemic to the political climate, that some otherwise sensible people would find portions of the silent majority narrative plausible and perhaps even compelling, especially its cynical take on political insiders, but the misdirected rage reminds us that one of the main weaknesses of democracy is how wrong the majority can sometimes be, as is microcosmically illustrated in the classic 1950’s film, “12 Angry Men”. Fortunately, there are grounds for hope. It doesn’t always turn out badly in the end. One of the main lessons from the film is that collective stupidity can be fixed, but someone has to have the courage and the willingness to speak up.

Why is it that more people are not speaking up? Some people actually are speaking up, but critical mass has yet to be achieved. There is a shortage of realistic ideas and alternative approaches that are sufficiently robust to catch on, reach a tipping point, and overcome the insanity, the stupidity, and the hatred. Often, there are no clear voices speaking up because nascent concerns have not yet formed into anything that can be expressed confidently in full public view or that seems worth the trouble. What ideas there are get drowned out because they are not as loud and are not as certain of being right as are the obliviously ignorant. And then there is the fear factor. The battle lines are drawn. Enduring the wrath of the violent zealots patrol can be unpleasant at best. No one wants to set themselves up as a target of the pack mentality by being the lone oddball. And even if we don’t fear being overtly attacked, we know that those who express heartfelt concerns are often looked at askance. Most people remember the old folk story, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”, which conveyed two warnings: don’t cry wolf and don’t trust anyone who does.

In the twisted, inverted logic of the “silent majority” crowd, a cowardly lynch mob mentality masquerades as toughness, but it is the very opposite of the kind of political courage that was exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt when he said “Walk softly, but carry a big stick.” The supposedly tough guys might have swagger in their walk, but their confidence is of the adolescent variety. It’s all shadow boxing, or as we say in Texas, “it’s all hat and no cattle”. It takes no courage to join an angry mob, and it takes even less courage to behave like a pack of kids on the playground who gang up on anyone who is perceived to be vulnerable or just different.

Somewhat more innocently, some of what is behind the silence is an example of what Jerry Harvey has named “The Abilene Paradox”, based on a story he tells about a drive he made with some members of his family to Abilene, Texas for dinner. The decision to make the journey was based on everyone’s assumption that everyone else was in favor of the idea. The experience turned out to be fairly miserable, and the travelers learned on the way home that no one was actually for the plan. They had all just gone along with the crowd rather than risking being thought of as sticks in the mud. Because none of them spoke up, it didn’t occur to anyone that someone needed to probe more deeply into what people actually wanted.

All of this is to say that if the majority is silent, it is usually not because there is a suppressed, coherent message that they are all united behind, but is instead because they are variously afraid, confused, uncommitted, led by other priorities, unwilling to take on more problems than they already have, or just going along with the crowd out of fear or because it would be too much trouble to do otherwise. It would be a mistake to assume that the noisiest few speak for everyone. In other words, the face that some would paint on the silent majority is grossly misleading. And if there is, at times, actual majority support of hateful and malicious ideas, it’s usually because demagogues and crazy makers have entered the mix. If the majority is sometimes in a myopic bubble, the bubble has usually been deliberately orchestrated.

The ascendency of the so called “Moral Majority” in the 1980s was carefully orchestrated largely by playing on the distaste for moral ambiguity and the need for a sense of certainty that many people feel in uncertain times. It has been observed that the irony of the “Moral Majority” was that it was neither. That does not disallow the likelihood that most of those who identified with the Moral Majority were basically decent human beings who cared deeply and just wanted to do the right thing. However, for many of the followers, being perceived to be moral was more valued than actually being moral, and the end results were often profoundly immoral. By not speaking up, the vast majority of those who aligned themselves with the Moral Majority unwittingly contributed to consequences that were a lot worse than what happened in Jerry Harvey’s story (making a hot and dusty 53-mile trip for what turned out to be an unsatisfying dining experience). Their silence tacitly condoned atrocities like the murdering of abortion doctors and hate crimes against religious minorities and homosexuals.

The general mindset of the religious right is a reckless abandonment of responsibility with regard to the actual consequences of their so called morality – sometimes even involving an explicit eschatological belief that the end times are upon us and that God’s will can be aided by bringing on cataclysmic environmental and social events which would initiate the prophesized period of tribulation that is supposed to precede the realization of an earthly Kingdom of God at the Second Coming of Christ. Is it not strange how many followers of the Prince of Peace are loud and proud about being gun toting racists and militaristic jingoists?

Religious and patriotic language is a big part of “dog-whistle politics”, the demagogic use of racist subtexts to get votes for conservative candidates. Those who identify with the religious right might not all be misogynistic, bigoted, and xenophobic, but the actual results of the insistence on traditional values involves a de facto oppression of women, of racial minorities, and of anyone who is perceived to be an outsider. And while dangerous wing nuts who equate white supremacist beliefs with Christianity might be a small minority, that the presence of such malignant elements is not repudiated adds a sense of menace to the ideology that ordinary Christians get sucked into and drug along with, even though they don’t agree with the hateful rhetoric that is a salient feature of the most outspoken members of the movement.

The moral outrage of the average supporter of the religious right might not be driven by hatred; nonetheless, their complicit, trance-like mental state lends tacit support to deeply pathological tendencies. Malignant haters are thereby emboldened. For many, supporting the political agenda of the religious right probably seems like the lesser of evils. They may not agree with everything that comes with the package, and would certainly outright reject much of that agenda if they were honest enough with themselves to see what it leads to, but when the question is implicitly framed as a choice between being a part of the moral majority or getting lumped with an immoral minority they, without pausing to think about it, naturally choose the former.

The whole situation is unfortunate, not just because unchecked bigotry can be so destructive, but also because many conservatives have abandoned or lost sight of the crucial role they ought to be playing in fostering a healthy political culture. It’s impossible to have any kind of meaningful dialogue when the conservative point of view is advanced as the only legitimate approach and when a legalistic promotion of traditional values becomes a way of hiding from real world ethical dilemmas and of avoiding any responsibility for actual results (by rationalizing that, as long as they are following the letter of the law, they are exempt from any culpability), or worse, making decisions in such a way as to deliberately create plausible deniability. Conservatives have an important part to play in the process by which constructive change gets vetted and eventually becomes the new normal. Although they often argue that they are standing up for permanent values, even a cursory review of history demonstrates that many of the so called permanent values of today represented a radical challenge to the permanent values that were promoted by an earlier generation of conservatives. What is permanent is that change happens.