The Silent Majority - No Longer Silent

Watching the State of the Union address was almost too much to bear.   

The antics of Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were puerile and disgusting.  They heckled. mugged for the cameras, and comported themselves like audience members at the Jerry Springer Show.   

Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy and others were either stone-faced or smirking throughout, except during a brief display of unity in support of Ukraine, which is evidently the only democracy Republicans are interested in defending.  Clearly not ours.

The President’s speech was followed, as is traditional, by the GOP response, delivered by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds with a stern, charmless affect, exemplifying the Republican propensity for lying with a straight face.

As has become a national phenomenon, Reynolds played the “populist” role, characterizing anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-diversity, anti-book movements as a “pro-parent, pro-family revolution.”  She also hypocritically boasted of $210 million in federal grants for rural broadband projects in Iowa despite her strident public opposition to the bill that provided the funding. 

This is what the GOP has become; a party hijacked by a fraudulent sociopath who unleashed a kettle full of resentment that has been simmering for decades.

There are two related dynamics that forged today’s Republicanism.   

Beginning with sex, drugs rock ’n’ roll and resistance to the war in Vietnam, ordinary, God-fearing, “patriotic” Americans felt their values were under attack.  The world as they knew it seemed to be changing.  They were, as Richard Nixon claimed in his famous 1969 speech, the “silent majority" whose voices were being drowned out by the “vocal minority.”   The “silent majority”was almost entirely white and had already been rattled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the growing militancy of Black Americans and their hippie allies.  

Then along came second and third wave feminism, wherein women sought an equal place in government, home and the office, further upsetting the “silent majority’s” equilibrium.  Without bras and with luxuriant armpits, these womyn were repellent to conservatives.

The third source of repugnant change came at about the same time with the Stonewall riots in 1969, when gay women and men rebelled against a lifetime of bigotry and social oppression.

I don’t claim that all conservatives or Republicans are overtly racist, sexist or homophobic, but a thick vein of residual resentment runs through the GOP and its policies.  The Republican Party, nationally and locally, has been steadfastly opposed to affirmative action, anti-discrimination rights for LGTBQ+ folks, equal pay for women, reproductive rights and honest education about race, sexuality and gender in schools.

And the resentment includes what they see as constant attacks on their religion by Godless atheists who want to remove prayers from schools and monuments from public spaces.

The confluence of these issues comprises what are today’s “culture wars,” through which long-aggrieved conservatives seek to restore order to their world, where men are men, women are women and people don’t constantly divide the country with “identity politics.” 

“Identity politics” has become shorthand for “We’ve had enough of civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights already!!”  What’s really at play is the restoration of an“identity politics” that privileges the only identity that need not be spoken because it has always been culturally and socially dominant - white, heterosexual identity.   Straight white folks don’t play "identity politics” because we don’t have to.  

The other dynamic fueling today’s Republicanism is a related resentment best characterized as “You can’t tell me what to do!” It was politically encoded in Ronald Reagan’s fabled quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”   The accompanying wish was to shrink government to a size that could be drowned in the bathtub.   There was no shrinking of corporate subsidies, bloated defense budgets or pork in political barrels.  But that’s not what they cared - or care - about

That was never the intent of a smaller government.  The idea was always to shrink only those aspects of government that told the “silent majority” what to do - how to use or misuse their property, how to sort their trash, what kind of gas-guzzling car they couldn’t drive and the granddaddy of “don’t tells,” any kind of gun control at all.  They also wanted to drown any programs that helped “the others,” who had the same opportunities they had and just didn’t work hard enough.

This is the so-called populism that Trump aroused with his Make America Great Again slogan.  Some people thought this was a platform to reassert American military and/or economic superiority,. But just look at Trump supporters at rallies and on social media.  They are not University of Chicago economists or sophisticated foreign policy analysts.   

They are members of the semi-dormant “silent majority” who heard MAGA as a pledge to make America the way it used to be.  When Reynolds declared a “pro-parent, pro-family revolution,”  she was evoking the same sentiment. “Don’t let the libs tell you what to do or what your kids should learn in school.”

The “silent majority” is now a very “vocal minority” comprised of low information, resentful people whose primary aspiration is to “own the libs” and reassert their social and religious hegemony. 

 If the Republican Party prevails in 2022 and 2024 they will have succeeded.