Mobilizing a Majority: Nixon's “Silent Majority” Speech and the Domestic Debate over Vietnam

Thelen, Sarah

doi:10.1017/s0021875816001936

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…To see the Silent Majority respond therefore came as a surprise, as Nixon acknowledged later in his memoirs: “It was one thing to make a rhetorical appeal to the Silent Majority – it was another to actually hear from them,” as he did in a flood of letters, telegrams, petitions, and postcards (as cited in Kohrs Campbell, 2014, p. 117; Laderman, 2020, p. 3). The great irony of the rhetoric of the Silent Majority, then, is that, as Thelen (2017) notes, “despite the resonance of the…idea within the American electorate, active and visible support [for Nixon] waned over time. In part, this decline was a natural consequence of Nixon's speech having inspired many citizens to speak out for the first time” (p. 25).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The silent majority, populism and the shadow sides of democracy

Follert

2021

Constellations

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We know the great silent majority will bide its time." -Mao Tse-tung, in Nixon in China (Adams, 1987) When one thinks back upon American political rhetoric in the past half-century, two prominent uses of the expression "The Great Silent Majority" come to mind. At one end is Richard Nixon who recovered the turn-of-phrase from obscurity in the inaugural year of his presidency. At the other end is Donald Trump, who echoed Nixon's usage but with new inflection. When Nixon praised the Silent Majority in his famous televised address, it was to differentiate the virtuous "people" from the noisy rabble in the streets decrying America's presence in Vietnam. "True" Americans were too busy "working, paying their taxes and quietly getting on with life" (Taggart, 2000, p. 93). The legitimate voice of the people, the logic went, was a circumspect one. When Trump's first presidential campaign revived this expression, the virtue of silent repose disappeared. Those who gathered at his rallies held placards aloft, paired with a rebel yell, proclaiming "The Great Silent Majority Stands with Trump." With this invocation of silence, Trump supporters expressed a feeling of voicelessness, of being ignored by elites and technocrats, of being "strangers in their own land" (Hochschild, 2016). Both Nixon's and Trump's usages, ultimately, may be framed as populist in their appeal to the will of the "true people" against its interlopers. But where the first largely heralded silence as a virtue, the latter decried silence as an impasse to the expression of the popular will. What then can this perplexing rhetorical move in its double iteration tell us about the dynamics of populism within modern democratic regimes in general and in American democracy in particular? Populism, in broad terms, may be framed as a discursive appeal to a circumscribed version of "the people" as a legitimizing force for a political movement or figure, over and against symbolically excluded groups. Such groups may be comprised of "elites" framed as the holders and gatekeepers of power, or some other segment viewed as parasitic on the social body. In appealing to popular sovereignty, and in relying on the legitimizing force of elections, populism can be broadly situated within the symbolic framework of representative democracy. In attempting to make totalizing claims about the people, populism also appears as a disfiguration of democracy. But the two, populism and democracy, remain inextricably linked. We may even call populism a "permanent shadow of modern representative democracy" (Müller, 2016, p. 11)-one in a series of shadow formations opened up by the democratic revolution and presaged by Alexis de Tocqueville in his early nineteenth century American travelogue.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The silent majority, populism and the shadow sides of democracy

Follert

2021

Constellations

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“…Indeed, President Richard Nixon was able to persuade the US public that the "great silent majority of Americans" approved of his Vietnam policies, despite a "vocal minority" of dissenters. Nixon's speech is often cited as a paradigmatic example of populist rhetoric: a bold claim about the convictions of those who were not speaking out, which resulted in a record 77% of respondents approving of the war, compared to 58% the day before (see Thelen, 2017). Half a century later, Donald Trump successfully campaigned on the slogan, "The silent majority is back".…”

Section: Demonstrative Communicative Silencementioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Democratic Theory of Silence

Gray

2021

Political Studies

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Contemporary democratic theory is focused on empowering the voices of citizens in collective decision-making. The opposite of voice is silence. Increasingly, citizens are remaining silent rather than vocally participating in politics. Among democratic theorists, silent citizenship is equated to civic disengagement and disempowerment. I expand this view by theorizing the conditions under which silence is also a political expression. My analysis identifies four types of silence that can politically communicate. The resulting framework draws out the communicative dimension of silence, providing new tools to assess the unique interpretative challenges and dangers that silent citizenship presents for a democratic system.

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Populismus in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika

Oswald

2023

Handbuch Politik USA

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Mobilizing a Majority: Nixon's “Silent Majority” Speech and the Domestic Debate over Vietnam

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

The silent majority, populism and the shadow sides of democracy

The silent majority, populism and the shadow sides of democracy

Towards a Democratic Theory of Silence

Populismus in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika

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