The silent majority, populism and the shadow sides of democracy

Abstract

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.

Illusions of Sovereignty: Understanding Populist Crowds with Hannah Arendt

“…Most political theorizing on present-day populism looks exclusively at the relationship between populism and liberal democracy 10 -suggesting either that liberal failures enable populism or that populism can be seen as a "shadow side of democracy," 11 if not a potentially progressive response to problems and paradoxes of liberal representative democracy. 12 By contrast, Arendt's theorizing points to broader historical, societal, and political dynamics at play in political modernity that undermine what she understands as the THE REVIEW OF POLITICS common world, 13 affecting both democracies and autocracies alike.…”