The Powerless Silent Majority

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

I first heard the term “silent majority” used to describe the coalition of Americans with traditional values that was mobilized to elect Richard Nixon back in the late 1960s. It was a concept that I always thought fit well with Willmoore Kendall’s understanding of the “deliberate sense of the community,” the broad electoral consensus that would prevail over the long run in the American political system. It is what made the United States an exceptional country, in Kendall’s eyes.
I am a great admirer of Kendall’s work. But I have a question: Why isn’t the consensus he described able to exert itself any longer on the great issues of the day? The polls tell us that an overwhelming majority of Americans want illegal immigration stopped and school prayer permitted. Also that a substantial majority wants abortion on demand made illegal and — until very recently — marriage to be defined as the union of one man and one woman. Yet it seems to make no difference.
On the other hand, policies with little public backing are instituted by government agencies, without any attempt to form a consensus. The proposed ordinance in San Francisco to ban smokeless tobacco use by baseball players — snuff and chewing tobacco — at athletic venues is a perhaps trivial but instructive example. Where is the groundswell for that idea? The argument can be made that secondhand smoke can be a health problem for spectators at an athletic event. But chewing tobacco? Its use may threaten the health of the player enjoying a chaw, but how does it endanger someone sitting hundreds of yards from him in the stands?
What happened to the liberals’ favorite argument about consenting adults being free to do what they want as long as they cause no harm to anyone else?
The sponsors of the proposed ban argue that smokeless tobacco use does “not send the right message to children.” The Associated Press reports the San Francisco ordinance “is part of an overall push by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, based in Washington.”
I wonder what the sponsors of the ordinance would say if San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone proposed a ban on sexually explicit programs on cable television because of the message about promiscuity that it sends to young people.
There are other examples: the ban on the showing of the film American Sniper at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the University of Maryland in response to complaints from Muslim groups on campus. Also Johns Hopkins University’s student government’s call for the university to rule out any “current and future Chick-fil-A development plans” on campus, arguing it would be a “microaggression” toward the campus “LGBTQ community and its allies.”
Chick-fil-A’s offense was that its president had spoken out in defense of traditional marriage in 2012.
There were no massive protests at RPI and Johns Hopkins calling for these policies. Activist minorities pushed them through. So how does it work? Substantial majority opinion is ignored on illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, and legalized abortion, but minority activists get their way on smokeless tobacco, LGBTQ demands and Muslim objections to “American Sniper”? What happened to Kendall’s “deliberate sense of the community”?
Kendall’s proposition was that in the United States “majority rule” was not understood by the Founding Fathers to mean rule by a simple numerical majority; that that was the genius of our system. The Fathers’ intention was that our system of division of powers and checks and balances would ensure that the majority would decide but “with an eye to whether or not the minority will obey, can be counted upon to obey — with an eye, therefore, to the necessity of carrying the minority with it,” that there was not to be “large-scale coercion of the minority.”
The Constitution was designed, Kendall continues, to make legislative change difficult, for it to take time, to force us to think and rethink whether the proposed laws were genuinely in the best interests of the country, to make it necessary for “the majority to bide its time until it can act by consensus . . . until it can reasonably expect the minority to go along.” We must remember, Kendall says, that “our system was devised by men who feared and disliked above all things the operation in politics of sheer, naked will.”
This is why they instituted the arduous process of getting a bill passed into law by both houses of Congress, of withstanding a presidential veto and gaining the approval of its constitutionality by the Supreme Court. All this, writes Kendall, “was devised to bring about amongst us a more perfect union, and thus not to divide us into majority and minority…thus not to keep us busy coercing one another,” but “rather to reconcile the conflicting claims of different wills amongst us.”
Kendall moves to the bottom line: The Constitution was written “to effectuate not the will of the people, but rather, as the Federalist puts it, the deliberate sense of the community, the whole community, as to what ought to be done, what policies ought to be adopted.”
I have been turning to these passages from the book Willmoore Kendall: Contra Mundum for much of my adult life. I still think it a great resource. (You can find copies on Amazon.)
But I don’t know how to reconcile any longer Kendall’s understanding of how our system was intended to work by the Founding Fathers and the situation I have described above. I would argue that there is a “deliberate sense of the community” against illegal immigration and abortion on demand and not that long ago in favor of traditional marriage. Nevertheless, the elites in the government, the media and the academic world have found a way to block the consensus from becoming law and public policy.
The elites have been able to achieve precisely what Kendall assured us was not supposed to happen. They have not had “to bide their time” until they achieved a societal consensus, but have resorted to the operation of “sheer, naked will.”
There is an ironic added dimension to all this, of course: Kendall argued the Founders were concerned with preventing a numerical majority from acting until it could “reasonably expect the minority to go along.” What we are seeing today is a numerical minority imposing its will upon the “deliberate sense of the community” when the issues are illegal immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage.
What is the lesson to be learned? I don’t have an answer. Except perhaps how important it is for people with traditional values to find some way to secure a presence in the world of the media and academic elites in order to break up the monopoly they now hold over the shaping of public opinion.
It is clear that the members of Congress fear more what is said in The New York Times and what they hear from Hollywood celebrities than thousands of letters from their constituents. They crave respectability, and as long as what is respectable is defined by the current elites, Kendall’s understanding of the deliberate sense of the community sought by the Founding Fathers will be irrelevant to the political process.