Forum Post: What happened to the silent majority?
Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 25, 2011, 9:46 p.m. EST by jppt
(82)
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I would have thought that ows would have brought them out by now. Do they have a leader? Wouldn't it be something if they did and they spoke out in support of ows.
I'll take the job... Put in me in the front lines and I'll tell them remove all currency systems and distribute our goods evenly. REMOVE it completely and allow the common man to have even if they don't work. Allow the schools to be filled with teachers and give them a home and food and car that they rate and not take their taxes or give a cut of their time to a government who doesn't do their job! contact me via facebook... andreyeampierre@ yahoo.com we need to organize and create a solid plan to meet and focus... if there is a system already please contact me and I will join it... I have been fighting this battle since the beginning and I am ready to stand in front of those who have no directions and put the words out to the masses who need it! FREEDOM from control! Freedom from a system that is NOT NEEDED!!!!
What would you say if you were the leader of the silent majority.
That would depend a hell of a lot on who exactly comprised said silent majority, now wouldn't it?
I don't know it doesn't seem to matter to the leaders of our country.
I would just smh.
The original "silent majority" (also known as the "moral majority) was largely comprised of upper- and middle-class white Americans reacting against the changes brought on by the civil rights and women's rights movements and who were willing to support massive union-busting and economic deregulation under the assumption that it would make their lives better at the expense of people who didn't really deserve what they were getting anyway (read: ethnic minorities and the poor).
They're not as openly racist or backward as they were thirty years ago, but their legacy has left a decent-sized stamp on this country. Now what you have is large groups of working- and middle-class people who for the most part aren't happy with where this country is headed but have bought into the whole "the best government is no government" spiel for so long that they don't really know better.
These people are not bad or evil or stupid, but at the same time I highly doubt that you're going to see the members of the "silent majority" or that many of their descendants endorsing certain important policy avenues let alone getting on the picket lines unless we make a strong, unified effort to reach out to them.
Since these people, for the most part are "silent", you really shouldn't go about assuming to KNOW what they think. (they have bought into the whole "the best government is no government" spiel for so long....) You can't read minds and you can't prove they think that. So why are you pretending that you KNOW???
I'm referring to a very specific use of the term thrown around by Republican candidates in the late 1970s and most of the 1980s to refer to a white, mostly affluent voting bloc that came en masse to the polls during that time to vote for Ford and Reagan. I'm not necessarily using the term in the same sense as the OP was.
"Now what you have is large groups of working- and middle-class people who for the most part aren't happy with where this country is headed but have bought into the whole "the best government is no government" spiel for so long that they don't really know better."
But you're not NOT necessarily using the term in the same sense either. Hence the problem. :-)
What I'm looking at is that the group that was over thirty then (and thus composed large chunks of the original silent majority) is now well into its sixties as a whole and it is their children who make up a fairly large part of this country. That group has been raised from the time they were young on the idea that poverty derives from laziness and that government is evil, and that large corporations are to be lauded as the protectors of our prosperity, and it is that group that we have to start appealing to if we really want to broaden our impact.
"That group has been raised from the time they were young on the idea that poverty derives from laziness and that government is evil, and that large corporations are to be lauded as the protectors of our prosperity, and it is that group that we have to start appealing to if we really want to broaden our impact."
Since NO ONE has ever interviewed each and every person in the category you reference and obtained the empirical evidence required to prove such a statement to be true, let me ask which one of the following statements (if any) represents why you just said what you did:
A) You were indoctrinated with this idea as a child and still accept it as the truth today. B) You think it is perfectly acceptable, intelligent, clever or just good clean fun to say or print bigoted, or biased suspicions in public in a manner that makes them appear to be facts.
C)You've heard some of these people say these very things yourself (or heard someone else say that THEY heard them) and it's common knowledge to anyone with a brain that if SOME of a group do it/feel that way-they ALL do. D)You've heard some of these people say things yourself (or had other people tell you that they have experienced it) that COULD indicate that they feel this way (if you twist them just a tad or make assumptions) and that's good enough for you to establish it as "fact". E) None of them are accurate but you have a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation you'd like to share in your own defense....
No generalization is going to be completely accurate, and I'm drawing on a number of different sources, beginning with a series of contemporary polls I read a while back. First of all, despite all that's happened over the past three years there's a new poll out saying that 64% of this country is more afraid of being abused or red-taped to death by the government than continued funny business on the part of Wall Street and big business.
I have also held long conversations on policy with a fairly large number of different people who do believe in at least two out of the three things I mentioned above (belief in the third started dropping after 2008 but there is still little support for reining in big business) and they are almost entirely white and making (or their parents are making) at least $100,000 per year. There are a few exceptions to this, but the vast majority of the people I've spoken to who believe in these things are well-to-do white Christians.
Generalizations based on small samples (ratio of the entire population) of a large population tend to be unrepresentative at all. And the more diverse the group is, the larger any representative sample is required to be. Because individual human beings are so incredibly unique, intelligent, honest people usually refrain from making generalizations about them.
The number of sources you draw from are completely irrelevant to whether or not your argument is valid, and the validity of your argument does not automatically mean your conclusions are true.
Your conclusions might very well BE accurate and true. My point is that you cannot prove that they are.
I cannot prove these generalizations (although I very much wish I had enough data and enough time to parse it such that I wouldn't need to rely on them), but I'm looking at this mostly from a marketing perspective. The ideas that I listed don't necessarily or exclusively correspond to any one demographic in this country (although I'd be very surprised if they weren't more prevalent in some groups than others), but various subsets of them appear to belong to a surprisingly large portion of the American population.
I correlated those ideas to the socioeconomic demographic behind the Republican "silent majority," quite possibly incorrectly (considering my lack of hard data and my failure to consider age as a factor), but there is research from the Pew Center that indicates that the generation that votes Republican most consistently was in fact the most white out of all of them and the most accustomed to affluence.
Thank you for restating and clarifying. I truly do appreciate it.
Might I humbly suggest that from a marketing perspective, as per my own personal experience, you might want to avoid insinuating...much less pretty much openly stating ..that your "target market" is bigoted, paranoid, and brainwashed? It tends to make you....er.....LESS appealing. :-)
Fair enough. The fact of the matter is that when you carry those ideas to their logical extreme what you wind up with is an ideology that turns a blind eye to monopoly and monopsony and leads to a degree of corruption and dysfunctionality in government that we've been experiencing only partially since 2000. I didn't mean my comments as a personal insult to an entire demographic, especially considering that not everyone in that demographic holds those positions, and for that I apologize.
That said, I do consider the idea that a tiny government creates a free society to be incredibly simplistic, and the idea that capitalism only works when you strip away regulations and controls and let things take their course to be flat-out wrong. I understand where the former idea comes from, considering the damage that the Second Red Scare and Watergate did to this country, but anybody telling you that there is no way to keep the government honest other than slashing it is lying to you flat-out.
But the logical opposite of "big government" isn't tiny government-it's just small government. Why does it have to be about "keeping government honest". Can't it be about government becoming unwieldy and monstrously inefficient?
A free society can establish the size of the government it wants. A government is an idea that can only be created by people-ideas do not create people, or societies.
I don't believe that stripping away all regulations and controls is any better of an idea than introducing every regulation and control is. Why is it that you seem to think that if someone expresses some degree of disagreement that what they REALLY think/mean/feel MUST be the logical extreme? That just flies in the face of logic and reason to me. And yet I experience it over and over and over from OWS supporters.
Why?
I personally want a government that is big enough to do what it must, including regulating private industry to the degree necessary to protect consumers and the economy as a whole, powerful enough to do those things efficiently, very much under the public microscope, and kept separate from all sources of influence other than the American people. I firmly believe that the government should be no bigger than it absolutely must be to do its duty by the American people, and I have little patience for unnecessary bureaucracy.
I have made this clear on here many times, including articulating concrete policy initiatives that I believe would take us toward this point and explaining my rationale behind the philosophy of slender, efficient government. More often than not, I am accused of being in favor of "big government" or of being a socialist or a communist before people take the time to slow down and consider the possibilities.
Having a government that does what we need it to do and no more is something I think pretty much everyone can agree on, but I feel like we've become more concerned with cutting out superfluous functions than making sure the government can do what we need it to do. Ron PauI wants to abolish the EPA and the DOE, and when I ask many of his supporters on here about that they either refuse to answer or they resort to strict Constitutional literalism and fail to explain how to deal with the costs and risks in making such a decision.
People tend to talk about this like the government's an obese old man in need of liposuction for all our sakes, and for a time that made sense. We've had Uncle Sam on the operating table since the mid-1980s; a lot of the fat that we set out to remove is long gone and now we're looking at cutting out vital organs to shave a pound or two here and there. What we have now is a government that's big and inefficient in a few places but becoming more and more anemic in the spots that count.
What if it's NOT a problem with fat? But a systemic, fatal disease that has been eating away at it's heart?
No problem; I'll probably be on later today and tonight depending on what my schedule's going to look like. Feel free to put it up even if I'm not around on here; I'll see it when I get back in. Thanks and Merry (belated) Christmas!
That's an interesting change of analogy, and I'd like to ask that you clarify what you mean more specifically. I'd also like to ask you a question: what direction would you like to see this country go in from 2012 on? I'm not asking about candidates or parties, I'm asking about specific policies. What do you see as the major issues that we as a nation need to address, and more importantly how would you address them?
I'm not asking to distract you, but I don't necessarily believe that it would be a good idea to carry this further without knowing exactly where you stand. If you wish, I can provide a series of links with different pieces of my answers to that question to put us on an even footing. Also, my post apparently doesn't have a reply link attached to it. Do you want to continue with this or go to a new thread?
I'd be happy to clarify tomorrow if that's ok. I'm one tired mom who finally got her Christmas whacked out kiddos to bed and I'm RIGHT behind them. :-) (If ModestCapitalist shows up here screaming that I'm a MAN along with another re-post of his encyclopedia sized theories-tell him to shut up and go to bed will you? lol)
It is the majority of people who don't speak out much , yet I would guess think a lot.
It was never real.
It was a Nixon campaign slogan.
They cannot get a word in edgewise.
Plz look at my new currency idea the hugback it could bring world peace.