Posted on 05/07/2024 3:49:19 AM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
ballot to protest abortion, for that is the world he knows.
For authentic conservatives, who still know an even older world, this presents a challenge. Politics can shape culture, to be sure, but in a democratic polity, you cannot simply reverse a cultural tide by political means. You can, perhaps, slow its progress, buying time for cultural renewal, but that renewal will have to come at the level of the imagination. The silent majority of Americans will have to recognize that there is a world more real than the increasingly unreal one shaped by Roe these past 50 years.
I’m Brad Littlejohn.
I think incremental change is the way we ought to go on abortion...it is the way the left won over so many. Abortion is a terrible practice. Getting rid of it is a noble cause. Do it wisely even if that means one step at a time.
Sorry. Bad cut and paste. Here is the whole article:
BRAD LITTLEJOHN: In 1969, amid widespread violent demonstrations, Richard Nixon addressed himself to the “silent majority” of conservative-minded people in America. For more than five decades, conservatives have continued to appeal to what they felt sure was that silent majority–a demographic that opposed abortion, same-sex marriage, and “woke elites.”
Only it isn’t working anymore. The Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision in 2022, and since then, vocal majorities in many states have voted in defense of legal abortion. Former President Donald Trump boasted of his pro-life judicial appointments, but even he effectively threw in the towel in his recent abortion policy. What went wrong? Where did the “silent majority” go?
Well, nowhere. The silent majority is still there, and they are still “conservative.” The problem is, that word doesn’t always mean what we think it means. It is true, most people are conservative in that they are risk-averse and don’t like a ton of adventure; there aren’t too many skydivers in the world. And most people prefer some measure of cultural and political stability, so they can inhabit a world that makes sense to them, a world they’ve always known. But most people have short memories.
Consider these facts: The average American alive is 39 years old, and thus cannot personally remember a world before, say, 1989. Their only knowledge of life before legal abortion would have to come through education—either the handing down of wisdom by parents and mentors, or formal instruction at school. Only the conservative intelligentsia and a few religious traditionalists are still staunchly “conservative”—at least, in the sense of seeking to preserve traditional wisdom from centuries past.
For most Americans alive today, the world of Roe v. Wade simply is traditional. That doesn’t mean they love abortion, but they accept it as a fact of life, a fixture of the social and political world. The “rights” and values around abortion and the social expectations it makes possible—all of these have been internalized by the silent majority as part of the status quo. Voting to restore abortion is a way to return to that status quo.
Americans are still conservative in a sense, but many now want to conserve radical individualism and materialism. The median voter, then, will still vote against runaway immigration, for that is a disruption of the world he knows. But he will not go to the ballot to protest abortion, for that is the world he knows.
For authentic conservatives, who still know an even older world, this presents a challenge. Politics can shape culture, to be sure, but in a democratic polity, you cannot simply reverse a cultural tide by political means. You can, perhaps, slow its progress, buying time for cultural renewal, but that renewal will have to come at the level of the imagination. The silent majority of Americans will have to recognize that there is a world more real than the increasingly unreal one shaped by Roe these past 50 years.
I’m Brad Littlejohn.
It’s not a matter of a majority.
There are millions of women who are using second-rate or not using first-rate birth control methods and then having sex with men the women feel are unfit to be husbands and caregiving fathers.
Modern coat hangers are not subject to rusting the way the ones in my youth were.
There is also insulated wire that’s found in most houses in America.
Abortion itself will not be legislated away.
What can be done is to make Social Security payouts partially dependent on the earnings of offspring. Social Security might kick in at 70, but at age 62-69 a parent could collect the FICA tax of offspring made during eight years, split 50/50 with a providing co-parent (or what’s left after child support adjusted for inflation is repaid).
There is no ‘right’ to murder innocent human beings.
There is only the lack of prosecution for doing so.
The “silent majority” is a myth, perhaps one of the worst myths ever perpetrated in U.S. history.
People who are silent are uninvolved. They are spectators and are irrelevant.
Fill a stadium up jam packed full of spectators, and put one team and one team only on the field, any one you want.
Who wins? The spectators or the team? Obviously the team wins, because the team is actually participating.
The team may have only been 30 or 40 or 50 people. But they are participating. THEY are the majority. Not the 50,000 spectators. The spectators are irrelevant.
I believe the “silent majority” was meant to be people who voted for the conservative candidate—but didn’t march in the streets screaming about it. They did/do indeed exist.
After Nixon was re-elected in 1972, leftist kook Pauline Karl (a “film critic”) lamented his landslide victory. She claimed nobody she knew voted for Nixon. Her attitude kind of illustrated how the elites view middle class Americans.
I know what people mean by the phrase. It doesn’t materialize in the real world though.
There isn’t any value in the fact that you won the election when you spend the next 729 days losing and losing and losing, over and over and over again.
Between each election there are 730 days.
The reality is (to keep this with the original post in regard to pro-life issues) that the only reason Roe ended up being overturned at all was not really because of Trump. It was because of the annual March for Life. They kept the issue in people’s minds. They did the hard work. They did not stop for 50 years. The March for Life is the unsilent majority, and they won because they kicked silence onto the ash heap of history where it belongs.
To borrow from my earlier analogy: The March for Lifers were not up in the bleachers. Sitting. Watching. Pointing. Complaining. Perhaps holding a bag of popcorn.
They got down into the field. In participation, they won the championship that year.
Full disclosure: I have been to a March for Life in Washington D.C.
Seems like you’re defining the phrase differently. Whether the actions desired between elections occur is a different demographic. You seem to define the activists and what I am calling the silent majority to be the same people.
There is overlap to be sure but they’re not always the same folks.
Anyway, I think Littlejohn does a good job analyzing our current state.
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