I am the child of progressive parents.
I hail from a progressive town.
I was raised during the progressive ‘70s.
Believe me, I know what it means to say the following. But, distasteful as it is, it’s true, and we all need to learn from it.
So swallow hard and repeat this after me.
Spiro Agnew was right.
Find out why after the break...
We Are the New Silent Majority, Part One
The histrionics of [the protest] was a PR disaster .... Anyone not ... [already of a like mind] ... was turned off by what they saw.... [T]he modern [protester] doesn’t care how he appears to mainstream ... society. He lusts for the euphoria of fervent political activity and needs the security of a community of like-minded people from a similar cultural background....
[The party] must rely on this radical movement that has driven the party outside the mainstream and prevented it from winning .... Barring any major crisis ... [the party] ... is heading for a catastrophic internal conflict.
- Max Blumenthal on FiredogLake
I'm just amazed when [they] go on teevee and say things such as, "The American people have shown they don't like the way the country is headed" while referring to the screamers at the [protest] - like that bunch of loons represents the "American people."
... [None of the] pundits have any business spouting off about what the "American people" want - none of them walk in the shoes of the great majority of Americans. They just listen to the organized groups that are able to yell the loudest at any particular time. Our obsession with ... "news" is going to kill us.
- SueDe on Daily Kos
We have been here before.
It is a familiar sight: in Washington, protesters shout outrageous things about a newly-elected president. On TV, sympathetic pundits coo approval and strive to find parallels with the Founding Fathers. Meanwhile, a growing majority of Americans, fed up with both the protester s and the pundits, struggles to find a voice and be heard.
We have been here before, forty years ago almost to the day.
The past is our key to understanding the future. And, as I only came to understand in the last week, the guide to our future is one singular, seminal historical figure.
Last week I read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. It’s a masterful chronicle of the years 1968-1972, the violent and violatile period when New Deal liberalism was eclipsed by Nixon/Reagan conservatism. Though I was only a child during the years described in the book, these years are permanently etched in my brain. I didn’t think Nixonland would hold any surprises for me.
But then around page 400 I got a shock—a deep, visceral shock, like someone punching me in the gut so hard I couldn’t breathe.
I found myself agreeing with Spiro Agnew.
For those too young to know, Agnew had a brief but spectacular run on the national stage. In 1968 Richard Nixon chose the somewhat obscure Maryland governor to be vice-president; in 1973 Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to a charge of tax evasion. Agnew’s role in the Nixon administration was to be the bad cop, to make Nixon look like a genial and serene peacemaker. This was quite the task, given that Nixon was a devious, calculating, cynical mass of insecurities.
But Agnew had two secret weapons in his speechwriters: the polished phrasemaker William Safire and the blunt, even thuggish, Pat Buchanan. On October 30 1969, just less than forty years ago, Agnew gave a speech in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, where he followed up on some earlier remarks he had made about recent protests against the Vietnam war:
I said I did not like some of the things I saw happening in this country. I criticized those who encouraged government by street carnival and suggested it was time to stop the carousel...
It is time for the preponderant majority, the responsible citizens of this country, to assert their rights. It is time to stop dignifying the immature actions of arrogant, reckless, inexperienced elements within our society. The reason is compelling. It is simply that their tantrums are insidiously destroying the fabric of American democracy.
... I believe in Constitutional dissent. I believe in the people registering their views with their elected representatives, and I commend those people who care enough about their country to involve themselves in its great issues. I believe in legal protest within the Constitutional limits of free speech, including peaceful assembly and the right of petition. But I do not believe that demonstrations, lawful or unlawful, merit my approval or even my silence where the purpose is fundamentally unsound...
Will Congress settle down to the issues of the nation and reform the institutions of America as our President asks? Can the press ignore the pipers who lead the parades?
A few days later Nixon delivered his famous "Silent Majority" speech, where the anxious, awkward president gave a name to the millions of people who did not riot or protest but had grave doubts about the cultural direction the country was heading in.
A new phrase instantly entered America’s political lexicon. Then Agnew followed up his Harrisburg speech with a speech about the news media:
Now what do Americans know of the men who wield this power? Of the men who produce and direct the ... news, the nation knows practically nothing. Of the commentators, most Americans know little other than that they reflect an urbane and assured presence seemingly well-informed on every important matter. We do know that to a man these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City.... Both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism.
We can deduce that these men read the same newspapers. They draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints....
Gresham’s Law seems to be operating in the ... news. Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational. Concurrence can no longer compete with dissent.... Normality has become the nemesis of the ... news.
Now the upshot of all this controversy is that a narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. A single, dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes in the minds of millions the entire picture.
These are, of course, heavily edited quotes. They leave out Agnew’s specific lies about Vietnam and his general lies about Richard Nixon ("This was not Richard Nixon’s war, but it will be Richard Nixon’s peace if we only let him make it.") These quotes include only the parts where Agnew appeals to the sanity and common sense of the ordinary American.
I present them this admittedly misleading way for two reasons. One is that it was these appeals to ordinary American—the Silent Majority—that made the speeches famous and transformed Agnew from a hired bad cop into an icon, beloved by one side of the raging culture war and loathed by the other.
The other reason is that, with only the slightest modifications, both these quotes could have been posted by just about of us here on Daily Kos in the course of the last six weeks.
The world that Nixon and Agnew lived in is rapidly disappearing. The old Silent Majority they spoke of is, quite literally, dying off.
But a new Silent Majority is emerging.
Where the old Silent Majority consisted of culturally conservative, largely Southern, whites, the new Silent Majority is racially diverse and culturally progressive.
We are the new Silent Majority.
As Agnew painted it, all that was good about America was being destroyed by a tiny minority of irresponsible loonies, abetted by fatuous, self-deluded press. Meanwhile the decent, ordinary folk stood by on the sidelines, powerless to affect the outcome because the Establishment keeps decent, ordinary folk from influencing politics and policy.
Many progressives today feel exactly the same way.
Despite the fact that polls show a solid majority of Americans in favor of a public option on health care, the press treats it as a fringe opinion ... all while devoting copious air time to the real fringe, the birthers and deathers and teabaggers.
As Nixonland makes clear, once the concept of the Silent Majority entered the ideosphere it quickly gathered momentum and became a powerful political force.
In 1960 the folks who made up the Silent Majority were looked at as old-fashioned anachronisms that would be swept away by the inevitable liberal tide. But that liberal tide quickly subsided, and by 1968 the Silent Majority were the new powerbrokers. For forty years they were the decisive bloc in every national election.
Now the political forces have realigned, and once more there is a majority whose voice goes virtually unheard in the media and the corridors of power. The time has come for us to own our new identity and to use it to further our goals.
We need to make the political world aware that we exist.
We need to make the political world aware that we can reward those who share our values ... and punish those who do not.
We need to be the new culture warriors, protecting the things we value from the street carnival politics of today.
This should not, in principle, be a difficult task. Marx said somewhere that history repeats itself—the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The America of 1968 stood on the brink of a genuine abyss, wracked by protests, riots, assassinations, and terrorist acts. It was a tragic time.
Today the major challenges to the values of the new Silent Majority—our values—come from Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber, and Joe Wilson, and teabaggers who named themselves after a pornographic act without even realizing it. 2009 is a year, not of tragedy, but of farce.
But we are in very real danger of blowing our moment. To transform ourselves into a force that can shape the next forty years we need to learn from the mistakes we’ve made time after time in the past.
Next: How Can Progressives Learn from the Legacy of Agnew and Nixon?