Silent Majority

First invoked in politics by Richard Nixon,[1] the Silent Majority is a hypothetical mass of citizens that approve of the speaker's position, but have not publicly expressed this in any tangible way. It is the off-line equivalent of "The lurkers support me in email."

Cogito ergo sum Logic and rhetoric

Key articles

Logical fallacy Syllogism Argument

General logic

Affirming a disjunct Balance fallacy Fallacy of ambiguity Handwave Homme de paille Paradox

Bad logic

Appeal to celebrity Handwave Nirvana fallacy Suppressed correlative Two wrongs make a right 稻草人谬误 v - t - e

It is also the name of a song by the band True Sounds of Liberty (TSOL).[2]

Use by conservative wingnuts

The "silent majority" is most often invoked by conservative politicians who argue that real Americans are conservative, but neither as politically active nor as loud as their liberal counterparts. Nixon initially employed it in reference to the Vietnam War: since most Americans weren't actively protesting the war, Nixon's reasoning went, it followed that they supported his policies. In contrast, those criticizing the war were a "vocal minority" whose views received disproportionate attention.

This logic is, to say the least, highly flawed, since it assumes facts not in evidence. By definition, the opinions of a "silent majority" are difficult to gauge since they do not engage in politicking outside of an election year. Assuming that all supporters of a position are silent, and all those who oppose it are vocal, is extremely dubious reasoning. Nixon's own domestic advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, cautioned him that "the silent majority is silent because it has nothing to say."[3]

With the rise of right-wing media and activist groups over the past few decades, the term has become even more an oxymoron, which hasn't stopped Republicans from using it. Most recently, Donald Trump and his supporters have branded themselves a silent majority,[4] even though most of them are about as silent as an airhorn operated by a drunk frat boy and Trump has never had a majority of support of Americans.

Ironically, the phrase was originally euphemism for dead people, as in "He joined the silent majority".[5] So when a politician says the silent majority will support them on election day…

The Horseshoe lands in China

Interestingly, the Chinese government and the tankies used this fallacious argument as a propaganda tool during the 2019-20 Hong Kong Protests, trying to make it look like the majority of Hong Kong residents supported China and opposed the protests, but supposedly were unable to do so due to fear of retribution from protesters.[6][7] During the 2019 Hong Kong local elections however, the majority voted against pro-China representatives and for pro-democracy parties. Now, they have to either resort to Doublethink or whine about "muh violence" or that the Hongkongers are "brainwashed" by British colonialism.[8]

See also

• Burden of proof
• Argumentum ad populum
• Appeal to authority

Notes

References

1. http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/richard-m-nixon/videos/nixon-addresses-silent-majority
2. TSOL - Abolish Government \ Silent Majority YouTube.
3. https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/releases/jun09/111370_Moynihan.pdf
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/us/politics/donald-trump-defiantly-rallies-a-new-silent-majority-in-a-visit-to-arizona.html
5. https://books.google.com/books?id=EcZZAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA302&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false Greenough, James Bradstreet; George Lyman Kittredge (1920)
6. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2019/11/day-hong-kong-s-true-silent-majority-spoke
7. https://hongkongfp.com/2019/07/16/extremist-mobs-chinas-propaganda-machine-tries-control-message-hong-kong-protests/
8. https://www.scmp.com/comment/letters/article/3039475/how-could-most-hong-kong-vote-support-rioting-and-violence

This logic-related article is a stub.
You can help RationalWiki by expanding it.