The Silent Majority: Apathy or Wisdom?

A common factor in American politics is the idea of a "silent majority" as a significant, sometimes even dominant, factor in American politics. These are the people who don't get worked up about politics; they go to their jobs or take care of their families and vote according simple, almost subliminal criteria: who they like, who they trust. The issues of the day are factors in that opinion but not necessarily dominant ones; the silent majority judges the whole range of issues on feel rather than analysis.

Some would say this is ignorance in action; others would say that it is prone to tyranny-of-the-majority. But I would say it's something else -- something that many Americans grasp in principle as the foundation of peaceful coexistance. I'll call it minding your own business. Which is to say, you don't bother someone unless they are bothering you. You don't try to stop them from doing what they want to do; you don't try to take their money for some cause; you don't interfere with how they want to spend their time or develop their land. You mind your own business, and everyone else does the same, and only where "your business" intersects "my business" do we need to interact.

That may be in activities that we both choose to conduct in public -- such as driving. Traffic laws, in the abstract, define a framework for interaction. That definition is a public good. We are better off having a set of rules that everyone agrees to operate by. It's more efficient to define the rules ahead of time than to argue about whose fault a particular crash really was. Particular rules may be poorly thought out or poorly implemented, but having a basic framework is better than not having one. (For the anarcho-capitalists: private roads can implement private rules just as easily; go build some and come back when you have).

But for activities that don't threaten someone else's life and health, we tend to fall back on the basic principle of leaving each other alone. And this principle extends to politics. I believe that the "silent majority" in America, the people who aren't vocal about politics except at the polls, and even the growing number of people who don't vote at all, are practicing this principle. They don't see a need for government to become involved in their lives, and so they don't involve themselves in politics.

Unfortunately, that leaves the political discourse to two groups of people: people who have something more that they want government to do, and people who want it to be a lot less involved. The average American doesn't see the thousands of regulations that businesses need to follow, doesn't see the large tax bill taken out of his paycheck, and doesn't see the need to change anything. It's not really interfering with his life, so he doesn't feel the need to interfere himself.

Most advocates for liberty are those who have had government interference in their lives. Maybe they have tried to run a small business, and noted with dismay the huge number of regulations imposed upon them. Maybe they were audited by the IRS at a young and tender age. But they have felt the heavy boot of government in their lives, and so they respond in kind.

But most people have the government interference carefully shuffled out of sight. Draw the taxes out of the paycheck, so that most people's interaction with the IRS comes only once a year, and many people get money back. "Hey," they think, "the government gives ME money!" Impose the regulations upon businesses, which can hire accountants and lawyers, then pass the cost along to the customer hidden in the cost of goods they buy. Do whatever is necessary, in short, to make government interference in the average person's life invisible.

Most people feel they are left alone by government, and so they leave it alone in turn. But it's interesting to look at what happens when that isn't the case.

Take security measures at airports. Everyone who has gotten on a plane since 9/11 has been searched more closely than before -- in many cases, substantially more closely. Government has interfered in lives directly. And people respond -- by getting angry at abusive security guards, by demanding armed pilots rather than intrusive searches, by creating such a public uproar over CAPPS-II that it's been renamed and reshuffled to avoid the attention.

But many things that don't interfere are, in practice, just as stupid and intrusive. They get ignored because they aren't on most people's radar screen.

For years, politicians have assumed that the "silent majority" supports the government status quo. After all, if the people wanted something different, they would vote differently, right? Since they elected us, they must support us. If they aren't voting at all, well, it means they support us enough not to want us out of office.

But that assumption is wrong. Silence is not support and silence is not consent. Silence means leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone. But leaving the government alone until it infringes upon your personal liberty is no longer enough.