The Silent Majority Myth

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Responding to Rick Perlstein’s piece on the rise of Trump coinciding with the final surrender of the Confederate flag, Paul Krugman remarks on the self-reinforcing nature of the Silent Majority myth:

So why shouldn’t they rally around The Donald? The elite considers him ridiculous, but the base has been told again and again that the elite is corrupt and anti-American. The base has also been told again and again that it represents the true views of everyone except Those People. So why shouldn’t they go with someone who is their kind of guy, in style as well as substance?

The Silent Majority myth is for me the most cognitively dissonant part of the self-mythology that conservative white America is under constant siege: Forces with vastly superior numbers don’t typically find themselves surrounded and under siege.

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