When Ten People Shout Down Ninety Eventually They Get Ignored

75% of Americans Never Tweet and only 10% Are Actively Engaged

I've been wondering about the mid-term elections.

Historically speaking, the Republicans are going to blow things out of the water. That's the history when the Democrats take the presidency. The polling (which is really just a tad better than determining whether or not you live another thirty years based on wagers on a Buffalo slot machine) are indicating the same.

The Left relies so heavily on the idea that the more people vote, the more people vote Democrat which has been shown to be a myth. Sure, 6 million more voted for Biden but he only won by around 70,000 votes given our bizarre Electoral College Three Card Monte. Biden and his dysfunctional crew have done a mountain of things in a year but tackling the Electoral College ain't one of them.

So I wonder what the fuck we're gonna do when the GOP takes the Senate and the House and effectively snips Biden's political genitals off and hides them in a jar behind the Rose Garden?

I look back to 2016. It was a devastation when Trump was declared the victor. I remember the night like it was yesterday. Aside from the non-stop hysterics for the next four years, I can’t say that the fat orange dude in the Oval Office affected my day-to-day life in any way. That isn't to say he didn't have some seriously adverse effects on the lives of others but how much did he really do? I mean, the Democrats are currently kind of in charge and Texas is banning transgender kids, Florida is banning being gay, and the Supreme Court is going to ban abortion.

David Mamet, a playwright/auteur from my old stomping ground who turned from hyper-liberal to hyper-conservative in the past twenty years or so, had this to say:

“Well, he did a great job as a president. If you put everything you see on these little screens aside and look at what happened during the Trump presidency. We told China to knock it off. We told Nato to start paying their fair share. We moved the Embassy of the United States to Jerusalem in Israel . . . Gas prices were down. There was the lowest black unemployment in history …”

He's not wrong about those specifics and an increasing number of our black and brown friends are taking notice. Sure, he missed the botched public relations regarding COVID, the stacking of every court in the land with arch-conservatives (including SCOTUS), and all the ridiculous corruption. He also attempted a coup and was impeached twice. But let's not quibble, OK?

The country is divided in half and, if you pay the most attention to the far ends of the spectrum, the vocal minority tweeting their vitriol and childish retorts, you'd think there was no hope for the united part of the states. So when I read some of the latest Pew Poll data, I find a hint of optimism.

75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.

On an average weeknight in January, just 1% of U.S. adults watched primetime Fox News (2.2 million). 0.5% tuned into MSNBC (1.15 million).

Also

In Gallup's 2021 polling, 29% of Americans identified as Democrats ... 27% as Republicans ... and 42% as independents.

We are bordering on a three-party system or at least have a solid chunk of the population unwilling to claim fealty to either the wholly ineffective members of the American political pissing contest.

I'd guess that a healthy number from both that 29% of Democrats and 27% of Republicans are also a part of that 75% who don't tweet which means that the Fourth Estate is paying attention to the wrong voices when reporting about the state of the union (not the speech but the actual state of our society).

I imagine sitting in a room full of one hundred people. Sixty-five are white, thirteen are black, fifty-two are women, six Asians, and sixteen Hispanics, and one single transgender person of a variety of ethnicities.

Ten of these people (four on the left side of the room and six on the other) are screaming at each other. I mean, rabid dog, foam-at-the-mouth rage. They have signs with hashtag slogans and are losing their shit about a basketful of issues. The other ninety people are sort of looking at them in amazement. The people closest to these tiny groups of lunacy can at least understand what is being shrieked about but an additional seventy in the middle just hear noise.

That's America as she stands. I'm probably somewhere near the person standing about thirty people from the left. I can make out what their losing their shit over but need to really strain to get it.

In the world of social media, this middle part, the largest part by far, is the silent majority. Those of us in our middle years have heard that label used before. The term was popularized by U.S. President Richard Nixon in a televised address on November 3, 1969, in which he said, "And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support." Nixon was referring specifically to highly conservative, highly religious Americans. Jerry Falwell called them the moral majority.

I'd suggest that this current silent majority could be reframed as the Sane Majority.

I have met a bunch of folks who belong in this Sane Majority. Characteristics include a distinct absence of social media in their lives, a tendency to see the problems of our country as economic and legal issues rather than morality plays, and a built-in curiosity about people who don't sit in the same part of the room as they do. These are conservatives, liberals, libertarians, even apolitical types.

There are a lot more of them than of the chattering classes, the activists and conspiracy theorists.

Historically speaking, third parties don't survive the machine. An independent party, open to pragmatic solutions and a dialed down sense of rhetoric is not going to get a lot of bandwidth from the current media. The first step, though, is recognizing that there are more of us than either extreme.

We have some time (not much).