They ignore America’s real majority
At home: disorder in the streets and a rising tide of drugs. Abroad: a shameful, humiliating withdrawal from an Asian outpost of empire. In politics: a conservative demagogue, backed by the silent majority, sweeps aside an ineffectual liberal stooge. In culture: fights over abortion, and women, and music, all conjuring a feeling that the republic is doomed. Am I talking about pot and Saigon and the sweep of Richard Nixon, or fentanyl and Kabul and the return of Donald Trump? I could be describing either, for both 1968 and 2024 feel like chaotically epochal years in the American story. Nor are these the only similarities between past and present. Just as in the Sixties, liberals today are faced with an urgent question: what now?
The answer, I think, is epitomised in a single book. Written by Ben Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon in 1970, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate charted the political centre in the new Nixonian age. Over half a century on, it still offers deep insights for navigating a society in flux, even as it shrewdly leavens its electoral insights with clear and evocative language. Especially with Donald Trump the new American leviathan, moreover, The Real Majority offers another enduring truth — if liberals fail to occupy the heartland of American politics, wily conservatives will rush to get there first.
