A quick note before I start – please do not call Gordon Ferguson and tell him I’m criticizing his papers again. I read the phrase in his latest work, but I’ve also heard it in commentary about various political and social issues. As far as his paper on the teamwork of leadership, I agree with him. To those of us that did not grow up Church of Christ, it may seem quite obvious, but what he writes needed to be shared. As far as the phrase vocal minority, I did a little research, thought about it for awhile, and this the result.

Two Sides of the Same Coin
It was Nixon who first spoke of the silent majority on November 3, 1969. In discussing a nation that was deeply divided about Vietnam, he remarked:

The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.

Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

There is no doubt that Nixon was interested in getting the US out of Vietnam as soon as possible, he had campaigned on it. However, the message to war protesters was pretty clear – Be Quiet, Get in Line, Get Behind the Program. I’m sure that he thought that after four years of dissent, a little quiet at home would go a long way to end the war. However, it is also implies that dissent is unpatriotic and even un-American. A true American would get behind the war and help the president finish something that his predecessors were somehow unable to finish. Again, I believe the implied message was, “There is no place for dissent right now”.

The opposite side of the coin has been invoked in recent days – political commentators are doing the same thing, but less passively. Instead of appealing to the silent majority, they belittle the ‘vocal minority’. This so-called minority is characterized as unpatriotic and even un-American. Not because they are against the war, but because somehow they are construed to be “against the troops”. Criticism of the war is blamed on ‘lowering the morale’ of US soldiers who are only doing their job. The message is as equally clear now as it was over 35 years ago – there is no place for dissent.

Very few have called on the silent majority with the exception of Dr. Jerry Falwell. He presumed that they were moral and silent. In the group’s second incarnation, I’m sure that this will be demonstrated over and over. After nosing around, it seems that many more people since 1969 have invoked the other of these groups to serve their ends. I found only one non-pejorative use of ‘vocal minority’ – the name of an acapella group at Villinova. In the remainder of the times in which is was used, it was an attack on the voices of dissent.

Characteristics of the Vocal Minority
Reading various attacks on vocal minorities, they fall into the same general description:

• They are generally not well informed or lack a certain perspective.
• They have not given much thought to their actions.
• They are reactionary.
• They are very few in number.
• They are loud.
• They are obnoxious.
• They are unprincipled.
• They have usually been stirred up by one person.

This vocal minority sounds like a pretty bad crowd. But as far as trying to get any kind of demographic information on them, I had no luck. It seems that sometimes the vocal minority is made up of liberal Catholics, other times, they are made up of conservative Muslims. Most of the time they are Democrats, but sometimes, they are Republicans. And sometimes, they are made up of those pesky physiologists that just cannot believe that sodium and potassium are actively transported across cell membranes.

Those meddlesome physiologists – always trouble.

After looking into it some more, I realized that the vocal minority really has only one characteristic – they are inconvenient. For some reason, a small group of people exists to speak out for a cause and they resist most efforts to go away. I am sure that there are times when this is nothing but hubris or good old fashioned hard-headedness, but I am not willing to believe that this is always true. Some of these vocal minorities have changed the world in good ways.