Brad Littlejohn: Today’s conservatives

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Tuesday, May 7th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: abortion and the “silent majority.” WORLD Opinions commentator Brad Littlejohn now on the everyday conservative Americans who didn’t know a world without abortion and who want to keep it that way.

BRAD LITTLEJOHN: In 1969, amid widespread violent demonstrations, Richard Nixon addressed himself to the “silent majority” of conservative-minded people in America. For more than five decades, conservatives have continued to appeal to what they felt sure was that silent majority–a demographic that opposed abortion, same-sex marriage, and “woke elites.”

Only it isn’t working anymore. The Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision in 2022, and since then, vocal majorities in many states have voted in defense of legal abortion. Former President Donald Trump boasted of his pro-life judicial appointments, but even he effectively threw in the towel in his recent abortion policy. What went wrong? Where did the “silent majority” go?

Well, nowhere. The silent majority is still there, and they are still “conservative.” The problem is, that word doesn’t always mean what we think it means. It is true, most people are conservative in that they are risk-averse and don’t like a ton of adventure; there aren’t too many skydivers in the world. And most people prefer some measure of cultural and political stability, so they can inhabit a world that makes sense to them, a world they’ve always known. But most people have short memories.

Consider these facts: The average American alive is 39 years old, and thus cannot personally remember a world before, say, 1989. Their only knowledge of life before legal abortion would have to come through education—either the handing down of wisdom by parents and mentors, or formal instruction at school. Only the conservative intelligentsia and a few religious traditionalists are still staunchly “conservative”--at least, in the sense of seeking to preserve traditional wisdom from centuries past.

For most Americans alive today, the world of Roe v. Wade simply is traditional. That doesn’t mean they love abortion, but they accept it as a fact of life, a fixture of the social and political world. The “rights” and values around abortion and the social expectations it makes possible—all of these have been internalized by the silent majority as part of the status quo. Voting to restore abortion is a way to return to that status quo.

Americans are still conservative in a sense, but many now want to conserve radical individualism and materialism. The median voter, then, will still vote against runaway immigration, for that is a disruption of the world he knows. But he will not go to the ballot to protest abortion, for that is the world he knows.

For authentic conservatives, who still know an even older world, this presents a challenge. Politics can shape culture, to be sure, but in a democratic polity, you cannot simply reverse a cultural tide by political means. You can, perhaps, slow its progress, buying time for cultural renewal, but that renewal will have to come at the level of the imagination. The silent majority of Americans will have to recognize that there is a world more real than the increasingly unreal one shaped by Roe these past 50 years.

I’m Brad Littlejohn.

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