Politics & Power Quote by Robert Reich

“Silent majority” is political ventriloquism: a phrase designed to make absence sound like consent. Reich hijacks it back from its Nixon-era origins, where it functioned as a cudgel against activists, protesters, and noisy dissent. His intent is to flip the implied moral geometry. The “silent” aren’t secretly conservative, he argues; they’re broadly liberal in their preferences, but muted by stigma, media framing, and the everyday exhaustion of politics.

The subtext is about branding as power. Reich isn’t only defending a policy agenda; he’s diagnosing how language gets weaponized. “Liberal has taken a real beating” reads like an economic report on reputational depreciation: decades of conservative messaging turned a once-neutral descriptor into a cultural slur, synonymous (in certain circles) with naive, elitist, or unpatriotic. By naming “radical conservatives” as the agents of that depreciation, he reframes the Overton window shift as deliberate strategy rather than organic drift.

Context matters: Reich emerged as a prominent public intellectual in the Clinton-era debate over globalization, inequality, and the future of the middle class. His claim anticipates the modern Democratic dilemma: many voters support liberal-sounding outcomes (higher wages, cheaper healthcare, fair taxes) while recoiling from the “liberal” label. The line works because it treats politics as a contest over legitimacy, not just legislation. If you can convince people their majority instincts are shameful or fringe, you don’t need to win arguments - you just need to win the dictionary.