David Writes:

No More Guardrails

Some words and phrases seem to have a semi-permanent place in the language of politics – ‘the will of the people’, for instance, still gets bandied around today much as it ever did. Others come in and out of fashion. We discuss one of these in our recent episode on the idea of ‘the silent majority’ – a term that’s back in vogue for now (but maybe not for long). Another phrase that’s everywhere at the moment, though no one was using it even ten years ago, is ‘the guardrails of democracy’. With Trump returning to the White House it’s become almost impossible to read a chin-scratching thought piece about what comes next without the author asking: where oh where are the guardrails?

The idea that democracy needs ‘guardrails’ was popularised in a book called How Democracies Die published in 2018, during Trump’s first term, by the American political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. It’s an appealing concept. For democracy to endure there needs to be some general acceptance of the limits within which political contests should be contained. Without these norms of conduct – accepting the results of elections, refraining from threats of violence against your opponents, acknowledging the rules of the game – democratic politics will veer towards authoritarianism, or worse. With Trump, the job of those who feared his ascendancy was to reinforce the guardrails.

But I think it’s an idea that has outstayed its welcome. There are three things wrong with it.  First, it’s too passive. When I picture guardrails what comes to mind is a bowling alley with the rails up for the people (mainly little kids) who can’t get the ball down the other end, to keep them out of the gutter. That may indeed be how people think about Trump (child, balls, gutter). But it implies that the game happens inside limits that are situated on the sidelines and have little to do with the playing of the game itself. It’s like we are looking for something to come to our rescue in order to get us down the other end. Wouldn’t it be better to be better at bowling?

Second, it’s proven ineffectual. In the years since people started worrying out loud about the guardrails of democracy there has been little sign of them getting stronger. As a way of framing the nature of the challenge that Trump poses to American democracy and the wider world it feels increasingly like wishful thinking. There is no question that he behaves as though the norms of democratic conduct are of little interest to him. As a result anxious commentators find themselves asking for more secure guardrails. But he’ll ignore those too. And, if this election is anything to go by, a majority of voters will be fine with that. They aren’t that fussed about the guardrails.

Finally, one person’s guardrail is another person’s straitjacket. The problem with contemporary democracy is that it’s too permissive and also too rule-bound. There are almost certainly too many norms and expectations and rules of the game being touted from one source or another – this is how it has to be done! No, this is! What fuels much of the irritation with democratic politics is that voters are incessantly being told there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Meanwhile, the people who genuinely don’t care how it gets done use that irritation to play havoc with the rules.

What’s a better picture of what might be coming next? When I think about Trump 2.0 I see a lot of push and shoving, much of it clumsy and unedifying, between big, angry beasts. The MAGA movement and its representatives will be locking horns with a range of powerful actors and institutions, from government departments to Ivy League universities, and from state governors to antsy Republicans in Congress. Trump has the so-called will of the people on his side. But the people he will be taking on are not powerless. The American administrative state, the elected representatives of non-Trump voting districts, the guardians of the US constitution: these are not guardrails to bounce off. These are people and institutions capable of pushing back if they can work out how.

I don’t foresee a civil war. Nor do I imagine a bowling alley. I see a series of exhausting fights.

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Silent Majority Speech, 3rd November 1969

Almost one year to the day after his election as president, Richard Nixon was frustrated. Support for his handling of the Vietnam War was slipping. Yet more aggravating, those that Nixon privately called ‘bums’ were growing louder every day.  

The president often found answers to such political headaches in the realm of Ancient History. His own White House taping system recorded him making the highly dubious claim that homosexuality ‘destroyed’ both the Ancient Greeks and Romans. The anti-war demonstrators of 1969 would be dispatched through a tried-and-trusted tactic that had served Philip II of Macedon and Julius Caesar: Divide et impera.

‘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.’ Nixon’s message was delivered gently, but unmistakably. Standing with the countercultural forces of society was to stand against America. In fact, it was to stand against peace itself. ‘The more divided we are at home,’ the president warned gravely, ‘the less likely the enemy is to negotiate in Paris.’ Nixon alone was fighting for peace, but he needed the people on his side. ‘And so tonight – to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans – I ask for your support.’ Whether one considered it Orwellian doublethink or masterstroke, support for the president’s Vietnam policy jumped by double digits overnight. 

But what to do for the red-blooded Republican stalwarts who were anti-anti-war from the beginning? Simple. Vice President Agnew, known for a rather less gentle public style, was deployed a week earlier to dangle some red meat. Demonstrators against the president were ‘vultures,’ ‘ideological eunuchs’ and ‘parasites of passion.’ Even Nixon needed a Nixon. 

A 1970s anti-war poster invokes the original meaning of the term ‘silent majority’ – referring to the dead – to condemn President Nixon’s failure to end the Vietnam War. 

The handwritten notes Nixon used to craft his 1969 Silent Majority address. The president settled on ‘silent majority’ after numerous iterations in campaign speeches, including ‘new majority,’ ‘the forgotten majority’ and the ‘quiet Americans.’

Nixon standing at a desk sprawling with responses to his Silent Majority address.

Quiz: Who Said It? Nixon or Trump edition

Answers at the end of this newsletter

1. ‘I would have made a good Pope.’

2. ‘The silent majority is stronger than ever before.

3. ‘We’re going to bomb those bastards all over the place . . . And let it fly. Let it fly.’ 

4. ‘Screw the Cabinet and the rest of those . . . From now on they come to me. I'm sick of the whole bunch.’

5. ‘The “suburban housewife” will be voting for me. They want safety and are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low-income housing would invade their neighbourhood.’

6. ‘As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night . . . millions of Americans cry out in anguish . . . the forgotten Americans.’

7. ‘We haven’t used the Bureau [FBI] and we haven’t used the Justice Department, but things are going to change now. They’re going to change, and they’re going to get it right.’ 

8. ‘So you never know what’s out there. But I didn’t tape, and I don’t have any tape, and I didn’t tape.’

9. ‘Today, we reaffirm … our eternal conviction that freedom will prevail over the sinister forces of communism.’ 

10. ‘The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy.’ 

A year before delivering his Silent Majority address, Richard Nixon sought more unconventional methods to reach out beyond conventional Republican voters. One was an appearance on the comedy sketch show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In during the 1968 presidential campaign. Both Nixon and his defeated opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, allegedly credited Nixon’s victory to his appearance on the show. 

President Trump calls on the silent majority of Americans to support him against ‘Sleepy Joe Biden’ at his first campaign rally of the 2020 Covid pandemic. It didn’t work. Unlike Kamala Harris in 2024, Joe Biden went on to secure an absolute majority of the votes cast.  

An article from the Washington Post in 2020 exploring the dark underbelly of the idea of the silent majority.

Alfred Nobel (1833-96)

Born in Stockholm to the famous Nobel family of inventors and engineers, Alfred Nobel displayed prodigious talent from a young age, taking a particular interest in chemistry and explosives, and learning six languages fluently. Deeply interested in the newly-discovered nitroglycerin, a volatile liquid, he sought to harness it for use in industry. Following years of perilous experiments (his brother Emil was killed in an explosion), Nobel discovered a stable compound incorporating nitroglycerin that he named ‘dynamite’ (after the Greek word for power). Rumoured to have been deeply affected by the mistaken publication of his obituary, which referred to him as the ‘merchant of death’, Nobel founded five prizes – funded by his will – to reward advances to humankind. The first were awarded in 1901.

Nobel Prizes and Sex

As evidence of the continuing hold of the patriarchy over academic preferment, women account for only 6% of the more-than 1,000 recipients of Nobel Prizes. Three of the prizes (Physiology and Medicine, Chemistry and Physics) are dedicated to advances in the sciences, fields that are regarded as particularly male-dominated. Indeed, only five of the 222 Physics prize laureates are women, including none in the 55-year period between Maria Mayer’s 1963 award and that of Donna Strickland in 2018. There have been 18 female winners of the Literature prize and 19 of the Peace prize. Economics does worst, with just three women receiving the nod.

Nobel Prizes and Racism

Recent study of Alfred Nobel’s private correspondence – including with his Viennese mistress Sophie Hess – has uncovered a resentful, jealous, and profoundly antisemitic man. He wrote that Jews ‘act merely out of selfishness or a desire to show off’, a racist trope that appears deeply ironic given the scores of Jewish Nobel Prize laureates. Indeed, there have been approximately 210 Jewish laureates, an astonishing 20% of the total, despite the fact that Jewish people make up only 0.2% of the world’s population. However, on the other hand, there is yet to be a Black laureate in the three Nobel science prizes.

Nobel Prizes and Migration

On our PPF episode Adam Rutherford mentioned the oft-repeated anecdote that your chances of Nobel prize success are highest if you had a Hungarian mother, are Jewish, and emigrated to the United States. Astonishingly, more than a dozen laureates are from this background. A huge number more are migrants, demonstrating the huge pull that the best academic institutions (especially in Europe and the US) have on the world’s brightest. Trinity College, Cambridge, for instance, likes to boast that its academics have received 34 prizes, more than all countries but the US, UK, Germany and France. But not many were born natives of Cambridgeshire. The map above shows the geographical trajectories of Physics prize laureates: it is very East to West.

Multiple Laureates

As if one award wasn’t enough, five individuals have completed a ‘double’ of Nobel Prizes. Scientists Frederick Sanger and Karl Sharpless have received two Chemistry prizes, and John Bardeen two in Physics. Linus Pauling received the Chemistry prize and eight years later the Peace prize for his activism against nuclear weapons. Perhaps most incredibly, given their history of male hegemony, Marie Curie won both the physics and chemistry prizes for her work on radioactivity. The wider Curie family, whose five laureates include Marie’s husband and daughter, have won a collective four prizes. Other laureate families include a number of fathers and their sons (such as Niels and Aage Bohr, Physics laureates in 1922 and 1975 respectively) and husband-and-wife teams (Edvard and May-Brit Moser for Medicine in 2014).

Bob Dylan didn’t travel to accept his 2016 Literature Prize at the awards ceremony in Stockholm. His acceptance speech was read out for him by the American ambassador to Sweden. In it, he says, presumably with complete sincerity, that he ‘didn’t see this coming’.  He also makes a crowd-pleasing joke about Hamlet at the expense of Denmark.

Dylan gave his Nobel Lecture (as stipulated for recipients of the prize) on 5th June 2017. In it he discusses his ‘typical grammar school reading’ and the impact on him of three books in particular: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. Here former diplomat Oliver Miles writes in the LRB about whether the award was deserved.

Abrams v. United States (1919)

A group of Manhattan factory workers had been convicted under the Sedition Act for distributing pro-Bolshevik leaflets. The Supreme Court upheld the convictions (which included prison sentences of up to 20 years) but in his dissent Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote: ‘The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas . . . the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’. The ‘marketplace of ideas’ defence of First Amendment rights was born. President Woodrow Wilson pardoned the convicted men.

Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumers Council (1976)

Virginia had banned pharmacists from advertising their prescription drug prices. The Supreme Court overturned the ban on the grounds that commercial organisations have free speech rights too. The judgment emphasised the importance of advertising in a free-market economy to inform citizens about their choices. The marketplace of ideas now included the marketing of ideas for profit.

Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969)

The original case concerned a Ku Klux Klan member convicted of inciting violence against Blacks, Jews and others. This time the Court adopted Holmes’s ‘marketplace of ideas’ position – that any idea, however repugnant, is part of the free trade in ideas – and overturned the conviction. A new test for free speech was devised – only statements that intended ‘imminent lawless action’ (rather than generalised threats) could be prohibited.

Citizens United v FEC (2010)

The Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision that the free speech clauses of the First Amendment prohibited government restrictions on spending by corporations (including Super PACs) for political campaigns. In its majority opinion the Court said that such restrictions ‘interfere with the “open marketplace of ideas”’.  The marketplace of ideas had gone in less than a century from being a protection of the views of communist factory workers to being a protection of the influence on American politics of those with the most money to spend.

Jordan Peterson is questioned by Cathy Newman about his influence on young men in a Channel 4 interview from 2018. His defence is based on supply and demand in the marketplace of ideas: ‘The fact that the words that I’ve been speaking, the YouTube lectures that I’ve done and have put online, have had such a dramatic impact is an indication that young men are starving for this sort of message’. It gets feistier from there.

Jeremy Waldron writes in the LRB about the different arguments that get deployed in defence of First Amendment rights to free speech. He is sceptical about the notion of ‘the marketplace of ideas’, and asks the central question: what is it exactly we are meant to learn from evil ideas?

Next Up

On Sunday part two of David’s conversation with political philosopher Alan Finlayson about another bad idea: modernisation

Coming Soon

More bad ideas - including The End of History and Steady State Theory - and more great political films, from The Candidate to The Zone of Interest.

Coming Next on PPF+

Our next bonus episode for PPF+ subscribers to accompany this series is with historian Lucia Rubinelli, who was our guide to The Leopard.  She will be talking about what’s wrong with the idea of sovereignty.

Nixon or Trump: Answers

1.     Nixon, 1960 [alleged]

2.     Trump, 20/06/2020

3.     Nixon, 05/05/1972

4.     Nixon, 07/04/1971

5.     Trump, 12/08/2020

6.     Nixon, 08/08/1968

7.     Nixon, 15/09/1972

8.     Trump, 22/06/2017

9.     Trump, 23/09/2020

10.   Nixon, 14/12/1972

www.ppfideas.com

Warmest Regards,

Team PPF