At the end of the 1960s, it became a politically legitimizing formula to appeal to a “silent majority” when conservatives found themselves confronted with a vehemently critical public in the wake of student revolts and a push towards social liberalization. Before that, the phrase had been used as a metaphor for “the dead”: “By the time you read these lines I shall have joined the great, silent majority.” Political philosophy had long considered the (illegitimate) rule that the dead exercised over the living – through the laws and constitutions that had been passed in the past. If democracy means that majorities decide, did not the majority of the dead, the great silent majority, rule over the minority of the living? And was that not a tyranny of the past over the present?
