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In Angie Hoffman’s recent column, she seems unaware of the history of the term “silent majority,” a term weaponized by Richard Nixon in an attempt to appeal to racist white southerners hellbent on keeping segregation the norm. She also seems unaware of how during the 1960s, Republican and Dixiecrat elite accused the Civil Rights movement of Marxism. Martin Luther King had dozens of accusations identical to the claims she makes against Black Lives Matter. I personally don’t believe Ms. Hoffman has ever read Karl Marx. If she were to go on the website of Black Lives Matter, she would see little analysis on class and material conditions, central components of Marxist theory. Her conspiracy doesn’t hold up.

So, why do conservatives demonize civil rights movements, past and present? Why do they engage in reactionary politics and fetishize a return to some past that never existed? Why do they obsess over internal and external enemies and scream about their own victimization? Well, postmodern conservatives have an irrational fear of change; they fear change will disrupt their real and imagined place within society. They fear different identities, different skin colors, different cultures, different religions, different ideologies will replace their own traditions and their own white, Christian, conservative identity. 

This irrational fear of change is why conservatives fail to understand the inequality, systemic racism, police brutality and generational poverty central to the recent George Floyd protests. Instead, they blame Antifa or Soros. This irrational fear of change is why they eschew proactive solutions to the coronavirus and instead claim victimization from China or Democratic governors.

This brings us to another tactic of conservatives: locating all identities they believe disruptive to their worldview and painting them as one monolithic enemy. This approach plants seeds for a belief in one large web of interrelated conspiracies they believe explains the world they live in: Jews like George Soros funded the protests. Bill Gates tracks the silent majority using vaccines. Antifa serves as the Democrats’ army. Academia trains students to become Communists. Democrats want Sharia Law. Millions of “illegal” immigrants voted Democrat in 2016. Democrats want one-world government. Claims get more outrageous than this: Go peruse websites from the QAnon cult, now a central component of the Republican Party. 

Toward the end of her column, Ms. Hoffman makes a call for loving who you want.  I commend her for this statement and hope she talks to fellow Republicans to change their party platform, one that still opposes gay marriage, transgender rights and a sensible path for citizenship. She then closes with a call for individualism over collectivism, without understanding what collectivism means. If you shop at a co-op, you support a collective. If you sing in a church choir, you sing in a collective. If you believe in Social Security, you believe in the collective. Rather than pit individualism versus collectivism, one can promote the rights of an individual while simultaneously supporting the cohesiveness of individuals toward a greater good, toward a more empathic future.

Joshua Hinnenkamp

Albert Lea