We Let Them Get Out of Hand

We have always had these people. You know who I mean. The ones who always think they’re “taking the country back” from someone, even if they can’t quite say who. The angry ones with flags and slogans and a permanent grievance about things not being how they used to be—though how it “used to be” never seems to include Social Security or stop signs.

They used to be quieter. That’s what Nixon called them: the Silent Majority. You probably weren’t around. Lucky you. But I remember. They weren’t that silent, honestly—they still ran the school boards and owned the dealerships—but they didn’t storm the Capitol. They just quietly voted for people who dismantled the safety net, deregulated everything, and blamed “welfare queens” for a sluggish economy.

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They’ve always made up about 35% of the country. That’s the core. Then there’s the 10% of “fellow travelers”—some clueless, some opportunistic, all useful. The ones who nod along and say, “Well, I don’t like his tweets, but he tells it like it is,” before forwarding a video titled America Was Better Before the Gays.

That’s almost half the country.

And the rest of us? We were busy. Working. Raising kids. Trying not to scream every time we saw someone put ketchup on pasta. We thought the system would hold. That reason would win. That these people would burn out on their own nonsense. But they didn’t.

They organized. They gerrymandered. They got judges. And slowly—one school board, one state legislature, one anti-science campaign at a time—they got out of hand.

We let them.

We laughed when Sarah Palin said she could see Russia. We rolled our eyes at Marjorie Taylor Greene chasing teenagers down hallways. We said, “Oh come on, that’s just fringe.” But the fringe is now the face. The lunatics didn’t just take over the asylum. They rezoned it and turned it into a theme park.

So here we are.

This isn’t a call to arms. It’s a call to attention. Because ignoring them hasn’t worked. And pretending they’ll go away if we’re just a little nicer, a little more patient, a little more “understanding”? That’s how we got here.

They were always here.

And now they think it’s their country again.

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