In modern politics, the first famous ‘silent majority’ was invoked by Richard Nixon. Almost 50 years ago, facing loud protests and civil disobedience over the Vietnam war, Nixon called upon America’s ‘silent majority’ – particularly in the farming and working class heartlands, and in the south – to back his attempts to pull the US out of the war slowly, in a negotiated peace, and not immediately as the liberals wanted.

Today we can look back and see those events in a long-term perspective. The liberal dissidents seem less anarchic. Nixon seems far less honest and patriotic than he did. We now know he helped disrupt the possibility of peace just before the 1968 presidential election, which would have favoured his rival. His invocation of the silent majority was also part of a larger Republican Party electoral strategy to sweep the south, which for the previous century had voted for the Democrats.

That’s the long view. In the short-term, however, Nixon was outstandingly successful. At the next presidential election, he mopped up every US state bar one. Middle America concluded Nixon understood it; his 1972 liberal rival, George McGovern, did not.

Fast forward to Malta, this week, and we have Joseph Muscat invoking a silent majority in his favour.

You could, of course, pause right there. What a way to cap the arc of his political career thus far: from quoting St Francis, and invoking Barack Obama, to borrowing (however unwittingly) from Nixon, the arch-Machiavellian, disgraced president.

Or else you could pause on that word ‘silent’. Over the past month, it’s not been the silent majority supporting Muscat that has attracted attention. It’s been the vocal portion. That calling protestors and dissenters ‘whores’ and ‘traitors’. That saying that Daphne Caruana Galizia got what she deserved, that protestors deserved to be mowed down by a car, and that Roberta Metsola deserves to be hanged for treachery.

Muscat invoked the silent majority to suggest an orderly nation, focused on its own business, supporting his policies to make Malta the best, as they say, in Europe. So it’s not beside the point to remember that some of those very publicly justifying executions include a police officer and a former soldier, the very people meant to uphold law and order. What orderly nation is this?

For people trying to explain what’s going on, there are two temptations to be resisted.

One is to regard what’s going on as very mysterious and unfathomable. This has been the reaction of some to the latest MaltaToday survey that showed that, in the month since Caruana Galizia’s assassination, Muscat’s personal trust rating has continued to climb to unprecedented heights, while trust in Adrian Delia and his Nationalist Party continues to drop like a stone.

There is nothing mysterious here. Labour is still short of an absolute majority – former Nationalist voters have either switched to Labour or swelled the ranks of don’t knows and undecideds to almost a quarter of the electorate. The trajectory has continued on the same course as before, in a manner that Caruana Galizia herself predicted.

Why should her assassination have made a difference?

The last month has been unremittingly bad for the PN. Delia has been held in almost as much contempt as Muscat in the wake of the car bombing. Labour spin on the social media even tried to suggest that he might have more to do with it.

Meanwhile, the fact that some PN politicians joined the protests only highlighted the fact that Delia was spurned by Caruana Galizia’s family. Labour has exploited this to depict a political party with irreconcilable differences.

Delia still tried to capitalise on the murder. But that backfired because that’s exactly what it looked like: exploitation not conviction. Only people whose convictions were not in doubt came across as being in good faith. But they did so as individuals.

The very capacity of articulating public moral judgement has been eroded after years of being told their moral judgements don’t count in a liberal society

The PN numbers therefore look exactly as they should. They are on the same course they were on before. We should perhaps be asking why the assassination didn’t make them worse.

So let’s resist the temptation to make the explicable into something mysterious. As the new PN deputy leader, David Agius, so rightly put it when celebrating his victory: the PN is alive and kicking.

Yes, itself.

Then there’s the second temptation: to look upon the (truly) silent relative majority supporting Muscat and pronounce it ‘amoral’.

Because it has apparently not grasped that Caruana Galizia’s assassination has a political background (irrespective of the assassins), with political responsibilities to be carried.

This temptation should be resisted. First, the argument for political responsibility is neither obvious nor simple. It needs time and space to put across.

It needs the broadcasting media, not just print or the internet. But the most popular broadcasting media are under Muscat’s control. The cardboard institutions are not just those of law and order. It includes the public broadcaster.

It is cheap to criticise people for being indifferent to an argument if they’ve never been properly exposed to it.

Caruana Galizia’s assassination has helped us apprehend the damage done to our forces of law and order by excessive political control. The relatively muted public reaction to the assassination should help us apprehend just how damaged is our public sphere by excessive political control.

Second, the temptation confuses the part for the whole. A segment of Muscat’s supporters have indeed expressed themselves in a way that suggests amorality. But that’s just a segment. It doesn’t include another portion, by no means the rest, who have used language that is vile but, in its way, deeply moral.

That sounds like a contradiction onlyif you’re used to thinking of morality as intrinsically good. However, some moralities are bigoted and repellent. Think of stoning for adultery.

‘Whore’, ‘traitor’, and yes, even ‘she deserved it’ are each instances of moral condemnation. They are judging some people to be bad. They are appealing to a perverse sense of justice (but justice nonetheless). They express the outrage of an authoritarian morality – bigoted and repellent, by all means, but stemming from a sense of moral indignation.

If you don’t recognise the moral indignation – if you simply dismiss it as lack of morality – then why should anyone who feels that indignation pay any attention to you? You become part of the problem.

But there’s a third segment to Muscat’s supporters – the truly silent one. It’s the one which is silent because its moral language has been smashed. The very capacity of articulating public moral judgement has been eroded after years of being told their moral judgements don’t count in a liberal society; years of religious moral doctrine without moral reasoning; and years of morally almost indistinguishable political parties.

It’s not the silence of acquiescence. It’s not the silence of omertà. It’s the silence of lack of confidence in your judgement. So, looking at the extremes at either end – the protestors at public incompetence at one end, and the amoralists and bigots at the other, you aim for the middle of the road – of private shock but public silence.

Whatever else you think of Joseph Ratzinger, he got this one right. A liberal society, without a strong sense of public values, places its own liberties in danger.

ranierfsadni@europe.com