"The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take our country back." A history student like myself might attribute this quote to Richard Nixon, but it's modern candidate Donald Trump who said it. This sort of rhetoric is causing him to soar in the polls, leading among Republicans in the race for the presidential nomination in 2016.

But what is the silent majority?

In Nixon's day, the silent majority referred to a majority of Americans who resisted the radical shifts of the '60s, such as the sexual revolution, international pacifism, the expulsion of religion from the public square and, in the Southern states, federal intervention on matters of civil rights. This silent majority was largely nameless; it didn't have a universal trait in common except for an animosity towards portrayed radicals who sought to challenge the status quo.

Today's silent majority is considerably different. For instance, consider this graph:

That's a representation of a random sampling from self-identified individuals in the political spectrum quiz. Blue dots are Democrats. Red dots are Republicans. The Democrat results are relatively centered around the same point; Republican results are spread over most of the graph, including over a decent part of the Democratic circle. Here's the same graph, this time with Libertarian scores added in green (Libertarians, especially in recent years, tend to vote with Republican candidates, i.e. Rand or Ron Paul and Ted Cruz):

With the three largest political factions in the United States outlined above, it's now easier to look at their relative power in politics. For the past seven years, at the federal level, a president from the small blue circle has controlled the country, blocking the demands of the rest of the above graph. That means the green, yellow, and red groups above, a broad spectrum, have been alienated from their government for seven years.

Furthermore, the Obama administration hasn't exactly been subtle in its unilateral process of decision making. What major decisions have been made have come in the form of executive orders (remember the "executive amnesty" for millions of illegal immigrant minors?). Other major decisions, such as that which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, have come in the form of decrees, often from unelected officials. Oberfell vs. Hodges ended with an opinion that declared "it is so ordered. "Regardless of your opinion on same-sex marriage, the language used there implies an aspect of decree and power reserved by the government from a dissenting population. In these case, one could even say that of the blue circle which holds the power in the above graph, which is largely opposed to authoritarian action, some will be uncomfortable with their own leadership's methods

This is where the silent majority comes from, a vast swathe of the population dissents from the Democratic leadership, which is why the Republican and Libertarian responses on the graph above cover a much broader swathe than their Democratic rulers. It doesn't help that Democratic pundits like Hillary Clinton refer to views held by a significant minority of the population, such as opposition to abortion, as those of "terrorist groups." Such rhetoric, all too common to Democrats, that dissenters have to be erased from society or corrected like a disease, is bound to drive away such dissenters to any available opposition. In America, the only chance to defeat this unilateral rhetoric is to join with the Republican Party, which, in this case, has become the home to the silent majority.

This is why the GOP is home to such a diverse group. On the stage in the GOP debates, you have Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Mike Huckabee, all of whom represent radically different world views and all of whom have been pegged as enemies of the people by an increasingly aggressive Democratic Party. The Republican Party accepts them because it has become a coalition against Democratic control; Christian authoritarians and Libertarian constitutional scholars have to walk together because they have nowhere else to go. This is also why Republicans are prone to infighting; John Boehner, the House Majority leader for the GOP, is set to resign at the end of October after a legacy of failing to unite world views so different that they can't hold together a common majority. This fact wasn't lost on Boehner, who himself declared that "it had become clear to me that the prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable harm to the institution."

So next time a politician comes forward to talk about the silent majority, remember this: the silent majority is not a unilateral, exclusive or oppressive force. Its radical elements do not define it as a whole. It does not represent a single voice or group. Ignorance of this mass, however, will only encourage the silent majority to grow in strength and number. Its opponents realize this, thus the increasingly aggressive tendencies of their speech, referring to their enemies as terrorists and dehumanizing them for hate and assault by the general population. These campaigns against the silent majority are not a sign of victory but rather increasingly desperate resorts to convince an ever-more-skeptical and ever-shrinking neutral base.