When faced with the kind of neck-and-neck polling results we are seeing in key battleground states, it is amusing to imagine the reactions of many elite Democrats. With mainstream media and arts and entertainment so thoroughly dominated by their fellow travelers, it is easy to envisage them screaming at whichever screen they happen to be using: “There’s no way! How could things be so close!”

They—but also many conservatives—would profit from becoming familiar with the so-called “spiral of silence” theory. Developed in the ’60s and ’70s by the late German communication researcher Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, the spiral of silence in essence expresses the idea that people hide their social and political opinions if they feel, rightly or wrongly, that airing said opinions would expose them to “isolation pressure” or social alienation. Such silence then further encourages the other side, setting off a downward spiraling effect, further silencing the object of intimidation and distorting perceptions of reality for all concerned.

Although it is a thoroughly intuitive model for understanding the widely divergent comfort levels between left and right when it comes to airing their political opinions (a divergence routinely felt in offices, in schools, at parties, etc.), Noelle-Neumann’s ideas are strangely unknown outside the rather niche area of academic media studies. For instance, the 1980 collection of her work, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion—Our Social Skin, is not easy to find in bookstores and had just one reprint way back in 1993.

In addition to the five senses we all know so well (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch), Noelle-Neumann suggests that human beings have a sixth sense which “tallies up information about what society in general is thinking and feeling” and causes us to develop a “social skin” of sorts. One reviewer of her book remarked: “It’s as if people come equipped with antennae that quiver to every shift in the social breeze.”

But if people have such a “sixth sense” and generally act in accordance with it, then it seems inevitable that the elite in society will work, if they can, to distort the perceptions of that sense so they can move the masses in the direction they want. This could be achieved by creating or manufacturing a social atmosphere in which people are made to feel “isolation pressure” to conceal their views, as if they are on the fringes of society even though they are not.

Noelle-Neumann cites a series of social experiments, including her own work, showing the extent of man’s sociability and innate desire to “fit in.” These experiments seem to prove how discussion of a particular issue can set off a silence spiral. In the oft-referenced 1969 “Asch Test,” for instance, Swarthmore psychologist Solomon Asch asked students to confirm which of three different lines on a board matched up with a fourth “target line” with all but one of the students being “in on it” and told beforehand to pick the same incorrect line. Despite the truth being obvious to any clear-sighted observer, over a series of such tests, the lone unsuspecting student reliably went along with the dozen or so others apparently due to a fear of being left out of the group.

Citing numerous anthropological studies on primitive cultures, Noelle-Neumann notes that banishment from one’s group and official public ridicule are features of human behavior that transcend cultures and time. Some of her examples show how these practices assist communities in cooperative behavior for the group’s survival. The corollary, of course, is that public ridicule can also be used as a form of undue social control.

Today, our Fourth Estate tries to make us believe that what we see in the mass media is an authentic representation of what everyone else is thinking. It is natural for us to assume it is as news articles, TV news clips, reporter interviews, and other bits of information seem to provide a shortcut for us to understand opinion outside of our own circles. As Noelle-Neumann writes, if the media throws its support to one side of an issue, the opposing side will always decrease, never increase its willingness to air opinions “for the willingness to speak out depends in part upon sensing that there is support and legitimation from the media.” 

In reality, however, what we are receiving is not public opinion, but the thinking and opinions of the reporters attempting to craft a narrative. That is, for the most part, we hear the wishcasting of well-off, coastal humanities graduates who recount the stories of the day in a way their social class happens to find interesting and that affirms their own particular values. Such “story selection,” Noelle-Neumann writes, is the most important aspect of the media’s utilization of the spiral-of-silence problem. The media has come to understand that it has the near ability to reconstruct reality. They have come to act, in the term psychologist Kurt Lewis coined for them in 1947, as “gatekeepers”—those who decide what will be admitted to the public and what will be withheld. As a result a kind of “pseudo-environment” emerges.

The news product that results is so burdened by the values of these elites that it becomes a regular part of the daily stressors felt by conservatives who “just know” that the mass media is well outside what the silent majority think and feel. People on the right know that the media, as a form of communication, is a one-sided, indirect, yet public form of communication designed to make individuals with differing opinions and values feel frustrated and helpless.

Another related “bonus” for the media elite is what Noelle-Neumann terms the “articulation function,” or the ability for “the media to provide people [including other journalists] with the words and phrases they can use to defend a point of view” while leaving those with differing opinions adrift. “If people find no current, frequently repeated expressions for their own point of view,” Noelle-Neumann writes, “they lapse into silence; they become effectively mute.”

All this would seem to show why the left-elite graft themselves onto the media industry, as well as the arts and entertainment industries. They are ruthless about maintaining the media’s gatekeeping function, which includes suppressing right-wing voices from traditional news outlets, social media, and elsewhere.

Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence model is a blueprint for how elites in modern democracies achieve social control. It is not by way of physical or economic sanction (although an emboldened leftist elite is beginning to flirt with these notions), but by psychological sanction. It doesn’t need a real Stasi to police Americans if it can count on the mass media.

Thankfully, however, the internet is still largely free, and the gatekeepers are experiencing pushback. After all, as Asch also found in his experiments, when intimidated participants were allowed to have a true partner by their side who shared their judgments, they were able to stand up to group pressure and collectively voice the truth. Only with such fellowship and moral fortification then, can the silent majority proudly show its real skin.