The Majority Nobody Talks About

Originally published on Substack. Shared here for broader access.

Most Americans are not who you see on cable news.

They’re not the guy screaming at a school board meeting. They’re not the one burning flags or waving them like weapons. They’re not the Twitter mob or the talk radio host or the politician who can’t finish a sentence without mentioning the “other side” like they’re the devil himself.

Most Americans are just... tired.

They’re working. They’re raising kids. They’re trying to keep the lights on and their marriages intact and their faith alive and their friendships from getting weird at Thanksgiving. They don’t have time to perform or incite outrage for an algorithm. They’ve got enough real problems to deal with.

And yet somehow — these people, the real majority — are the ones who end up invisible.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that many like me have been shouting about, but almost nobody in the media or politics wants to say out loud: the loudest voices in this country DO NOT represent most of it. They never did. But they figured out that volume gets rewarded. Outrage gets clicks. Conflict gets airtime. Grievance gets donors and Fear keeps people tuned in. And so, the machine keeps churning out caricatures of Americans — red-faced and raging on one side, smug and dismissive on the other — while the rest of us watch and wonder when exactly we lost the plot.

We didn’t lose it. It was taken from us. Slowly at first, then all at once.

Call it what it is: I call it the FOG model. Fear. Outrage. Grievance. It’s not a bug in our political and media systems — it IS the business model. Keep people afraid of the other side. Keep them outraged. Keep them nursing grievances that never quite get resolved because resolution doesn’t sell. A calm, functioning democracy is terrible for ratings. A country that’s exhausted and at each other’s throats? That’s content.

And too many Americans are done with it, in the worst possible way — checked out entirely. Disengaged. Convinced their voice doesn’t matter, their vote won’t change anything, and that the whole thing is too broken to bother with. That’s not cynicism without cause. The FOG model earns that reaction every single day. When the system seems designed to exhaust you into surrender, surrender starts to feel rational.

Thanks for reading Derate the Hate | Wilk Wilkinson! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

But disengagement isn’t neutrality. It’s a gift to the loudest voices in the room.

When the reasonable majority goes quiet, the unreasonable minority fills the space. Every checked-out voter, every person who stops showing up, every neighbor who decides it’s just not worth the argument — they don’t make the chaos go away. They hand the microphone to the people causing it.

So, if you’re exhausted, I get it. Genuinely. But exhaustion is exactly what the FOG model is designed to produce — because a tired, disengaged public is easier to manipulate and easier to ignore. The answer to that isn’t to retreat. It’s the harder thing: staying in it. Showing up anyway. Building bridges even when the people burning them are louder than you.

That’s where the real work is. And it starts with refusing to disappear.

Because here’s the thing: tribalism is real, and it continues to do real damage. But it has not consumed most of us. Not yet.

The US versus THEM paradigm has infected enough of our institutions, our media, and honestly our own families to do genuine damage. I’ve seen it. I’ve talked to people afflicted by it for years doing the Derate the Hate podcast. It’s destructive. It breaks things that are hard to put back together.

But here’s what I also know: most people aren’t there.

Most people hold views that don’t fit neatly into either team’s jersey. Most people have a neighbor they like who voted differently than they did. Most people, when you sit them down away from the performance of it all, are reasonable. They’re even capable of saying I might be wrong about that. That’s not weakness. That’s what maturity actually looks like. And for what it's worth — I find that kind of courage every single day at Braver Angels. It exists. It's real. And there's more of it out there than anyone on cable news will ever tell you.

The problem isn’t the American people.

The problem is who’s claiming to speak for them.

Both parties have been hijacked — not by their best, but by their loudest. What used to be a Democratic Party with real working-class roots now struggles to speak to the very people it once championed, too often trading substance for symbolism and alienating the middle in the process. What used to be a principled conservative movement has in too many places become a performance; more about triggering and “making the left cry” than actually governing. Somewhere along the way, statesmanship became a punchline and the base became the whole ballgame.

And the base, in both cases, is not the majority.

Politicians know this. Many of them privately admit it. But the incentive structure punishes the honest and rewards the theatrical. Primary elections are dominated by the most motivated voters — who are often the most ideologically extreme. Fundraising flows to whoever can manufacture the most urgent crisis. The FOG machine dominates twenty-four hours a day, and stepping away from it takes a kind of political courage that our current system actively discourages. So even the decent ones — and there are some decent ones — find themselves playing a game they didn’t design, wearing a mask they can’t quite convince themselves to take off.

What we’re left with is a political class that has become a funhouse mirror: a distorted, stretched, weaponized reflection of a country that mostly just wants things to work.

A country that is exhausted.

Not apathetic. Exhausted. There’s a difference. Apathy is not caring. Exhaustion is caring deeply and being worn down by a system that keeps demanding you choose a side, pick a team, and stay angry, because the moment you stop being angry, you stop being useful to the people profiting off your fear and outrage.

Most Americans don’t want that. They want a government that governs. Media that informs. Leaders who lead without manufacturing the next crisis to keep themselves relevant.

I don’t think that is a radical ask. That’s just decency.

I’m not here to tell you everything is fine. It’s not.

I’m not here to tell you both sides are equally guilty of everything. That’s a cop-out and you deserve better than that.

What I am telling you is this: the narrative that America is a country of hateful, irredeemable tribes at each other’s throats is a lie. A profitable lie. A politically convenient lie. But a lie nonetheless.

The real America is full of people who are frustrated, yes. Scared, sometimes. But most of them are not consumed by hatred for their neighbors or the latest rage-bait “Breaking News” headline. Most of them still believe in something worth saving. Most of them would, given half a chance and a little less noise, find more common ground than the FOG machine wants them to know exists.

That’s not naivety. That’s what I’ve seen with my own eyes, in hundreds of conversations, across every kind of divide.

The real majority nobody talks about is still out there.

Still tired. Still decent. Still waiting for someone to actually represent them.

And we’re still worth fighting for.

Originally published on Substack. Shared here for broader access.