One of the biggest misconceptions in today’s political discourse is the idea that meaningful change can only be achieved via a 51 per cent majority and that everything below that threshold is just noise. Alas, it is the noise that counts, not the numbers. As the late and great George Jonas once wrote: “It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities. Don’t count heads; count decibels.” He wrote these lines about the Middle East, but they apply just as much in the West, take just a few examples: In the US and elsewhere, the share of the population that is part of the “queer-spectrum” is overestimated in almost every poll. While many people think almost a quarter of the population is part of LGBT, the real numbers are much smaller: For transgenderism, the number is 1.3 per cent, and even if one would count all existing variations (that includes individuals who identify as bisexual, even though they never had sex with anybody but a member of the opposite sex, but I guess “bi” just sounds cooler than “cis”) the number would not be cracking 10 per cent. Yet we are beholden to the yearly ritual of “Pride Month” including flags and marches usually reserved for national holidays. The reason is simple: Whatever you think of the Pride-Progress movement, what they lack in heads, they more than make up in decibels. Ironically, another movement has been picking up on that. There are more genuine Muslims in Europe than there are genuine “LGBTQ persons” – as mentioned above, just calling yourself “non-binary” often does not mean anything in reality – and many among them have understood that if 1.9 per cent can impose their will on the remaining 98.1 per cent, why should they not be able to do the same?
The quarrelsome author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this the dictatorship of the small minority, and the mechanism through which it works is the “renormalisation” of societal norms by an uncompromising minority: the observant Muslim will not eat the non-Muslim majority’s meat, while the majority will eat his without noticing. This gives a butcher a rather simple choice: If he switches to halal he loses nothing, while a butcher who refuses loses an entire community, and so the switch propagates up the supply chain until a mere three or four per cent of a population has set the default for everybody else. According to the Food Standards Agency’s account of how sheep were killed in 2024, around 82 per cent of all sheep slaughtered in England and Wales went through religious slaughter. The overwhelming majority of that was halal, including 28 per cent that were killed without any stunning at all. Officially the Muslim population of England and Wales is about 6.5 per cent, according to the 2021 census, yet it was a small part of a small community that set the standard for everybody else.
This is of course not just true for the Muslim population, but for every minority that sticks to its beliefs. If one group cares about something while another group is indifferent, it is not the relative group sizes that matter, but the dedication to the cause. When John O’Sullivan wrote in National Review in 1989 that every institution that is not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing, this is what he meant: Claiming you are “neutral” on certain issues will only mean that you end up living in the world of those who are not neutral but have clear preferences. Sometimes, of course, this can also backfire: When the American company Anheuser-Busch believed that it would be a good idea to promote a working**-class beer (Bud Light) with a transgender celebrity by the name of Dylan Mulvaney, the backlash was immense: US sales of the brand fell by around a quarter and it lost its place as America’s best-selling beer**. The company leadership obviously believed that their customer base is “neutral” and that catering to the uncompromising LGBTQ community would open new sales avenues. As it turned out, the base neither liked nor accepted this, and within weeks (after plummeting sales) the new ad campaign was back to masculine themes like hunting and the military.
To be clear, I am not lamenting this, on the contrary: The fact that a minority can be the agent of political change if they just want it enough can be a positive thing as well, and here are just a few examples: On May 22, 1787, 12 men, nine of them Quakers (who can be as uncompromising as they are soft-spoken), met in a London printing shop to abolish the slave trade at a moment when perhaps three-quarters of humanity lived in some condition of bondage one way or another. Their goal must have appeared absolutely mad in the eyes of their contemporaries, but they did not care: They ran petitions, gave public lectures, demanded a boycott of sugar produced with slave labour and generally annoyed the decision makers without end. And so, in February 1807 the House of Commons voted the international slave trade out of existence by 283 to 16. Even more remarkably, slavery itself followed in 1833. In hindsight these developments seemed unavoidable, but this is always the issue with historical change: What seemed impossible at the time appears unavoidable after it happened. The same pattern, by the way, holds for the Christian West that only became Christian because – once again – an uncompromising minority refused to add their God to the pagan pantheon but insisted that everybody has to bow to the one God of the Christians. I am glad that they held course against all odds, and from a few thousand at the beginning of the first century AD, within four centuries they had become the official religion of the Roman empire. Was this also “unavoidable”? I do not think so, and the thousands of Christians who died for their belief would probably agree. It was the willingness to give everything, including their lives, that ultimately transformed the pagan world into a Christian one. Can we really be sure that Islam will not be able to accomplish the same in the 21st century? A 10 per cent minority that is full of convictions and self-confidence has every chance to impose its will on the indifferent and lukewarm remaining 90 per cent, especially if the latter has no convictions of its own. If you are “tolerant” towards halal slaughter, the burka and sharia law, do not expect the other side to be just as tolerant and indifferent as you are. You might say you do not care if somebody else is fasting during Ramadan, but those who are, are very much interested in you participating in their ritual, which is why there is significant pressure to convert to Islam (or at least follow its rules) in almost every Western European school where Muslim pupils make up the majority of the student body.
I hasten to repeat that none of this is an argument that determined minorities are a bad thing, but I am cautioning my more libertarian-inclined readers that just relying on “the better idea to win in the free marketplace of ideas” is not how things work. Certainly, truth and reality will always win out in the long run, but, as John Maynard Keynes once said, “In the long run we are all dead.”
