What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?
There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade.
In law we talk about the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, which is not only wrong in itself, but which calls into question everything that has come before. Most of our institutions have been chiming thirteen for quite a while, and people have noticed.
But it’s not enough to notice. Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act.
This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. If the powers that be are good at it, virtually every citizen can hate them and want them out, but no one will do anything because every citizen who feels that way thinks they’re the only one, or one of a tiny number.
In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.
This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don't realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.
In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.
But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.
Trump’s victory, with a majority of the popular vote, was important. The media and most pollsters kept telling us he was a loser, and once again they were wrong. They likewise told us that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” until the debate with Trump demonstrated that he was, in fact, sharp as a bowling ball. Then they told us that joyless scold Kamala Harris was running a campaign of “joy” and was a spirited “brat” instead of a charmless cog in the Democratic machine. Her somehow simultaneously dry and sodden public performances got rave reviews, when nobody, in fact, much liked her. By election day, she was basically hiding from the press – and voters were basically hiding from her, as her events became smaller and her appeal “more selective,” in the words of Ian Faith, right to the end.
When Trump won, it was not only obvious that he had won, but that the people who told us that he was a marginal figure in American politics had been lying. And that their lies lacked power....
....MUCH MORE
Some of our previous posts on teasing out what people are thinking:
April 2021
Lessons From Communist Eastern Europe On Virtue Signaling and Other Things
November 2021
Politics: I Am Told I Should Read Professor Timur Kuran To Understand Current American Politics
May 2022
The Wildly Perverse Effects Of Compelled Beliefs
February 2024
Compelled Beliefs and Preference Cascades
And as noted in a February 2023 post:
In authoritarian/totalitarian/tyrannical societies when people are attacked for their ideas, to the point that their ability to earn a living is threatened or destroyed they oftentimes keep their thoughts to themselves, while outwardly appearing to acquiesce to the authorities or the mob which is oftentimes created by the authorities.
This dynamic makes for a very dysfunctional society, exemplified by the old Soviet joke, "We pretend to work, They pretend to pay us." This ended up being the way of life from the Balkans to the Baltic, with various degrees of submission. After the East German revolt in 1953 was put down, the GDR was probably the most enthusiastic adopter of the totalitarian society required to force people to do things that are contrary to the human spirit, and thus had less distinction between outward appearance and inner beliefs; while people in Czechoslovakia and Poland probably had the most difficult time accepting the diktats from above and thus had the widest divergence between mouthing the party line and what they were actually thinking.
In the case of Poland it was so apparent to everyone involved that Stalin once remarked that imposing Communism on Poland was akin to “fitting a saddle onto a cow.”.
A major, major issue to be aware of is that when people begin to realize they are not alone in their thinking, their passive resistance begins to exceed the limits of containment and self-restraint that individuals have practiced, to the point you get Budapest in 1956, Prague 1968 or Tiananmen Square 1989. The rulers, fearing for their lives, much less their hold on power, tend to react violently to what they didn't see coming or, in the case of Gdansk in 1989 they try to cut a deal to hang on.
This rapid reveal of what the populace actually thinks and feels is the preference cascade....
Here's a 2022 post that will suffice as a quick overview:
When Self-Annointed Elites And Other Control Phreaks Care More About Image Than Substance
For the record, Potemkin, like Dracos, got a bad rap from history.
Excerpted from the Ecospohia essay "Potemkin Nation", August 18, 2021:
One of the repeated lessons of history is that when Potemkin politics become standard operating procedure in a nation, no matter how powerful and stable that nation might look, it can come apart with astonishing speed once somebody provides the good hard shove just discussed. The sudden implosion of the Kingdom of France in 1789 and the equally abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are two of the most famous examples, but there have been many others. In every case, what happened was that a government that had stopped solving its nation’s problems, and settled for trying to manage appearances instead, discovered the hard way that governments really do derive their power from the consent of the governed—and that this consent can be withdrawn very suddenly indeed.When things start to crumble they can crumble fast.
