Developing and something to watch for...

...Is Obama about suffer a "preference cascade"?

Ed Driscoll explains:

A decade ago, Glenn Reynolds described a “preference cascade” as one of the reasons why “totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly:”

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. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

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. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

If anyone is due for a "preference cascade" it is Barrack Obama. I recall people announcing for Obama in 2006, when he had been a Senator for less than two years and they knew nothing about him, usually in the context of showing that they were not racists. That kind of faith over fact approach can last for a long time, but at some point someone is going to announce that the "Emperor has no clothes" and then people are going to start saying, "Gee, you know, he does seem a little scantily dressed."

The thing keeping Obama aloft thus far is probably simply the totalitarian media. We've had recent examples of how people living in New York, and probably Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, just aren't getting the unfiltered news. However, when left/lib opinion sources like Maureen Dowd start "putting down markers" for Obama's defeat, then people who want to be trendy, and what better describes the left/lib mindset?, will not want to be the last ones to miss the new bandwagon.

Preference Cascade - The Tea Party.

The Virginian argues that the "preference cascade" concept explains why the Tea Party movement formed in spite of the opposition and derision of the official political class.

The "Taranto Principle" may be a special case of "preference cascades."

What is the Taranto Principle? It is a principle laid down by the Wall Street Journal's perceptive editorialist, James Taranto. Mr. Taranto, in his column "Best of the Web Today," surveys the press and reports daily on their output with special emphasis on their contradictions, hypocrisies and — most deliciously — imbecilities. Like all other thoughtful observers of American press, Mr. Taranto recognizes that they are heavily biased toward the Democratic Party and the left in general.


Yet, while many who hold that this advances the Democratic Party and the left, Mr. Taranto believes that it has a harmful effect on left-wing politics, often causing left-wing candidates to lose at the polls.

According to the Taranto Principle, the press's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans. According to Mr. Taranto, in 2004 the press quietly went along with Senator Jean-Francois Kerry's exaggerated claims to heroism and military prowess, thus encouraging his braggadocio and leaving him utterly unprepared when his fellow vets stepped forward and demonstrated that he had been a dreadful showoff in Vietnam.

"Preference Cascades."

A comment at Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit on the "Arab Spring" provides a useful way of thinking about surprising historical events, such as the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 or the collapse of the ancien regime in France in 1789.  Both events were surprising because these appeared to be solid, imposing, monolothic structures that were swept away in a matter of months. 

The comment observes:

JON HENKE EMAILS: “I was thinking about the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and surrounding areas and I recalled something you wrote in 2002 that really captured what is happening in that region today. Concerning ‘preference cascades’, you wrote…”

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). 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. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

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. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

So, to give credit where credit is due, Glenn Reynolds posits the idea of "preference cascades" working in a subterranean fashion in totalitarian regimes.

This is obviously an argument in favor of the First Amendment, which provides feedback to our government about the true sentiments of the governed, because truth is always good.  If a "preference cascade" effect is to occur in the United States, it will probably occur in an area of "political correctness," where the things that people know that they have to affirm to be accepted members of good society are at a variance from their lived experience.