A Trump wave is on the way
By Glenn
Harlan Reynolds
As
plebes make The Donald increasingly acceptable, expect elite Trump supporters
to come out of the closet.
In America, Donald
Trump — who many of the experts thought
had no chance — is dominating
the polls. In Britain, meanwhile, much of the public seems
to be mobilizing in favor of exiting the troubled European Union — a
British Exit, or Brexit.
Writing in The
Spectator, Brendan O’Neill puts this down to a class revolt on both
sides of the Atlantic. And he’s right as far as he goes, but I think
there’s more than just a class revolt. I think there’s also a
developing preference cascade. O’Neill writes: “In
both Middle America and Middle England, among both rednecks and chavs, voters
who have had more than they can stomach of being patronised, nudged, nagged and
basically treated as diseased bodies to be corrected rather than lively minds
to be engaged are now putting their hope into a different kind of politics.
And the entitled Third Way brigade, schooled to rule, believing themselves
possessed of a technocratic expertise that trumps the little people’s vulgar
political convictions, are not happy. Not one bit.”
Well, that’s
certainly true. Both America and Britain have developed a ruling class that
is increasingly insular and removed from — and contemptuous
of — the people it deigns to rule. The ruled are now returning
the contempt.
But while there’s a
class component here, it’s not as strong as some might suggest. Trump does well among
college and post-college educated voters, too, and the Brexit is
suddenly developing support from the sort of political class leaders who used
to be pro-Europe. The difference is that the upper-class types have been
less willing to show it.
In both cases, it may
be that the lower classes are expressing their views more openly because they
have less to lose.
Express the “wrong” opinions in British or American politics or academia and
it’s the (figurative) gulag for you; if you work at a fast-food place, the
consequences are generally less steep. But when enough ordinary voters
express an opinion, the elites may feel safer, too.
In his terrific book,
Private
Truths, Public Lies:The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Timur
Kuran writes about the phenomenon he calls “preference falsification”:
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. 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. Kuran
calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I wonder if that’s not
what’s happening here.
Novelist
Bret Easton Ellis, for example, recently tweeted: "Just back
from a dinner in West Hollywood: shocked the
majority of the table was voting for Trump but they would never admit it
publicly.” What he describes is
preference falsification — but if people stop hiding, it will become a cascade.
And Ellis himself has started that process with this tweet. Meanwhile, confronted
with PC nonsense, college students have started chanting ”Trump!
Trump!” (Law professor Ann Althouse has been predicting
this cascade for weeks.)
Likewise,
in Britain, both London Mayor Boris Johnson and mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith have come out against staying
in the EU.
On this news, author Jim Bennett emailed me: “Are we seeing a preference
cascade for Brexit? Although many are already for it, of course, mostly they
have been either old-line Tories or working-class marginal malcontents.
Boris and Zac are part of the rich, well-connected, cosmopolitan London set
which has always been presumed to be Europhiles. Watch this phenomenon.”
It used to be, of
course, that the lower and middle classes were stuffy and constrained by social
convention while the freethinkers at universities and in the ruling
class got to experiment with unconventional ideas. If their
experimenting got enough success, then it might eventually filter down to
ordinary people. (The sexual revolution worked this way, more or
less).
But now it’s our
ruling class that is hidebound by political correctness, and it takes movement
by the masses to give it permission to express a controversial view. That’s a
major change, and it’s one that the ruling class isn’t likely to appreciate
much. But having subjected itself to the chains of “acceptable” opinion, what
can it do?
Glenn
Harlan Reynolds, a University of
Tennessee law professor, is the author of The
New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from
Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/25/donald-trump-supporters-brexit-preference-falsfication-2016-primaries-column/80856410/
