The Rumble You Feel Under Your Feet? It's A "Preference Cascade"...

...and yes, it does sound and feel exactly like the beginnings of a landslide. You may have noticed it subconsciously first - a few negative stories in the media about the president, primaries where Obama cannot reach 60% while running uncontested,  fixed national polls that still can't get Obama to a 50% approval rating.  Little events, any one of them.  But like one falling rock dislodging another, which dislodges two more...

John Hayward at Human Events:

What I believe we are seeing here is the beginning of a “preference cascade,” a term made popular by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame. It’s a fascinating concept, applied originally to the process by which oppressive governments fall.

A large population can be dominated by a small group only by persuading all dissenters that they stand alone. Most of their fellow citizens are portrayed as loyal to the regime, and everyone around the dissident is a potential informer. A huge dissident population can therefore be suppressed, by making them believe they’re all lonely voices in the wilderness… until the day they begin realizing they are not alone, and most people don’t support the regime. The process by which dissent becomes seen as commonplace, and eventually overwhelming, is the preference cascade.

That’s what began happening over the past couple of weeks: a large number of people discovered it’s okay to strongly disapprove of Barack Obama. His popularity has always been buttressed by the conviction – very aggressively pushed by his supporters – that disapproval of his personal or official conduct is immoral. You’re presumptively “racist” if you disagree with him, or at least a greedy tool of the Evil Rich, or a “Tea Party extremist.”

...I should add that the most powerful cascades occur when an artificially imposed sense of isolation crumbles. That's very definitely what is happening here. Widespread popular discontent with the Obama presidency has been suppressed by making the unhappy campers feel marginalized. The failure of that strategy is akin to watching a dam burst under high pressure...


Ironically, it is the media, not the Obama Administration, that has done their very best to suppress all dissent of the president, and affix hateful labels upon his opponents.  A far cry from what the Founders envisioned; never in their darkest dreams did the imagine that the free press, whom they fought to protect, would willingly give themselves up into servitude to the government, and so actively seek to squash debate, withhold information, and distort the truth in order to protect an increasingly un-Constitutional leadership.

The metaphorical dam, built by the media, may in fact cause the resulting landslide to be even more catastrophic for the party in power than might have been the case otherwise.

Just desserts taste the best, I'm told...