When the Preference Cascade Becomes a Flood

I’ve written before about preference cascades — where large portions of the public, often a majority, conceal their views for fear of punishment, only to reveal those views when some precipitating event takes place. Classic examples include the fall of Communist regimes, like Ceausescu’s Romania, where even Ceausescu himself thought everyone loved him until shortly before he was stood in front of a wall and shot.

Usually those happen in one direction. But in contemporary America, they’re happening in two.

The murder of Charlie Kirk at the hands of a leftist gunman has revealed that many, many more Americans — and even people elsewhere around the world — supported Charlie and his views than was commonly appreciated. New Zealanders in London danced a Haka in his honor; crowds gathered all over the United States, as well as in Rome, London, Germany, and Israel.

Charlie’s views — uniformly disparaged by the press as “far right” — are in fact mainstream, generally held by the majority of people. His assassination has caused people to step forward, and realize that the normal-American community is a huge majority.