When Dems wish to deny a hugely popular policy like voter-ID, they use their media to trick supporters of the policy into feeling weird, alone, and isolated. It's a preference cascade in reverse, engineered with massive support from biased media.
https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1376209989602271233
A preference cascade happens when people realize they aren't alone and isolated, that huge numbers of fellow citizens - maybe even a vast "silent majority" - hold positions that have been portrayed as unpopular or even criminal by the dominant powers in society.
Someone speaks up, stating the forbidden truths no one is supposed to utter, and suddenly the silent majority comes out of hiding and finds its voice. Until that moment, people were afraid to speak, fearful they were completely surrounded by regime supporters and informers.
Preference cascades can happen under any dominant system - from violent dictatorships to societies where centrally-directed social pressure makes people treat certain positions as "conventional wisdom" or the "will of the people" without (much) physical violence.
After decades of study, the dominant political and cultural powers in the Western world have realized that preference cascades can be reverse-engineered. The process can be reversed, with huge amounts of control over information and culture, to make the majority feel isolated.
Voter-ID is a fantastic example of this. It's hugely popular, including with the minority groups that supposedly can't vote unless they're treated like helpless infants and given the most fraud-prone voting rules possible. Damn near EVERYONE understands why voter-ID is needed.
Most see the requirements of a tight, fraud-resistant balloting system as modest and reasonable. They know from what the Left likes to call "lived experience" that protecting identity requires a little effort. They routinely put more effort into things less important than voting.
So the Dems and their media went to work years ago, not trying to PERSUADE anyone to change their minds, but rather to make everyone feel as if "everyone else" thinks voter-ID is some kind of racist conspiracy. If you think it's no big deal, there's something "wrong with you."
The effort isn't really moving public opinion polls much - support for smart voting rules remains stubbornly high, across all demographics - but that's not the point of the effort. The point is to defuse populist energy and give Dems room to posture as crusaders against "racism."
The goal is to keep people who support voter-ID from organizing to transform the ideas they support into law. The Dems are tricking people into thinking there's some big, helpless minority quietly seething in fear and frustration, and only Dems have the courage to speak for them.
It's a preference cascade in reverse: creating a phantom "silent constituency" so the rest of us begin feeling guilty and SILENCE OURSELVES for supporting voter-ID. We stop talking about it, stop demanding it. We begin fearing everyone we might discuss it with could turn on us.
That's the key factor in subduing a majority: Fear of the Informer. In brutal dictatorships, it's the fear anyone you talk to might rat you out to the secret police, even your family members. In the increasingly totalitarian West, it's fear of social media swarms.
Once you make everyone afraid to express a widespread opinion - once you create Fear of the Informer - you've neutralized populist energy and made it almost impossible to translate the forbidden idea into policy and law. A lot of people still hold the idea, but won't ACT on it.
You've also destroyed populist RESISTANCE to the contrary view. Dems are free to conduct tub-thumbing populist crusades against voter-ID even though they only have 20-30% actual support for their position AT BEST, because the 70-80% majority won't organize resistance.
You don't need overwhelming majority support to get things done in a degraded "democracy" like modern America. Ambitious politicians just need to short-circuit overwhelming resistance to their demands. It's not hard to do with control of social and legacy media.
In the real world, if you sit on a bus with 10 people, odds are good 8 of them would cheerfully support voter-ID and say its requirements are no big deal. In the virtual world, you sit alone in a sea of informers, with an unfair, unreasonable position nobody holds in good faith.
That's why you're about to find yourself in an America where "virus passports" are needed for travel, but asking someone to show their ID when voting to influence our titanic mega-government is outrageous "racism." Preference cascade in reverse. /end
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
