Nobody Knows Until They Do: Does Preference Falsification Predict a MAGA Break with Trump

When I was a younger man in the late nineties and early oughts, I was the head of the ESL faculty at a prominent university in South Korea. It was the heyday of the ESL craze in Korea and also the pinnacle of anti-American sentiment there as well. One of the things I emphasized to my faculty was that we had to prove to our Korean students that we were teachers and that we knew how to teach. In Korean education, the teacher was always right, so asking a question meant that the teacher hadn’t explained something clearly. That was insulting to the teacher. The answers to test questions were right and wrong. You either knew it or you didn’t. The teacher was the font of all correct answers. You couldn’t do any of the fancy Western education stuff involving critical thinking or even group work. Should your class ever conclude that you didn’t know what you were doing as a teacher, that you were not a legitimate teacher, they would just ignore you. Worse, they would then complain to the administration.

One year I hired a young man with a PhD in ESL. PhDs were rare in Korea — they could teach stateside — so when one crossed your desk, you hired them. He had a Korean wife and two young children. It seemed like it could work out, but at the end of the second semester, he began to behave oddly. Very oddly. Oddly enough for me to worry about his mental health. One day I received an angry delegation of students from one of his classes. He had left the class without explanation and never returned. It was offensive to them. It wasn’t proper teaching.

When asked about it, he said one of his children was sick and he was needed at home. He was alarmed enough that he left without explaining to the class. That should’ve been the end of it. While I suspected that it wasn’t exactly true, it was a good enough cover story that it should’ve worked. The students in his class weren’t having it. They were demanding his dismissal. They went to my Korean faculty supervisor, and this teacher was dismissed.

When I met with my supervisor, the one complaint had blossomed into a litany of complaints. Most of them were minor infractions that if taken individually would not have been enough to warrant his dismissal. Up until his disappearing act, they were all tolerated by the class. Undoubtedly there was grumbling about unqualified English teachers. But, leaving without explanation in the middle of class was the straw that broke the camel’s back. When they met with the head of our department it all came pouring out. “He left in the middle of class!” “He was badly prepared for classes.” “He cussed in class one day!” “He came to class with greasy hair.” “He doesn’t dress fashionably.” “His smile is lopsided.” And, suddenly every little thing the class didn’t like about him or that he had done wrong came tumbling out until it formed an overwhelming tsunami of complaint.

Criticisms of Trump Mounting

That’s what is happening with many of Trump’s 2024 voters. They could take the tariffs because there were billions on the tariff shelf. They could take prices being up because good times were surely right around the corner just like in Trump 1.0. They could take going without their ACA insurance. The dismantling of the US government. Reduced funding for Medicaid. ICE atrocities in the streets. The blatant corruption. Murdering foreign fisher people on the high seas. But, once gas prices started going up and a real shooting war started, well, folks got worried. They got scared. Times started getting tough. On them.

We all know the Republican rule-of-thumb: shit ain’t real until I step in it on my own front stoop. The Cheneys were homophobes until Mary Cheney came out, got married, and shamed them all in 2012. Prime example. You see this happening over and over again on issue after issue. When it affects one of their own, then the government should do something about it.

The corollary is that Republican policies are supposed to hurt the Other, those people over there, the Communities of Color, the ones MAGA hates. When those policies hurt them, they can be dismayed, and cries of, “You’re hurting the wrong people,” echo throughout Red America.

Now, that one complaint against Trump was legitimate. He started foreign wars when he ran on keeping us out of wars. Once that criticism became acceptable to levy at him, the others could be, too.

Preference Falsification and Preference Cascade

This phenomenon has a name, preference cascade. It is a sudden shift in a group’s opinions or beliefs that occurs after dissatisfaction with a norm, belief, or policy is shown to be much more widely accepted than anyone thought. Public consensus on an issue seems to suddenly collapse, but in reality doubts existed in the minds of the pubic all along — they were simply lying to themselves and everyone else about what they believed.

A good example is marriage equality. Biden forced Obama into publicly proclaiming his support for marriage equality, and, then, suddenly, everyone was for it, even SCOTUS. Yes, really THAT SCOTUS.

Preference Falsification versus Cognitive Dissonance

The point is we lie to ourselves all the time about what we really believe, especially when there is tremendous peer pressure to do so. We may believe one thing, so we don’t stand out and buck the crowd, we keep it to ourselves and tell a public lie. If the lie persists or the pressure to conform is strong enough, we take it a step further and lie to ourselves again, telling ourselves that this time we really really really believe it. For all the world, it seems like we do.

It is similar to cognitive dissonance — the lie we tell ourselves when our actions don’t match our beliefs. A more modern term for it was coined by Timur Kuran, preference falsification. When social pressure is involved in changing our public-facing statements of what we believe, we have performed preference falsification. We’ve misrepresented what we truly think — whether we’re aware of it or not — for something that is socially acceptable. It is more than a little white lie, though. It is something that we will not divulge because of the consequences of defying the social pressure. The force is such that we feel the need to hide our real motivations and thoughts from others.

Examples: The Insurrection and the Big Lie

When it is the government or a political movement putting pressure on a populace to conform to ideological and policy beliefs, then you can have public performance of compliance. A good example is the 6 January Insurrection. We’ve gone from Trump has disqualified himself from participation in governance — corporations renounced him and quit contributing to his PACs, for example — to full corporate compliance and massive donations to his questionable funds like his inauguration and ballroom.

Another example is the Big Lie: the 2020 election was stolen from the rightful winner, Trump. It is a litmus test for participating in Republican politics. There is tremendous pressure to outwardly support the statement, and nominees for Senate-confirmed positions twist themselves into wriggling shivering quivering knots trying to communicate that they know Trump lost the election fair and square without actually saying he lost. Just as repeating the Big Lie is the entry ticket to suckling at the Trump grift teat, not explicitly disavowing it should be the exit ticket to confirmation.

Preference Falsification and MAGA

We can apply this concept to Trump’s 2024 support and MAGA. As much as I was convinced that Trump had explicitly cheated to win the 2024 election, I am now equally convinced that he did not. If he had, he would’ve won by 99% in all of the states. You know he couldn’t resist doing so, unless they were pulling a “keep him out of the room” thing like they did during the Iran War Crime combat search and rescue operations. But, for the narcissist, there can be no super secret jenius plan that is not blurted publicly What’s the point of being a jenius with super secret plans for world domination if no one knows about them? Am I right or am I right? I’m right, right?

Still, I think we can accept that seventy-seven million of our fellow Americans re-election the instigator of the 6 January Insurrection because they could not accept that the administration that engineered the soft economic landing after the #COVID19 pandemic could do it again in 2024. Seventy-seven million of us thought it was better to bet on the person that brought about the #COVID19 pandemic disaster, tried to destroy our democracy, actively assaulted any attempts at limiting climate change, and promoted chaos, racism, misogyny, and hatred at every opportunity. When you put it like that, maybe it is easier to believe that the muttering fokkers cheated.

MAGA believes that Trump’s touch can gild every steaming pile of shit with gold — sure, you’re still standing in a field of shit, but gilded shit beats admitting the truth. The whole self-deluding concept relies on LBJ’s piquant insight of convincing the lowest white person that they are better than the best Black person. When the best Black man moved into the White House with his brilliant wife and were so gracious and decent about it, well, that set off the self-destructive death wish of MAGA and that gilded field of shit went beyond being acceptable, it became necessary.

Trump’s excursion into war criming in Iran and spiking gas prices has awoken MAGA from their euphoric stupor to the nightmare of discovering that the thing they used to oppress Communities of Color, women, and anyone threatening their make-believe 1950s Mayberry illusion is really just the same robber barons who’ve been picking their pockets all along. They have handed the keys to the treasury to a cabal of global elitists who are just using it all to stuff their pockets with as much of their hard-earned tax dollars as they can. That realization is what preference cascades that unravel preference falsification are made of. Just ask Viktor Orbán.

The question is whether Trump’s Iran adventure — the war crimes, the saber rattling, the very real possibility of coming home in a flag-draped box — is the ESL teacher walking out of the classroom, causing the entire enterprise to be questioned. Are we standing at the cusp of the preference cascade that finally unmakes MAGA, or can their cognitive dissonance absorb this blow like it has so many others? Kuran’s unsettling answer is that nobody knows until they do. And then everybody knows all at once.

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