PREFERENCE CASCADE: Republican Nikki Haley’s decision to call on the the South Carolina legislature “to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol grounds in Columbia,” James Taranto writes, “appears to have set off a ‘preference cascade,’ a concept the Tennessee legal scholar Glenn Reynolds discussed in a 2002 essay about the post-9/11 outpouring of patriotism, including displays of the American flag.”

In his latest “Best of the Web Today” column in the Wall Street Journal, Taranto quotes the following passage from our Insta-Host. (Registration at the Journal may be required, if my Google pass-through link doesn’t work):

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. . . . 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. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

Taranto adds:

After Tucson, the left tried to incite a moral panic over incendiary conservative speech. Even President Obama didn’t go along with that. After Newtown, they made a push for gun control. They won some victories in states where Democrats held legislative power—Colorado, Connecticut, New York—but lost elsewhere, including in Washington. The anti-Confederate preference cascade results not from the power of the left but from the newly revealed powerlessness of those in the South with an attachment to Confederate symbolism.

And it’s not clear that the politics here redound to the advantage of the left, or the Democratic Party. Southern states’ abandonment of Confederate symbolism seems likely to ease racial polarization, and a less polarized political climate may pose a challenge to Democratic efforts to encourage black voter turnout and keep Republicans on the moral defensive.

Read the whole thing.