by Stephen Soukuup
From Tocqueville to Kuran, history’s lesson endures: regimes rarely fall at peak oppression, but when fear fades, private truths surface, and the cascade begins.
In 1856, Alexis de Tocqueville—perhaps best known as the documentarian of Democracy in America—published his keen and biting analysis of French society’s experiments in popular governance, The Old Regime and the Revolution. Among the most important observations made therein is Tocqueville’s conclusion that the French monarchy’s collapse came not when conditions in the country were at their worst, most oppressive and insufferable, but rather, when they were improving. Privately, the French Third Estate (the common people) hated the First and Second Estates (the clergy and the nobility, respectively) for decades before the Revolution. The Third Estate nevertheless maintained its public deference, largely because that was simply the way things were done; that’s the way people were expected to behave, whether or not they believed it was right or just or fair. As Tocqueville put it, “It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution…Feudalism at the height of its power had not inspired Frenchmen with so much hatred as it did on the eve of its eclipse.”
Roughly 135 years after Tocqueville wrote about the collapse of one of Europe’s ugliest and most corrupt regimes, Timur Kuran, a brilliant Turkish-American economist, offered his own analysis of private truths, public lies, and their effect on revolutionary sentiment in authoritarian regimes. In a series of articles and then in his classic book, fittingly enough titled Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Kuran introduced the twin concepts of knowledge falsification and preference falsification—which explain the rise and persistence of social conditions that enable the prolongation of corrupt and oppressive regimes—and the related idea of a preference cascade—which explains the process of social change, up to and including revolution.
Succinctly put, Kuran describes knowledge and preference falsification as “special forms of lying.” They amount to “misrepresenting what you know and what you prefer” in order to maintain a specific social order and one’s place in it. These special forms of lying are, according to Kuran, “an innate human response to the dangers of being ostracized, to being cut off from friendships and privileges that are critical to survival,” necessary because “we are born with a need for social acceptance.”
Or, to put it more bluntly, people tend to lie about what they believe in public—on matters great and small—to avoid offending others or drawing unwanted scrutiny to themselves. This is how social order is maintained.
In Private Truths, Public Lies, Kuran provided three examples of knowledge falsification and preference falsification in action and their consequent distortion of social conditions: the Indian caste system, American unanimity on the merit of affirmative action, and Communism in Eastern Europe. Inarguably, the most famous of these three—and the most reaffirming of Tocqueville’s observations—is the maintenance and then sudden collapse of Communism.
For virtually the entirety of their communist regime’s existence, the people of Eastern Europe engaged in knowledge and preference falsification. Although they privately detested the regime, they put on brave, regime-supporting faces in public because they justifiably feared the repercussions of doing otherwise. This behavior “distorted” social conditions by creating the (false) perception that the communist governments were stable and popular. How could they not be, after all, when everyone said, over and over, at the top of their voices, that they love the government? In this way, the regime only had to do part of the work of maintaining public order and obedience, while the people themselves did the rest. They all unwittingly convinced one another that the regime was legitimate because they supported it, even as they secretly loathed it and even as it had practically no legitimacy at all.
Think here of Vaclav Havel’s famous greengrocer (from his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless”). Havel’s greengrocer puts a “Workers of the World, Unite!” sign in his window, not because he is a party supporter or a regime enthusiast, but because he justifiably fears the consequences if he does not. He “lies” publicly so that the regime will not single him out for reprisal. Given that all the other shopkeepers do the same, they create a “panorama” of allegiance by agreeing to live “within a lie.”
In time, however, knowledge and preference falsification are overtaken by reality. Something unexpected happens to shatter the public façade. Something sparks a recognition among the people that they are not alone in harboring private doubts about and antipathy for the regime. Havel argues that this realization enables people to “live in truth,” a truth that becomes a “bacteriological weapon” that, in time, infects the body of the regime and destroys it. Kuran, by contrast, called this a “preference cascade,” in which one person, then two, then three, then thousands of people embrace their “private truths,” forcing the entire social structure to collapse upon itself.
I mention all of this today because I believe we are presently in the throes of a social and commercial revolution. For much of the last two decades, big American businesses have operated under the watchful eye and imposing fist of an authoritarian regime. In general terms, that regime can be called ESG or stakeholderism or, as I called it in my book, “woke capital.” More specifically, one of the chief enforcers of the regime is an organization called the Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the nation’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve LGBTQ+ equality.” The truth, of course, is rather different. The HRC is a pressure group that harasses corporations, forcing them, through social coercion, to align with its aggressively leftist agenda and, in so doing, to waste shareholder resources on overtly political endeavors.
The primary tool of the HRC’s social coercion mechanism is something called the Corporate Equality Index, which it uses to keep tabs on companies’ behavior toward, treatment of, and support for LGBTQ individuals, exclusively in terms that the HRC determines based on its ideology and agenda. As I note in the book, “The Corporate Equality Index has become an enormous concern for companies that desperately want to avoid the label ‘homophobic’ and thus do everything they can to appease and ally with HRC.” That appeasement usually equates to donating to HRC as corporate sponsors and, more ubiquitously, doing everything possible to get a score of 100 on the CEI, which requires, among other things, providing medical benefits for transgender “treatment.” Every major company in the country (and even some in other countries) participates in the CEI annually, hoping to grovel enough to win the regime’s blessing.
Or at least they did until recently:
New research from the LGBTQ+ group Human Rights Campaign showed a drastic drop in Fortune 500 companies willing to publicly disclose their diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
The HRC’s 2026 Corporate Equality Index saw a 65% drop in participation this year, falling from 377 Fortune 500 companies in 2025 to just 131 companies in 2026. HRC noted many of the companies that dropped out hold federal contracts.
About 18 months ago, my colleague Robby Starbuck began his own pressure campaign, urging corporations with left-wing social agendas but right-leaning consumer bases to reconsider their positions and to get out of politics and back to business. At Robby’s “urging,” Tractor Supply became the first major company to agree to amend its DEI policies, including dropping out of HRC’s odious index. In other words, Tractor Supply became the first shopkeeper to take down its sign, the first scared citizen to rebuke its public lies and express its private truths. And soon, others followed: John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, Ford… and now, well, most of the companies in the Fortune 500.
The regime hasn’t collapsed completely, of course, but it’s wobbling mightily. According to The 1792 Exchange, in addition to the above cascade, the HRC lost 27 corporate sponsors between December 2024 and December 2025 and, as a result, had to lay off 20% of its staff. Interestingly, this year, the Human Rights Campaign made its corporate index much less intrusive and much easier to navigate. One supposes this means that the powers that be at the HRC think that “moderating” is the way to win back support. I, on the other hand, think it means that they’ve never read The Old Regime and the Revolution, specifically the following passage from Book III, Chapter 4, known as “the Tocqueville Paradox”: “The regime that a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform.”
May history repeat itself. And soon.
Stephen Soukuup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/16/tocqueville-meets-the-human-rights-campaign/
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