In the last three presidential elections, from 2016 to 2024, the pollsters whose job it is to predict election results from opinion polls noticed a trend: More people voted for Trump than had said that they would vote for Trump. In other words, a lot of people weren't comfortable saying to a stranger that they would vote for Trump, presumably because they knew that what Trump was saying was way out of the Overton window of acceptable public discourse, but then secretly agreed with him anyway and voted for him. Thus some pollsters giving Hillary Clinton a 99% chance of winning the 2016 election, which obviously went spectacularly wrong for the pollsters.

But elections are only one aspect of this. The gap between the public and the private window can appear wherever people have the opportunity to express their opinions secretly. One example is social media platforms that measure people's opinions by what they click on or which direction they swipe in. And while the public discourse has more or less eliminated sexism and has a promoted positive body image for people that don't have a perfect body, the results from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Tinder are just the opposite: With their clicks and swipes young people confirm a preference for a very traditional view of what is beautiful or attractive. And because the algorithm promotes what is actually popular, not what is politically correct, we end up with a bunch of female influencers all looking like porn stars. The result for men isn't any less sexist and outside the Overton window of public discourse: Muscles and expressions of wealth are popular, while soft and caring men are not. What people think and what they say they think is clearly different. And you can't even blame the boomers for that, they don't hang out these platforms.

In gaming the most visible example of this was the failed boycott of Hogwarts Legacy. The activists managed at least in part to dominate the public discourse and shout down anybody who argued against a boycott. But that clearly didn't influence the secret buying decisions of people very much. People felt that they weren't allowed to say that they thought the game wasn't transphobic, but had no qualms about buying it.

Both politicians and companies frequently adjust their policies to what they perceive the current Overton window of acceptability is. So the problem of a gap between a public Overton window and a secret window of actual acceptability isn't just the hypocrisy; it is the danger of politicians and companies misreading the public discourse and deciding on policies that aren't actually publicly acceptable. Anheuser-Busch InBev isn't "woke", their actual values are purely capitalistic; they just misjudged the Overton window of public acceptance and walked right into the Bud Light boycott disaster. On climate change and environmentalism, one study found that 88% of customers publicly expressed a preference for sustainable packaging and the like, while in reality only 25% of them let that affect their purchasing decisions; which explains the sales numbers of companies like Temu and Shein, which are everything but good for the planet. Many left of center parties in developed countries from Canada to Europe are currently waking up to the reality that they misread the public acceptance of migration and asylum policies. Far-right parties have been increasingly successful in elections in Europe, because they were simply better at understanding what people really thought about that.

In the end all of this results in a hollow victory for social justice and other left-wing causes. It doesn't help if you are in control of the public discourse, but have left behind the "hearts and minds" of the majority. According to The Atlantic, the illiberal political correctness and cancel culture is now in decline. The idea that if we eliminate sexism, racism, and whateverism from public discourse, the attitudes of people would follow, has been shown as wrong. Instead politicians from the Democrats have been heard to change their tune after the election on social justice issues like trans rights, trying to get more in touch with what voters are really thinking and saying things they wouldn't have said before. In my opinion it would be better if there was no gap between the two windows, because that gap has been shown to be unhelpful in actually changing people's behavior for the better. Shouting somebody down isn't the same thing as changing their mind.