A predicted consequence is dismissed as impossible, and once it occurs it is defended as deserved by those who predicted it.
Dreher coined it around 2013 during the American same-sex marriage debates, to describe assurances that religious objectors would face no consequences, paired with the view that any consequences would be deserved. Michael Anton placed it first in a 2021 catalogue of seven such patterns. Its analytical content is the refusal to concede that the earlier denial was wrong: the denial concerns the future and the justification the present, so the two are never put side by side.
In practice
- A regulator assures small firms a rule will never be extended to them, and defends the extension four years later as long overdue.
- A manager who promised the reorganisation would not touch headcount presents the redundancies as the correction of overstaffing everyone had known about.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is that the two statements are made at different times and serve different purposes: the denial forecloses opposition in advance, and the defence justifies the outcome afterwards, with nobody obliged to reconcile them.
- In its favour
- The two-step structure is recognisable well outside politics, in organisational change and in commercial promises, which suggests it names something general rather than partisan.
- Against it
- It is a polemical formulation about political opponents rather than a measured finding, the two statements often come from different people who are not contradicting themselves, and no one has counted how often the sequence occurs.
- Standing
- A polemical formulation about political opponents, not a measured finding. The two-step structure is recognisable well outside politics; the claim that one side does it distinctively is contested and has not been tested.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works