Happy Monday FRians!! As always, this Monday’s post comes to us from Stephen Hall. Thanks again, Stephen!
I was only recently introduced to the concept of the Overton Window, though to be fair I may have heard of it before and simply dismissed the concept as inherently foolish without bothering to contemplate just why it was foolish.
Dubbed the “Overton Window of Political Possibilities” and developed in the mid 1990s, it can be analogized essentially as:
“Imagine, if you will, a yardstick standing on end. On either end are the extreme policy actions for any political issue. Between the ends lie all gradations of policy from one extreme to the other. The yardstick represents the full political spectrum for a particular issue. The essence of the Overton window is that only a portion of this policy spectrum is within the realm of the politically possible at any time. Regardless of how vigorously a think tank or other group may campaign, only policy initiatives within this window of the politically possible will meet with success.”
The idea being that the role of a political think tank is to educate the politicians on the issues, and thus move the window of possibilities closer to what the think tank imagines is good policy.
Is this reality? Let us look at how well the concept has been applied in the past.
The left, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were in complete agreement in supporting the concept of traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and stated so publicly. Polls at the time showed overwhelming support for the concept of traditional marriage and opposition to homosexual marriage.
So, by the logic of the Overton Window, the left should have dropped that issue because it did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being effected and any effort or money spent by the left to advance that issue would be a complete and total waste of time and resources.
It was enacted not by legislation but by judicial fiat.
How about the suffragette cause of the right of women to vote? Mathematically, as women could not vote the passage of such would require a majority of men to dilute their own franchise against their own interests. It was socially and politically unpopular, and thus by the reasoning of the Overton Window, should never have seen the light of day.
The same would also seem true regarding the black vote for similar mathematical reasoning, however there were regional party differences which, much like the present immigration issue, sought to gain demographic political advantage through the use of such an issue. That consideration was not present with regards to women voting.
How about the issue of abortion? There was a clear nationwide consensus that abortion was wrong, and an acceptance that the legalization of abortion would never pass the state legislatures of the several states. Once again, it came down in the left’s favor via judicial fiat rather than legislative action.
While a number of issues do appear to be swayed by the judiciary rather than legislation, thus seeming to be an end run around the Overton Window concept, there are many other issues, particularly regarding the passage of Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, and other “social safety-net” programs which certainly passed through the legislature well outside the Overton Window.
In fact, Roosevelt had to threaten to pad the Supreme Court by expanding the number of seats in order to prevent that type of judicial action which would have prevented his radical vision of the creation of America as a welfare state.
Look at some of the present issues: pushing gun control; voting privileges for felons; welfare for not just non-citizens but illegal aliens; undermining the electoral college; mental psychosis substituting for gender identity; open opposition to free speech by communist organizations like Antifa; openly racist minority groups like BLM; pushing to recognize sharia law; government paid college tuition; socialized medicine; and curtailing due process for civil accusations on college campuses.
Everyone of these issues ought not even be present in the field of political discourse as extreme leftist ideas which are so far out of the mainstream as to be not only outside of the Overton Window but at the very end of that yardstick in that analogy.
The example employed in that article explaining the Overton Window is the idea of pushing legislatures to merely consider allowing the possibility of charter schools to compete with public education. This is not the radical, and traditionally American, idea that education is not a governmental concern and should be entirely privatized.
The leftists never, repeat never, operate within the concept of the Overton Window. The creation of the Overton Window, by “think tank” employee Joe Overton, appears to me nothing more than a way of bilking money out of conservative donors to such think tanks while advocating minor trivial changes and not really bothering to actually affect real policy.
Every leftist agenda is to shoot for the moon, to advocate the extreme, thus any compromise moves the needle in their direction. “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Revelations 3:15-16.
This Overton Window reminds me of first hearing about Godwin’s Law and the foolishness of that concept. Of course, I had been programing computers for at least a decade and was already out of college before the first expression of Godwin’s Law by Mike Godwin.
It would not be until years later that I actually heard the expression by some condescending little twit who assumed that I was new to computers simply because I had never heard of it when the truth was just the opposite that it wasn’t fabricated until after I quit paying attention to such things.
If you, like I was, are unfamiliar, Godwin’s Law reads something like this: “Sooner or later in any online argument, someone will bring up Hitler.” As the article reveals in short order, Mr. Godwin himself is just as prone to do that as those he would look down upon for doing so.
The implication being that the person to make such a comparison must not have a valid argument or they would not have resorted to such a comparison.
The real effect is to shield those socialists who propose policies similar to the socialist state of the Nazis, thus Godwin’s Law is used as a shield to protect the left from having to actually face valid analogies to their political positions.
The leftists do not appear to be dissuaded from the employment of the Hitler and Nazi comparisons in the slightest. Like the Overton Window, Godwin’s Law appears to be nothing more than a tool to advance the leftist agendas.
Both are politically correct stupidity designed to hobble the opposition in the media by that very leftist media. It is a constant barrage of “You can’t say that!” all the while they freely engage in saying that very thing or much worse.
I reject all such foolishness.
Argue the extreme. Advocate based upon abstract principle. Never limit your advocacy by that which you think is merely “attainable” but push for the absolute. Be not lukewarm, but insist upon being either hot or cold.
