The Overton Window

The Overton Window is an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies. Politicians can only act within the acceptable range. Shifting the Overton Window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones within the window, seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable. According to [Joseph] Lehman, who coined the term, "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it."

Can one find examples of policies that show the utility of the Overton Window as an explanatory device? Yes, but it is complicated.

Perhaps the greatest example of the most astonishing and an astonishingly successful campaign to get an issue into the Overton Window in recent times – perhaps in my lifetime – has been the "making gay ok" campaign which culminated in the previously unthinkable notion of same sex marriage. Until the 1990s, not even homosexuals wanted it. Homosexual rights campaigners and associated progressivist fellow travellers succeeded in achieving a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn in public opinion in around two decades. They got a previously "unthinkable" policy into the Window.

Another, not unrelated, recent example of extremist policies being implemented is the case of one jurisdiction after another implementing radical abortion laws, those in New South Wales being characterised by Tony Abbott as "infanticide on demand", that, on the evidence of polls, did not meet voters' approval. Yet they were passed in the parliament. The NSW Government simply didn't tell the voters at the previous election what it was up to. It didn't need the process of the Overton Window. It entirely circumvented it.

Some might say that this is contempt for the public, and a mark against the democratic process as it was traditionally practised. But it also suggests that the modern politician-in-government, imbued with bravura beyond belief and, perhaps, recognition that in the current age of woeful oppositions which no longer do their jobs, governments are often safe in the knowledge that, whatever their bungles, their deals and their lies, voters will see the "other mob" as being even worse. In such a race to the bottom, the losers are those who find themselves "on the wrong side of history" on key moral and social questions and who have views that the ruling elites hold in contempt. Or those whose influence is neither numerically significant nor sufficiently powerful to move politicians to enact their (the voters') preferences.

Another way of contemplating the Overton Window is to consider policies that once were "unthinkable", that is, beyond "radical", which then move to near, but not quite in, the Window. Consider Bernie Sanders' run for office in 2016 in the USA. He was the leftist equivalent of the populist Trump, on the outer of the establishment. And he very nearly got the Democrat nomination, despite his policies being Marxist and previously considered way out of bounds. One might, of course, suggest that the Democrat National Committee took the view that voters can take only so much leftism, and that politicians like Clinton and Biden present to the electorate as being much closer to the Window.

Indeed, there seem to be nowadays much bigger and faster jumps from "unthinkable" to at least "acceptable", if not quite implementable. Perhaps this reflects generational change, the greater willingness of young voters to go radical, or the faster speed of communications that allows ideas to circulate more rapidly than previously, and so gain traction. Or perhaps it is simply a reflection of the postmodernist "all bets are on" approach to philosophy, politics and society since the ideas of the class of '68 emerged, fully formed, from Paris and Haight-Ashbury and moved to the political mainstream.

A very different way of seeing the Overton Window is not to open minds to new, perhaps previously unthinkable ideas, thus widening the range of ideas considered acceptable and so enlarging the Window, but rather to narrow the ideas that can be considered debatable, up for discussion.

This is precisely the method of the "cancel culture" now in the news, of shutting down debates and denying a voice to opponents, and it seems to be working. Think of the pressure brought to bear on climate sceptics like Peter Ridd of James Cook "University", or the efforts of regulators in the UK and elsewhere to silence opposition to Covid lockdown policies. This is an attempt to move things OUT OF the Window rather than into it. It is a reverse Overton Window manouevre, in effect. And it a favourite tactic of governments, the ABC, universities, the fascist corporate culture driven by woke HR departments, the lawfare brigade, the social justice warriors who attack cultural appropriation – "stay in your lane" – and, of course, the social media lynch mob who undertake "offence archaeology" to dig up embarrassing statements made by an opponent in the past, in order to have him or her sacked or worse.

As the freedom fighter Toby Young has argued, all these groups want a tiny Overton Window, and are working assiduously, around the clock, to get it. They have succeeded in shifting "the centre" way leftwards. Understand this critical development will become the key to a thought-through conservative revival and push-back.

These different examples suggest a number of questions.

What is the utility of the Overton Window? Does it explain anything/everything? Does it have implications for political strategy? Is there a manual for getting your preferred policy idea into the window? Is the Window a better way of explaining politics, than, say, public choice theory?