The Overton Window

All good questions.

Joseph Lehman, a colleague of Overton's (referred to above), was himself not one to regard the Window as earth shattering:

It just explains how ideas come in and out of fashion, the same way that gravity explains why something falls to the earth.

Indeed, politicians already knew that they need to have policy proposals that are acceptable to the public in order to get elected and get these policies implemented.

Or do they? There is evidence both ways.

A certain Bill Shorten as recently as 2019 blew an unlosable election by trying too hard to get policies into the Window that did not belong there – like uncosted (and probably uncostable) climate change policies.

On the other hand, as I have explored elsewhere, the current Victorian Premier that people to his right characterise as "mad, "a lunatic", "extremist", "despotic" and "evil" has consistently implemented leftist policies that many people would regard as outside the Window, only to be elected and re-elected with stunning majorities.

The leftist New Republic critiqued the Overton Window as a "libertarian" idea that it said peaked in 2016 and operated as (yet another) explanation of the rise of Trump.

Is the Overton Window merely the Trump era's "go-to nerd phrase", as one observer has suggested?

It is, absolutely, more than this.

It might be thought that the Window is merely a description – one among many – of how politics work, and therefore not a guide to action. That it doesn't provide acute strategic insight. It IS a framework for first-stage thinking about the core political tasks. Moreover, Overton himself suggested that those wishing to shift the needle on public attitudes on particular topics should be bold. They should state the "unthinkable", perhaps in new ways, and get out and make the case. It might be surprising what can be achieved. Look at the same sex marriage debate. Perhaps the right should take note.

Take the case of those SJWs and others who are endlessly playing the game of narrowing the Window. A demonic trick, to be sure, but one that is hitherto successful beyond their dreams. They just keep winning! Using an Overton Window framework, those on the right-of-centre who normally lose all the battles – and the war – might re-consider their political task as that of re-opening the Window. By insisting that the things that the woke class has stopped us talking about, say the endless rewards of mass immigration, or the sheer beauty of Islam, through epithets and lies, are indeed allowed to be talked about, and even acted upon politically.