Let’s Stop Talking About the Overton Window – Jacobin magazine

If youve been involved in left politics in the last four years, youve probably heard a lot about the Overton window. Weve been told that Bernie Sanders has shifted the Overton window with his social-democratic policy proposals, that Bernie and Trump have jointly managed to break the Overton window, and that radical slogans like abolish the police must be supported by anyone who wants any sort of police reform because it shifts the Overton window in the right direction.

Sometimes, people who use these phrases are making a purely descriptive claim. Shifts occur in which ideas are widely discussed by political commentators. In 2014, for example, only a handful of prominent figures were foregrounding single-payer national health insurance. Now everyone who talks about politics for a living has said something about whether Medicare for All is a good idea. This in turn has helped spur centrists to develop proposals that lie somewhere in between Medicare for All and the health care laws currently on the books.

No one denies that shifts of this kind happen. The question is why they are happening and how consequential to real politics these evolutions are. Can shifting the Overton window help the Left get closer to achieving our goals?

Joseph Overton was a senior vice president at a libertarian think tank in Michigan, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He developed his window idea in the mid-1990s as a way of convincing potential donors that his organization was doing valuable work.

The Mackinac Center spends its time arguing for proposals to bust labor unions, undercut the movement for climate justice, and generally make things worse for most people. Its not hard to see why wealthy plutocrats would support this agenda, but Overton understood that even inherently attractive products benefit from good marketing. He made a brochure for potential donors with a cardboard slider to illustrate how the window of political possibility on any given issue could be shifted along a spectrum going from total government control to a libertarian utopia of zero government intervention.

After his death in 2003, the concept was taken up and named after Overton by his Mackinac colleague Joseph Lehman. Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like theyre ordering dessert from a menu, Lehman told the New York Times. They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.

Crucially, the point wasnt about implementing the policies the Mackinac Center actually wanted. He would tell them that neither the most libertarian nor the least libertarian possibility was ever going to become a reality. Instead, they should think about points on a spectrum.

Ideas within the window on Overtons slider might be implemented. Ideas that were too far outside of the window were radical or even unthinkable. Summarizing Overtons thinking in the New Republic, Laura Marsh says he proposed that the most effective way of moving relatively libertarian ideas into the mainstream wasnt to advocate for minor, incremental changes to an already accepted idea but to make the best case for a currently unthinkable idea and thereby move policy proposals adjacent to that from radical to acceptable.

At least two kinds of commentators whose political preferences sharply diverge from those of Joseph Overton seem to think that leftists can shift the Overton window by advocating policies previously considered to be unthinkable. On the one hand, some moderate progressives are, at least in their more conciliatory moments, happy to have the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shifting the Overton window on progressive policy. If Bernie and AOC are putting Medicare for All on the table, for example, this might have the virtue in the eyes of some of these Democrats of making a public option more likely.

The second group is made up of leftists genuinely committed to transformative goals who think that advocating the loaf that theyd love to have someday at least makes it more likely that theyll get half a loaf sometime soon.

The moderately progressive case for the value of Overton window manipulation is typified by Rachel Maddow. She did a segment on Overton and his window just before she interviewed Bernie Sanders in December 2015. The way to shift the window, she said, was to advocate super-extreme positions which change the realm of whats politically possible because after something super-nuts has been floated positions which are slightly less nuts will start to look acceptable. She illustrated this dynamic by describing Donald Trumps rivals for the GOP nomination first denouncing Trumps proposed Muslim ban and then making somewhat similar proposals themselves. When she segued from this segment to the Sanders interview without even a commercial break, the implication was lost on no one. This guy might be a little crazy, and he certainly wont be the nominee, but hey, at least hell help shift the conversation in a more progressive direction.

Anecdotally, Ill say that I heard a lot of this kind of thing after Bernies first defeat in 2016. Sometimes it came from liberals trying to cheer up their dispirited leftist friends. Sometimes it came from leftists themselves looking for a silver lining in the outcome of the primary. In a way, members of both groups would say, Bernie has already won. Just look at all the concessions to him in the Democratic platform!

This was always pretty thin gruel. American major party platforms are wish lists with little practical significance. But its the kind of consolation that rings especially hollow after Bernies second defeat this time to a man who has strongly suggested that if Medicare for All were passed by a Democratic House and Senate during his second term, he would veto it.

In a way, the idea that we should put forward radical demands not in order to achieve them but so that less radical versions of them will become policy just sounds like common sense. Any union negotiator will tell you that it makes sense to bring ideas to the bargaining table that are highly unlikely to make it into the actual contract. If you demand eleven, you might at least end up with three.

The problem with using this analogy as a prism for thinking about what kind of a left political agenda were putting forward is that there are some fairly large and relevant disanalogies between the two cases. To start with, a union negotiator suggesting contract language it would be difficult for the boss to accept knows that the unions members would love these proposals.

Those extra two weeks of paid vacation every year might never become a reality, but thats not because the people on whose behalf the negotiator is working dont want them. Contrast that to demanding the abolition of all policing in a country where 81 percent of black Americans dont even want police presence in their neighborhoods to be reduced. Demanding eleven is sometimes a good strategy for getting a nervous enemy to grant you three, but its far less clear that when the majority of the people you think would benefit from a policy dont even want two, demanding eleven will get them to want three.

In at least some cases, it might even have the opposite effect. It remains to be seen whether the gambit will pay off, but Donald Trump certainly seems to believe that hell get a lot of mileage out of blurring the lines between (a) the tepid and grotesquely inadequate police reforms proposed by Joe Biden, (b) the more popular idea of defunding the police, and (c) police abolitionism, and using popular fear of (c) as a cudgel against even (a). To be clear, I dont think the possibility of the Right using this kind of rhetorical strategy against us is a good enough reason not to put forward radical policy proposals. Right-wing fearmongers will lie about any progressive idea as a matter of course. The point is just that we have little reason to believe that proposing very unpopular ideas will do anything to make more moderate versions of those ideas more popular.

The second, related problem is that company negotiators arent going to come back with a proposal for an extra two days of paid vacation out of a sheer desire to continue to look reasonable in a situation where the boundaries of the discussion have shifted. If the demand has any impact its because the union has real-world leverage. If bargaining breaks down, the workers might walk off the job and hurt the companys bottom line. No parallel mechanism exists to make establishment politicians sit up and take notice when a faction thats out of power engages in a purely rhetorical escalation of its demands.

The analogy between negotiating tactics at bargaining tables and ultraradical slogans printed on protest signs or advocated in left-wing magazines gets even thinner when we remember that much of the point of the latter isnt to directly spook policymakers into making concessions. Our goal is to shift public opinion in our direction so that we can build up a movement with enough support to actually win such concessions or, better yet, to take power so we can implement our ideas ourselves. And for that task, the negotiating analogy just isnt relevant. You cant spook a majority of the population into wanting the things that you think they should want.

None of this means that socialists should only advocate things most people already support. It doesnt even mean that theres no value in making currently unthinkable ideas a little easier to imagine. About half of the articles I write for Jacobin are attempts to do exactly that. But the point of the exercise isnt to somehow trick skeptics into supporting something halfway in between our radical aspirations and the status quo.

Sometimes the activity of the Left might well result in inadequate reforms implemented by establishment figures that greatly improve on previous conditions. But we dont get any closer to that goal by going for broke on a rhetorical level. Instead, that becomes possible when we build up a movement so powerful that our political enemies see the need to make concessions to stop us from coming to power. And the way we build up such a movement is by clearly and persuasively articulating what we actually want in a way thats compelling to large numbers of people whose material interests would be served by that agenda.

Thats the opposite of verbally advocating things we arent even sure make sense for the sake of shifting the Overton window. Doing the latter, if anything, undermines our ability to convince persuadable people that a better world is realistically possible.

Ghoulish right-wing think tanks like the Mackinac Center do advance the agenda of their wealthy donors. But the way they do it isnt well-represented by Joseph Overtons cardboard slider moving some ideas into the window of political possibility by making previously unthinkable ideas a few steps beyond those proposals a bit more thinkable. Rather, the main value of think tanks to their donors agenda comes from doing things like filing amicus briefs in court cases, providing cheat sheets of arguments used by partisans in debates about things that already politically possible, and even writing sample laws that fit the preexisting policy preferences of right-wing donors.

A think tank (or a political magazine) that wants to be useful to its political goals might well spend some time, or even quite a bit of its time, advocating ideas that probably arent going to become popular any time soon. Im a socialist. I dont just want to nationalize health insurance by implementing Medicare for All. I want to nationalize every hospital in the country by taking a page from Britains postwar Labour government and creating a National Health Service. Oh, and Id also like worker control of the means of production. Thats pretty far outside of the window of political possibility in America in 2020.

But we need to be clear on what advocacy for these ideas can and cant accomplish. Medicare for All is already quite popular, which is one reason it makes so much strategic sense for us to focus on it right now, but its quite doubtful that its going to be made more popular by socialists talking about currently fringe ideas that go beyond it. The point of talking about creating an American NHS isnt to trick anyone into supporting M4A. Its to persuade people who already support M4A that our work wont be done when weve accomplished it.

Its important for radicals to work to make whats currently unthinkable thinkable. But thats not so we can shift the Overton window so far that something halfway between those unthinkable horizons and the miserable present can become politically possible. Its so that we can actually achieve the kind of unthinkable future that we desperately need.

Originally posted here:

Let's Stop Talking About the Overton Window - Jacobin magazine