From the Editor

The Overton Window

By:  David Deschesne

Editor/Publisher, Fort Fairfield Journal

No, I'm not going to bore you with a review of Glenn Beck's book because while I think the political theory is sound, I still believe Beck is a shill for the war-hawk neo-con military industrial complex whose goal is to mislead true conservatives into supporting fascist and authoritarian ideologies while thinking those ideas are “conservative” in nature. Huh, come to think of it, Beck is indeed helping to move the Overton Window toward authoritarianism and most of his followers have no idea that he's doing it. So, what's the Overton Window?

The Overton Window is a political theory developed by Joseph P. Overton, a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes as a narrow “window” the range of ideas the public will accept. On this theory, an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within that window rather than on politicians' individual preferences.

According to www.mackinac.org, Overton observed that any collection of public policies within a policy area, such as education, can be arranged in order from more free to less free (or from less government intervention to more). To avoid comparison with the left-right political spectrum, he arranged the policies from bottom (less free) to top (more free). When the window moves or expands up or down along this axis, an idea at a given location may become more or less politically acceptable as the window moves relative to it. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:

Unthinkable

Radical

Acceptable

Sensible

Popular

Policy

The Overton window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it. For example, some social policies that were affected by a shift in the Overton Window in the past were slavery, prohibition and homosexual marriage.

Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public so that the window either “moves” or expands to encompass them. The primary proponents of new and radical policy are generally special interest groups and they use mass media, such as television dramas and sitcoms, movies and, to a lesser extent these days, books to sway public opinion to their side.

According to www.mackinac.org, “At any one time, some group of adjacent policies along the freedom spectrum fall into a ‘window of political possibility.’ Policies inside the window are politically acceptable, meaning officeholders believe they can support the policies and survive the next election. Policies outside the window, either higher or lower, are politically unacceptable at the moment. If you shift the position or size of the window, you change what is politically possible. Many believe that politicians move the window, but that's actually rare. In our understanding, politicians typically don't determine what is politically acceptable; more often they react to it and validate it. Generally speaking, policy change follows political change, which itself follows social change. The most durable policy changes are those that are undergirded by strong social movements.”

A great shift in the Overton Window occurred during the 1930's Great Depression. According to an essay entitled Great Myths of the Great Depression, available at www.mackinac.org the U.S. government was able to shift public sentiment toward welfare handouts away from public shunning of such programs to overall acceptance. A synopsis of the essay at that website explains, “Eighty years ago, the Overton Window shifted decidedly toward government intervention in the American economy. According to the popular view, this transformation occurred because capitalism failed and precipitated an economic collapse. But in this monograph, Mackinac Center President Emeritus Lawrence W. Reed questions this narrative and suggests the trend toward government intervention continued not because of the government’s successes, but because of its failures.”

Other formulations of the process created after Overton's death add the concept of artificially moving the window, such as deliberately promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous “outer fringe” ideas, with the intention of making the current fringe ideas acceptable by comparison. For example, 100 years ago, Maine, like most states, considered homosexuality a crime (as well as adultery and fornication). At the time, public perception of those acts allowed for laws to punish those crimes in excess of one to five years in prison with hard labor and multiple thousands of dollars in fines. Over the years, the window has shifted by a slow, methodical private marketing system where groups interested in legitimizing those acts moved social mores and acceptance by offering extreme suggestions - such as homosexual marriage - which make the initial acts of homosexuality seem less drastic and thus sway public policy in that direction.

Now that homosexual marriage has been legitimized in the minds of many (not this writer!), the sexual deviant crowd is once again moving the Overton Window to the outer fringe by promoting transgenderism and suggesting it's okay to allow men to use women's rest rooms (so long as those men "believe" they are women) and for school-age boys to join girls sports teams and change with the girls in their locker rooms. While this idea seems radical now, there are some states - even Maine - who are slowly legitimizing the idea in the form of public policy. Once the transgender community has been successful at convincing the public that it's okay for men and women - even school-age students - to coexist in the same restrooms and locker rooms, the Overton Window will shift to an even further extreme - legitimizing sex with juvenile children, then toddlers and legalizing child pornography. Each step will seem too “radical” so the public will acquiesce to a lesser degree, slowly being mentally herded toward the ultimate goal of complete sexual anarchy. Given the rate that our society is accepting sexually deviant ideas, legalized sex with toddlers and child pornography is probably only about twenty years away.

More Editorials by David Deschesne