6.4 The Myth of the Overton Window

You win policy debates by crafting arguments for extreme positions — and then shifting the entire window of debate. 

—DailyKos.com, 2006

The Myth of the Overton Window is a bit like the Myth of the Bully Pulpit, but you don’t need to be president and you don’t need to be thoughtful. Anyone can make the country more progressive just by saying extreme things on social media.

This myth is where “Abolish ICE” came from and  you can be pretty sure “Defund the Police” did too. And about all it’s good for is firing up Trump’s base and getting them out to vote.

Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating. Let’s check the Overton-window video posted on Vox.com, the successor to The Washington Post’s WonkBlog. “If you want to change what people think of as acceptable [inside the Overton window], you shouldn’t start here” explains the narrator, pointing to “Radical” representing an idea located just outside the window. Then skipping over “Ridiculous,” which is well beyond “Radical,” he says, “You should start here” as he points to “Unthinkable.”

This may sound a little silly (because it is), but this video got 1.5 million views, and I couldn’t find a critical single critical comment. The concept has been popular with the radical left for more than a decade and has become a mainstay of radicalism.

There are two problems with this myth. It doesn’t work as advertised, and it helps Trump. In fact, as I write this, I worry that the newest example of an Overton-window slogan — Defund the Police — could save Trump from his self-damaging response to the George Floyd protests.

The Overton ‘Theory’

As the narrator explains, “Forcing people to consider the Unthinkable idea will make your Radical idea seem more acceptable.” At least that’s the myth. This way there’s no need to come up with a reason for your Radical idea. Just say something unthinkable. That’s brilliant! 

Who Was Overton Anyway? When Joseph Overton died in 2004, he was in the process of trying to explain, in a fund-raising brochure for his think tank, how to move the policy window in the libertarian direction. Naturally, he thought his think tank could do that best. That was his pitch for funding. 

His “window” idea is simplistic but reasonable: “At any given time, in a given public-policy area, only a relatively narrow range of potential policies will be considered politically acceptable.” That range is the Overton window. He was arguing that think tanks were best equipped to shift this “Overton window” and that they should do this by making cogent arguments for ideas that were a bit outside the window in the direction they wanted it to move.

Thoughtful, cogent arguments, ideas that are just a little outside the window — none of that sounds like the Vox video. So how did such ordinary ideas, which started in a conservative think tank, end up as flamboyant nonsense on a progressive blog?

A Leap to the Left, then to the Right

Less than three years after Overton’s death, his ideas somehow took a quantum leap over to the left-wing DailyKos website and mutated into “You win policy debates by crafting arguments for extreme positions — and then shifting the entire window of debate.”

As they explained it, “The GOP takes impossibly radical positions and makes them worthy of consideration just by talking about them,” so the Democrats should do that too.

The Overton-window noise on the left soon drew the attention of right-wing radio talk show host Glenn Beck, the scourge of progressives (or “Crime Inc.,” as he calls them). What a great scare concept — the left uses the Overton window to take over the whole country. Beck wrote a thriller called, of course, The Overton Window, and it made it to #1 on The New York Times’ hardcover fiction list on July 4, 2010.

The Myth and Reality

The myth is that taking extreme-left positions moves everyone left and extreme-right positions move us all to the right. Does that make sense to you? When Trump takes an extreme right-wing position, do you move right? No one on the radical left ever seems to ask that question.

Every four years, Gallup asks: “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be _____, would you vote for that person?” Between 2015 and 2019, Trump took extreme anti-Muslim positions. The result? Muslims became less acceptable to Republicans but more acceptable to Democrats.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders took positions that were extremely pro-socialist. Socialists became more acceptable to Democrats and less acceptable to Republicans. And for the country, there was no net change. In fact socialists were the only group that did not become more acceptable nationally.

So the myth is just wrong. But taking extreme positions does have an effect — it polarizes the country. In fact, the extreme positions of both the left and the right are the primary force behind polarization. Trump is the right-wing source of polarization and left-radicals using the Overton-window myth are the main left-wing source.

A Tragic Example

Ida Tarbell, an investigative journalist, wrote a very non-extreme and incredibly well-researched article, “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” that appeared in the November 1902 issue of McClure’s. With it, Tarbell shifted the Overton window of acceptable views regarding trusts, the giant monopolies owned by the robber barons. This helped clear the way for Teddy Roosevelt to begin suing them under the Sherman Antitrust Act and breaking them up — part of his famed trust-busting.

This part of the story fits with Overton’s view (not the myth) that careful arguments can shift public opinion. 

But other progressive journalists thought that if her non-extreme ideas were this powerful, more-extreme ideas would be even more powerful. Soon all kinds of magazines and newspapers were publishing “investigative” articles, which became ever more extreme and sensational.

William Randolph Hearst, who was then on the left wing of the progressive movement, published a series of articles called “The Treason of the Senate,” which Teddy Roosevelt considered unthinkable. Lincoln Steffens, a socialist journalist who was close to Roosevelt, claimed that Senator Aldrich was “the boss of the United States.” Roosevelt was deeply offended.

According to the Overton Myth, such claims, which Roosevelt considered “absurd,” should have shifted Roosevelt strongly towards Steffens’ socialist views simply because the claims were extreme and on the socialist side. Instead, it caused Roosevelt to vehemently reject Steffens’ views. So Roosevelt gave his famous “Man with the Muck Rake” speech, which caused Steffens to conclude that Roosevelt had “put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you.”

This was only three-and-a-half years after Tarbell’s first Standard Oil article appeared. We now call Ida Tarbell and her fellow journalists “muckrakers” and think of that as a badge of honor. When Roosevelt gave his speech, he meant it as a harsh criticism of the extremists, but it was used against all investigative journalists.

Life magazine immediately published a devastating satire of “McSure’s Magazine,” ridiculing “Ida Tarbarrel” and all the best “muckrakers.”

In the final analysis, the death of powerful and effective investigative journalism, which was the beating heart of the Progressive Era, can be laid at the feet of unthinking left extremists. They had bought into the myth of the Overton window a hundred years before anyone had heard of it.

[image]

Ida Tarbell in her Library

Conclusion

There is no theory or evidence behind the Overton window myth. It’s just what radicals like to do — grab attention with extreme statements and cause polarization, which they hope will lead discord, the first step toward a revolution.

Extreme-left statements fire up the right just as extreme-right statements fire up the left. Think about that. It means that right-wing extremists actually help us win elections, and the radical left helps Trump.

Of course, this does benefit the radicals. As the Democrats move left, more join the radical fringe. But according to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2018 book, How Democracies Die: 

If one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

And yes, the radicals are putting this theory into practice. Sean McElwee, the most prominent Berniecrat pollster, who we met in Chapter 3, calls himself an “Overton Window Mover.” And he is best known for inventing and promoting the slogan, “Abolish ICE,” which was taken up by Ocasio-Cortez to the delight of Trump, the Republicans and the far-right media.