A term that became popular in the last decade or two is the Overton Window Principle. It was a theory conceived in the 1990s by a brilliant young engineer-turned-lawyer, Joseph Overton, who was a libertarian and executive in a libertarian think tank, the Mackinac Center, in Michigan
While working in fundraising for the Mackinac Center, Overton developed his Window principle, while explaining to audiences the purpose of think tanks. The essential idea is that there is in every society a “window”, or range, of thoughts and policies that are generally acceptable to the wider population. The purpose of think tanks, he would say, was to push that window further open by making once unacceptable ideas acceptable.
Key to achieving this goal is by throwing ideas out there that are seemingly outlandish, getting the wider population to discuss them, and thereby prepare the ground for the broader population to eventually accept policies that were once deemed outrageous.
The Left in the West really seemed to embrace Overton’s theory with gusto. Overton died in 2003 at a tragically young age (43) in an aircraft accident, but had he lived to see our society today, the free marketeer that he was probably wouldn’t appreciate the results of his theorizing. The rise of socialist and communist politicians in America, like Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reveal that the window of acceptable economic policies, particularly for young Americans, is shockingly anti-free market.
But the ideas that were perhaps most outlandish were those involving transgenderism and race- based preferential policies in the form of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
In a shockingly brief period of time, the Left managed to convince many, if not most, Americans that we must accept absurdist notions, such as a person’s sex not being defined by the chromosomes which inhabit every cell of their bodies. We were told that a person’s gender was “assigned at birth.” And that the genitalia that tells mom and doctor whether you are a baby boy or baby girl is just an arbitrary construct, and the real factor determining your gender is how you feel.
If one were to have proposed such a notion thirty or forty years ago, they would have been dismissed by polite society as a lunatic. How is it that such a large portion of society, most of whom identify as Left or Democrat, now believe that this is reality?
Similarly, up until recent memory the vast majority of Americans were in accord with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous dream, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” That seemed straightforward and commonsensical.
Yet somehow, the insidious notion emerged that a supposed oppressor class – primarily white, heterosexual males – existed opposed to an oppressed class consisting of just about everyone else. Moreover, all those who occupied one of the multitude of “oppressed” groups – black, gay, female – were deserving of preferential treatment in employment, academia and almost every other sphere of life.
Sure, “affirmative action” existed back in the 60s and 70s, but the notion then, as wrong-headed as it was, focused on boosting the numbers of blacks in corporate positions and elite universities, often at the expense of merit. However, there was not such an emphasis on the demonization of other groups, particularly white males, as we are seeing today.
That required the creation of an entire academic construct, Critical Theory, which posited the oppressor versus oppressed dichotomy. The original Critical Theorists, like Professor Skip Gates at Harvard, would in Joseph Overton’s view, have been shoving that window of acceptable societal discussion very hard. The eventual insidious spread of Critical Theory through the rest of academia allowed the eventual enactment of policies in government, academia and the corporate world, known as DEI, which are so overtly and outrageously discriminatory that they could never have emerged twenty or thirty years ago. The ground had to be prepared.
Now, however, we have a force of nature, in the form of Donald Trump, who is working to close the Overton Window on many fronts. His executive order to ban all DEI programs and policies throughout the federal government, and threats to withhold federal funds from recipients of them unless they rid themselves of their DEI programs was a huge step in that direction.
Similarly, his executive order to end men and boys competing in women and girls’ sports, and using their bathrooms and locker rooms, was another effort to close Overton’s Window.
One can cite numerous examples of Trump’s efforts to roll back policies which the Left had succeeded, since the era of Obama, in foisting on the American populace. Open borders, defunding the police, allowing crime and criminals to go unpunished.
If Joseph Overton were alive today, would he say that it is possible to close the Overton Window once it has been opened too wide? I like to think he would be working in Trump’s White House to pull down the window sash.
