![]() “They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. “Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu,” Lehman told the New York Times. 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.Īfter his death in 2003, the concept was taken up and named after Overton by his Mackinac colleague Joseph Lehman. It’s not hard to see why wealthy plutocrats would support this agenda, but Overton understood that even inherently attractive products benefit from good marketing. ![]() 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. ![]() He developed his “window” idea in the mid-1990s as a way of convincing potential donors that his organization was doing valuable work. Joseph Overton was a senior vice president at a libertarian think tank in Michigan, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Can “shifting the Overton window” help the Left get closer to achieving our goals? Joseph Overton’s Theory of Politics The question is why they are happening - and how consequential to real politics these evolutions are. No one denies that shifts of this kind happen. 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. Now everyone who talks about politics for a living has said something about whether “Medicare for All” is a good idea. In 2014, for example, only a handful of prominent figures were foregrounding single-payer national health insurance. Shifts occur in which ideas are widely discussed by political commentators. Sometimes, people who use these phrases are making a purely descriptive claim. If you’ve been involved in left politics in the last four years, you’ve probably heard a lot about “the Overton window.” We’ve 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.
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