Back in May, thereisnospoon posted
this absolutely fantastic diary about "The Overton Window".
After seeing thread after thread in the last two days discussing Ann Coulter's latest outrageous remarks, I think it's time to dust off his diary, and revisit what the Overton Window is all about.
Because, you see, Ann Coulter is a very specific cog in the Right Wing Noise Machine, and every Kossack should know exactly what that is.
You see, her job is to say mindbogglingly outrageous things, and get them discussed in "the media", so when the GOP wants to do something that might have previously seemed unthinkable, well, it doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
For instance --
To say the wives of the 9/11 dead are "witches" people will at least think about it and start questioning the motives of the widows and think "gosh, what if they ARE just capitalizing on their husbands' deaths?" From now on, that seed has been planted in people's minds.
From
thereisnospoon's diary:
The Overton Window, in my opinion, is basically the key to the Republicans' success over the past twenty years--and it comes straight from the Republican think tanks.
One useful tool is the Overton window. Named after the former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy who developed the model, it's a means of visualizing where to go, and how to assess progress. Let's say, for example, that you want to make education as free and choice-based as it can possibly be. Let's start by developing a continuum of educational states, from the desired extreme of total freedom, to the undesirable extreme of total statism. It might look something like this:
--No government involvement in education.
--All schools private with government regulation.
--Voucher system with public schools.
--Tuition tax credit with public schools.
--Homeschooling legal.
--Private schools restricted.
--Homeschooling illegal.
--Private schools illegal.
--Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
The key thing to consider here for a moment is the systematization of these ideas and policies.
Now, back when Joe Overton drew up this notional list (which is meant to be illustrative, so don't get hung up on its particular accuracy), the range of actual, reasonable possibilities as perceived by the general public in Overton's state of Michigan were the items bolded below:
--------------------------
--No government involvement in education.
--All schools private with government regulation.
--Voucher system with public schools.
--Tuition tax credit with public schools.
--Homeschooling legal.
--Private schools restricted.
--Homeschooling illegal.
--Private schools illegal.
--Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
-----------------------------
The bolded items, representing the politically possible amongst all conceivable options, are the Overton window. The idea is to shift that window in the preferred direction. In Michigan today, the Overton window looks substantively different:
---------------------------
No government involvement in education.
All schools private with government regulation.
--Voucher system with public schools.
--Tuition tax credit with public schools.
--Homeschooling legal.
--Private schools restricted.
Homeschooling illegal.
Private schools illegal.
Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
Do you see how this works? Systematically, piece by piece, the GOP takes what had been considered impossibly radical positions and makes them worthy of consideration just by talking about them--and then makes what had been considered outside possibilities truly possible. Now, I happen to believe that legalization of homeschooling is a good thing (though there should be oversight)--others may disagree.
But the important thing to remember is that the Republicans are carrying out this same exercise with every public policy debate today--from invading Iran to making birth control illegal to eliminating Social Security. The once unthinkable becomes possible--and they don't care if they take some heat for it initially.
Ann Coulter is the one who takes the heat. Her job is to say THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS SHIT you can possibly imagine, take the heat, but ........ plant those seeds in people's minds .......
Remember the "Let's Nuke Iran" discussion we had a while back in the media. The right wing did exactly this -- take something unthinkable, and get people to talk about it. There were pundits on TV, and headlines scrawled across the screen saying "maybe nuking Iran isn't such a bad idea". It got people to thinking about it. It got it in people's heads. So if we used a few tactical nukes or bunker buster nukes, well AT LEAST WE DIDN'T NUKE TEHRAN.
At any rate, please please read thereisnospoon's diary on The Overton Window, and hit the links in it.
It is truly an epiphany.
Suddenly Ann Coulter's existence will make sense to you in all its horrific rationality.
To finish with a quote from his diary (which is actually from here):
Step by step, ideas that were once radical or unthinkable -- homeschooling, tuition tax credits, and vouchers -- have moved into normal public discourse. Homeschooling is popular, tuition tax credits are sensible, and vouchers are acceptable. (On the latter, they've been soundly defeated in Michigan of late, but the point is that they are a part of normal public and political discourse.) The de facto illegality of homeschooling, by contrast, has gone the way of the dodo. The conscious decision to shift the Overton window is yielding its results.
So there's your tip from the VRWC for the day. It's a methodology that could work for the left as easily as the right, although I'm not aware of a single left-wing think tank (and they are few) that operates so systemically. If you're of an analytic bent, and want to figure out where a legislative or policy strategy is heading, try constructing the scale of possibilities and the Overton window for the subject at hand. Change can happen by accident, true: but it is just as often the product of deliberation and intent, and it does all of us well to understand the mechanisms by which it occurs.
So hey. Next time you talk to a liberal, maybe although you SHOULD use a baseball bat to talk to him (ha ha, what a funny joke!) instead you can simply key his car! You're being relatively nice, and he's lucky!
See how it works?
We "liberals" are "godless" and deserve to be talked to "with baseball bats" and the Supreme Court judge who represents our views needs to have rat poison put in his creme broulee.
If you and I said any of this, we'd have the fucking FBI calling us. Coulter? She gets a book tour.
People say there's no vast right-wing conspiracy. Bullshit. The simple fact that she gets her ugly nasty face on the mainstream media programs proves that there's a right-wing conspiracy to spread this kind of vile shit. I mean, the grand Poo-bah's of the KKK only are seen on Jerry Springer. Ann Coulter gets a national voice, and it's because the corporate media is in on the game.
The game is rigged in their favor. What do we do about it. Start our own damn media. Like this place. What we really need are some seriously wealthy investors and businessmen who will put their money where their mouths are and start up some serious contenders in the media business. Could you imagine a mainstream news channel with the propensity for telling the truth a la "Democracy Now?" Can you IMAGINE that? I can.