This video explains “the Overton Window”, that boundary defining what is and isn’t acceptable in public discourse. It’s an essential diagnostic tool for our politics right now because it’s moving to the right, thanks partly to Donald Trump’s reckless disrespect for decency, so it’s useful to make sure it’s widely understood. This presentation plays with humor to get the instruction across, and yes, that’s one proven way to do it. But the information here is incomplete. We all need to be fully apprised and armed.
For a few decades, the Overton Window set racism and bigotry outside the boundaries of normal behavior. Now they’re routine again, as they were in the unfair, unworthy America that Trump voters want to Make Great Again. But if these sentiments have regained their status as “normal”, it’s not just because of Trump. They were always there. The Overton Window helps us see what happens on the surface, but we have to look under it to understand why it’s shifting. That’s where we find another useful concept.
Call it “the Atwater Spectrum”.
Don’t Google it. I’m inventing it here. And it bears the user’s name but he didn’t invent it either: the late, unlamented Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was a Republican political strategist best remembered for his notorious “Willie Horton” ad on behalf of the 1988 George H.W. Bush campaign. Atwater was just one of the self-proclaimed “ratfuckers” (political saboteurs, rumor mongerers, paid liars) who worked for Republican political candidates, with winning by any means as the sole objective. One way to do that was moderating the message. He explained anonymously to Alexander P. Lamis in The Two-Party South how, over the years, the political Right had clawed its way back from landslide defeat in 1964 by training itself and its supporters, the former to blow the dog whistle, and the latter to hear it. It was cited again in The New York Times:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "N----r, n----r, n----r." By 1968 you can't say "n----r" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N----r, n----r."
Note the obvious: the GOP didn’t repudiate or fight racism, because they needed them. They repackaged them.
That was Trump’s opening.
The Republican base was furious in 2008 and 2012 when the abstract version of "N----r, n----r” couldn’t stop a n----r from getting elected president. The deal they made had been broken—they’d let their states and towns get ruined if they could feel inherent superiority again. McCain and Romney let them all down by behaving civilly and even defending Barack Obama. So, the gloves had to come off. Donald Trump, as a private citizen in the public eye, had capitalized on that grievance and fear, and without the abstractions. He said loud and long that Barack Obama was not legitimate, that he wasn’t American, that he was lying about his origins, and most important, that the Republicans weren’t mounting any effective response, not just to the fact of a black foreigner in the White House, but more important, to how insulting it was to real Americans—white Americans--to see him there. Those insulted Americans wanted their weapon back. They wanted "N----r, n----r” back, open carry, in your face, fukc your feelings; and they wanted to be proud again to say it.
They wanted permission, and Trump saw it. He knew that the rank and file GOP voter was insulted by fearless minorities taking part in American society as though they had the right to be here. He knew that the GOP voters wanted to feel visceral pride in their nativism, and wouldn’t be content with incremental abstractions and slow wins. He knew the GOP leadership wanted to stay inside the genteel abstractions of that Overton Window, deliberately neglecting the craving of their own voters for revenge.
Note the obvious, that two of the scalps he collected first were those of McCain and Romney.
Note something else obvious: Trump has never successfully initiated anything. When he has tried, he has failed spectacularly. He is merely an opportunist—a brander. His sole gift is for finding momentum built by someone else, and bleeding off some of that energy. He didn’t start this racism in the Right. He branded it and sold it. Trumpism just puts a new name on an old sickness. Trump also understood that all those red herring issues that the Republican voters love--forced busing, states' rights, gay marriage, freedom to hate gays, feminism, and all that stuff—were a key to the one thing he cared about, cutting taxes. He could yell about race and immigrants and bad hombres and the voters would give him a mandate to cut taxes, even if more tax cuts for the people like Trump gutted their communities. He knew what any casino owner knows, that some people can be induced to starve as they gamble away their last nickel, and like it.
So, Trump smashed the dog whistle, starting in the Republican primaries. He swept aside the pretense to genteel civility that Republicans had claimed since Buckley, and insulted the mainstream candidates to their faces, calling them betrayers, liars, and politically-correct weaklings. He retro-branded Republican party as its 1950s version. He gave the invisible base voters back their sense of poison pride and inherent superiority. He did what the Party dreaded: he told the truth about Republicans, and got himself and their elite the tax cuts they wanted.
Big mistake.
Trump, Trumpism, and every MAGA hat on earth aren’t going to reverse the trends that Trump voters hate. They aren’t going to repeal Roe. They aren’t going to repeal Obergefell. They aren’t going to segregate schools. They aren’t going to drive real science out of the classroom, or force Evangelicalism into it. And they can’t deny the debt they permitted the GOP to make when their communities shrivel, their industries collapse, and their children’s future is over before it starts. The deal was clear: in exchange for "N----r, n----r”, Trump could make them believe his lies about everything else, and get them to deny what they see with their own eyes. Trump can’t keep that deal. The Republicans can’t keep it. And their voters are starting to see it, no matter how hard Trump tries to distract them with his nonsense about the Wall or Fake News or Hillary’s emails. It’s an awful echo of the deal the Confederate leaders made with their soldiers: sacrifice your reality for our theory. We're seeing a repeat today of the same thing that plagued the armies of the South 150 years ago: desertion by people who decided at last that their reality was more important that their leaders’ theory.
The fight is not on the surface.
One more diagnosis of the obvious is not the same as one valuable idea about what to do. The Overton Window didn’t move itself. Trump unleashed the seismic human forces that moved it. Those forces don’t vanish if Trump is gone. That’s why there are a few things that the Democrats, the Never Trumpers, and anyone else who opposes Trump must keep in mind:
- Look under the surface and fight there. The dog whistle still blows about race but it translates into policy in tax cuts, the crippling of the IRS and Federal oversight agencies, rollbacks on regulations, packing the Federal bench, etc. Race, sexism, prejudice are just the surface issues.
- Stay galvanized. Stay networked. Outcomes are what matters, not motives. Trump is a symptom, not the real problem. The legacy of the GOP since Goldwater is what we need to dismantle. 2018 was only the first of the many wins we need to root Trumpism for good. Trump’s brazen malice has galvanized his opponents. They must come together on the common ground and not let petty differences get in the way.
- Know your strengths and use them. Politics is not the real arena. The real fights are the trends in the private sector and the culture that Trump cannot slow or reverse: decarbonizing the economy; decentralized, distributed energy generation and management; machine learning and automation; and Big Data Analytics; and our irreversible progress in tolerance and acceptance. Reality is trending away from the bitter anti-empiricism that underlies Trumpism.
- Compete with them and be ready to help them when—but not until—they finally desert the Republicans. They’re at war with you. Respect that. Arguing with them is a waste of time. Compete with them on their bottom line.
- We need Trump to keep doing his damage. Donald Trump is not a Republican, and he is not an asset to the Republican Party. He is a divisive corrosive force inside the GOP, pitting the Romney/Bush Establishment against the base, the Evangelicals against the mainstream Christians, and the diehard Trumpists against the NeverTrumpers in the press. The Democrats couldn’t have done this. Be patient and let him continue.
- Recognize the opportunity: Trump is the biggest mistake the Republicans have made in the last 100 years. Embrace it. Don’t fix it for them, and don’t be distracted by the noise. The shifts in the Overton Window and the Atwater Spectrum are the suicide notes of an obsolete mindset. Let Trump succeed in branding the Republican Party irreversibly, and help him take the whole thing down.
