So we get to install a new one, a beautiful, energy-efficient picture window with no more distortions. On every major issue, a majority favors progressive measures, but we have been held back by electoral shenanigans. No more.
The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse.
When we can have free and fair elections, or can vote in enough numbers to overcome all of the obstacles that the other side sets in our way, we get to bring all of our preferred policies right into the middle of the window, and get a look at some new ideas around the edges.
They only pretended to shift the Overton Window to the right, going back to the Republican Southern Strategy, back when there really was a sufficiently racist majority in the US to elect Richard Nixon by a landslide. Now we get to re-establish voting rights in a SCOTUS-proof manner, and put in competent government officials, roll back Trump's unconscionable executive orders, restore Congressional oversight, enact hundreds of bills to start fixing everything, and banish the poisons of the last few years.
Check out Dr. Goodie's Hundred Reasons to Love Joe Biden for more on this. There will be a link below to one of her followup Diaries on this same theme, grouping the ideas together for further reference.
We have been toiling along these lines for decades to overcome the backlash to the Civil Rights Era and to achieve further critical advances for women (really, for all of us) such as contraception and abortion and protections from discrimination and violence. We have had some notable successes in this era, in spite of the worst that the other side could think of to do. LGBTQ rights, for example, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster v Intelligent Design case. But now we get to do hundreds.
There will be #SoMuchWinning that Rs will immediately get tired of it, and then so much more that many of them will crawl back under their nice safe rocks and hope that the prosecutors and the legislative oversight committees and the investigative reporters will forget all about them. Fat chance.
Trump, on the other hand, has brought racism, even White Supremacy, firmly into the other end of the Window, along with extreme misogyny, bigotry, nativism, and vast criminality, and thus, as I maintain, smashed the Window to bits. There is no boundary any more between supposed Republican principles and the Trumpian Id.
Until Nov. 3, when we get to vote the entire maladministration out, and a substantial number of state and Congressional politicians, and kick these ideas out of polite discourse, as firmly as Bill Buckley once read the John Birchers out of the Republican Party. Or, shall I say, defenestrated them from the Overton Window.
The Overton Window is an often nebulous, but nevertheless often useful, concept. Voting rights in the South were unthinkable until the day they weren't, when Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma Alabama had his men crack skulls on national TV. All of a sudden Civil Rights and Voting Rights became policy, up to a point.
More often, a political idea advances by a percent or so a year, from being unheard of to being the majority view in perhaps fifty years—but sometimes, as with systemic racism, much longer.
The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.[2][3] According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.
How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream
Take some of the legislation introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 presidential campaign helped popularize these ideas. In 2015, his bills to make public colleges free and expand Social Security had no co-sponsors in the Senate. Two years later, they had seven and 17, respectively, in addition to 50 and 133 co-sponsors in the House. His signature measure, the Medicare for All Act, had no Senate co-sponsors in 2013 (he didn’t introduce it in 2015), but four years later it had 16, along with 125 in the House.
Medicare for all was of course LBJ's original proposal, based on the Canadian model. It has taken rather more than fifty years for it to get back to where it was supposed to have started.
I am not going to catalog Trump's legislative and administrative disasters, of which Supreme Court Injustice Barrett stands out. This is the Good News, after all. This list, from former kossack smallch, will do.
The Overton Window, novel by Glenn Beck. The sequel is The Eye of Moloch.
Ad man radicalized by 9/11 sets out to expose the "real" conspirators. All of the turgidity of Ayn Rand with none of the literary merit. /s
Breaking the Overton Window
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The alt-right—the umbrella term for online groups and people who espouse white supremacy, white nationalism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry—isn’t a political movement in the conventional sense, says Andrew Marantz, who covers media and politics for The New Yorker. The alt-right doesn’t intend to win a majority in Congress, at least not right away. The goal, rather, is to change how America thinks. Ideologues in the movement refer to shifting the “Overton window,” a sociological concept that defines which ideas are speakable in public at any given time. Marantz explains to David Remnick exactly how ideas and memes are being moved from the fringes of the far right to the center of American discourse.
Like Qanon, some of whose adherents will be in the next Congress.
Science
Music
I recommend taking an extended break, at least some of the time, from worrying about the news.
I have learned enough Portuguese at Duolingo to begin to understand these songs.
From the Good News Network
55 years ago, The Who released their iconic single My Generation. The hit was ranked #11 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Pete Townshend reportedly wrote the song on a train but credits American jazz and bluesman Mose Allison’s Young Man Blues as its inspiration, saying “Without Mose I wouldn’t have written My Generation”. Singer Roger Daltrey’s delivery—an angry and frustrated stutter (‘Why don’t you all fff … fade away’)—was inspired by, among other things, John Lee Hooker’s Stuttering Blues.
- Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni was first performed in Prague (1787)
- Swiss businessman Henry Dunant organized a group which eventually became the International Red Cross when leaders from 14 countries and 6 nonprofits convened in Geneva seeking to develop possible measures, for the first time, to improve medical services on the battlefield (1863)
- Turkey became a republic following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1923)
- The National Organization for Women was founded in the U.S. by 28 women in response to the failure of the federal government to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the group now has 550 chapters nationwide (1966)
- The song ‘Islands In The Stream‘, performed by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, co-produced by Barry Gibb, and written by The Bee Gees, reached #1 in the US (1983)
- John Glenn, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, became the oldest person to go into space, at 77-years old (1998)
- European Union leaders signed the EU’s first constitution (2004)
- Turkey opened a sea tunnel connecting Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul (2013)
And, Happy 73rd Birthday to Richard Dreyfuss, the actor best known for his roles in Jaws, American Graffiti, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Goodbye Girl, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1977. He also earned an Oscar nomination for Mr. Holland’s Opus. (1947)
Also, 131 years ago today, with only a population of 6,000, Vancouver, BC, welcomed Lord Stanley—the British Earl and Governor General of Canada—to dedicate the park named for him. Today, Canada’s most beloved urban park, totaling 1,000-acres (405-hectares), Stanley Park is a green oasis in a city landscape, offering unforgettable moments to more than 8 million visitors annually.