Sunday, February 6, 2022

The Overton Window

 I've talked about this before, here and here.  Wikipedia has a good explanation:

Political commentator Joshua Treviño has postulated that the six degrees of acceptance of public ideas are roughly:


  1. Unthinkable
  2. Radical
  3. Acceptable
  4. Sensible
  5. Popular
  6. Policy

The Overton window is an approach to identifying the ideas that define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies. Politicians can only act within the acceptable range. Shifting the Overton window involves proponents of policies outside the window persuading the public to expand the window. 




Overton's original aim with this idea was to push ideas on the right until they became mainstream, and then move the window even further to the right.   It's time for progressives to push the window back the other way.


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