Conservative Theory Go-to Nerd Phrase

How an Obscure Conservative Theory Became the Trump Era’s Go-to Nerd Phrase

The “Overton window” has become a useful, and misunderstood, shorthand for the state of American politics.

By DEREK ROBERTSON

When Donald Trump descended his golden escalator almost three years ago to make a campaign announcement that decried the influx of “drugs” and “rapists” from Mexico, among other outrageous claims, he established the one aspect of his political project on which nearly everyone could agree.

Trump was shifting the Overton window.

Or was he expanding it? Opening it? Climbing through it? Smashing it wide open?

A once-obscure poli-sci concept is having its moment in the sun. Trump’s unexpected popularity has revealed a constituency for both policy ideas and personal behavior that were once verboten in American politics. But in casting President Trump as the agent of the Overton window’s expansion, pundits have misunderstood a crucial part of its meaning.

The concept of the “Overton window,” the range of ideas outside which lie political exile or pariahdom, was first batted around in a series of conversations by the late free-market advocate Joseph Overton in the 1990s. After Overton’s untimely death in a plane crash in 2003, his friend and colleague at the libertarian Mackinac Center, Joseph Lehman, formalized and named the idea in a presentation meant to educate fellow think-tank warriors on the power of consistent advocacy. Ring the bell loudly for your idea, no matter how unpopular, and back it up with plenty of research and evidence, so the thinking went. Today’s fringe theory can become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom by the shifting of the finely tuned gears that move popular opinion; to Overton and Lehman the role of the think tank was to at least familiarize voters with these ideas, giving them an institutional home when public opinion finally moved their way.

But there was a bright line between elected officials and everybody else. Politicians were constrained by the existing range of public opinion, that fickle child of social, cultural and economic forces, among too many others to count, to push for new, untested ideas.

“Honestly, we needed a way to explain to regular donors why they should support a think tank in the first place if they care about ideas,” Lehman told me. “The Overton window began literally as a way to solve a little bit of a fundraising and communications challenge. And Joe Overton, my colleague, was busy trying to work this into a brochure, but he died before that was complete.” He went on to say, “It fell to us who worked with him to put it together.”

For the first few years of its existence, the concept was mostly the domain of conservative wonks, a typical example being Ross Douthat’s invoking it in a 2007 argument with leftist historian Rick Perlstein. Through the Bush era its use in the national press was scant, but in the right-wing ferment of Obama’s first term a particularly influential pseudo-libertarian became so infatuated with the concept that he named an entire novel after it.

The moonlighting pulp writer and auteur of the chalkboard Glenn Beck wrote a 2010 potboiler, conveniently titled The Overton Window. It follows a nefarious PR executive who pushes the window to the point where Americans are willing to accept a hostile takeover and shredding of the Constitution. This lead-them-by-the-nose interpretation of the theory may not have exactly matched its authors’ intent, but it popularized the phrase to the point where over the next several years it cropped up with increasing frequency. Activists on the left embraced the idea in pushing Democrats toward a more open immigration policy, as did the restrictionists on the right as represented by then-Senator Jeff Sessions.

And then Trump came along. By transforming the far right’s racial subtext on immigration into … let’s call it “super-text,” Trump revealed that the Overton window was far wider than establishment politicians and the media had previously assumed. The dynamic played out on the left, as well, with Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primaries revealing that for a large chunk of America’s liberals, “socialist” was no longer a dirty word. Whatever the reason, the electorate was amenable to ideas that just four years earlier would have been anathema.

Suddenly the Overton window was everywhere. When Trump floated his idea to restrict all travel by Muslims to the United States in December 2015, National Review’s David French put the idea front and center in an anti-Trump column, and The Atlantic’s Megan Garber invoked it in an essay on Trump’s purported demagoguery. The window was even exported overseas, with Suzanne Moore in The Guardian ascribing Jeremy Corbyn’s unlikely ascendancy to its expansion. Trump’s shocking victory in November 2016, then, was proof of its shattering once and for all.

Today, the concept has become so ubiquitous that it’s ascended (or descended, depending on your perspective) to meme status—there’s an Overton window for coffee, for the Star Wars universe, for Cleveland Cavaliers star J.R. Smith’s achievements in the field of volume shooting. The alt-right has earnestly embraced the concept, seeking to normalize explicitly pro-white rhetoric in the public sphere. Paul Ryan’s recent primary challenger, “pro-white” Wisconsin businessman and alt-right darling Paul Nehlen, explicitly acknowledged that goal during a Breitbart radio appearance in December. And the idea that Trump continues to serve as the master builder, expanding and moving the window around the house of American ideas, is refreshed nearly every week on Twitter.

But by focusing on Trump and other politicians at both extremes who have taken advantage of a newly permissive political environment, pundits miss the point. Activists on both the right and the left understand Overton’s original concept much more intuitively than the news media: politicians respond to the public’s definition of the window, not the other way around. Conventional wisdom determined that hardline anti-immigration rhetoric and radically redistributive economic policy were non-starters with the American public, but given the opportunity to vote for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the American public happily proved conventional wisdom about the Overton window on those issues to be wrong.

The effort to understand how and why that shift occurred has taken up a small Bitcoin fortune’s worth of bandwidth. Whether it was economic anxiety, racist backlash or the failure of our institutions to inspire trust and loyalty, the first step to understanding this disorienting political moment is to recognize that the American political imagination has expanded. In 2006, the Mackinac Center’s Nathan J. Russell described the relationship between voters and politicians: “Politicians are constrained by ideas, even if they have no interest in them personally. What they can accomplish … is framed by the set of ideas held by their constituents—the way people think. Politicians have the flexibility to make up their own minds, but negative consequences await the elected officeholder who strays too far.”

Today, Lehman says he still agrees with that diagnosis. “The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window,” he said. “That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it.”