The Overton Window is known to many but still most can’t see how it shapes acceptable politics. What’s left and right in the US is shifted so far right from most other democratic countries.
I think it’s important to recognize the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters. This means that the present state of affairs can only be the result of one or both of these scenarios:
Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
#2 it has always been #2 except sometimes those “forces” want the same things or the “forces” that agree with something the public also happens to agree with have a win for a minute
What you’ll notice online is that a lot of these people who want to move the overton window understand this, so their goal is to remove the left from the voting population. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can require ID to vote, and then invalidate trans people’s IDs. You can gerrymander so the votes don’t count. You can just plain old kill people. You can make it very unpleasant to vote. You can suppress candidates who represent the left wing from winning primaries. And if you’re really clever, you can make up a propaganda line that convinces leftists it’s in their own interest not to vote.
I don’t think the US is the outlier that people think it is. Other “democratic” nations are undergoing the same political issues at the behest of the same economic interests.
With the major difference that those nations have a lot more social programs to combat poverty and homelessness, and have health insurance that doesn’t bankrupt people. That really helps with social cohesion and prevents larger scale radicalization.
The Overton Window is known to many but still most can’t see how it shapes acceptable politics. What’s left and right in the US is shifted so far right from most other democratic countries.
I think it’s important to recognize the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters. This means that the present state of affairs can only be the result of one or both of these scenarios:
Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
No. It’s shaped by what’s acceptable to the media, politicians, and their owner donors.
Much more often than not, the vast majority of voters don’t get to choose beyond harm reduction by choosing the lesser evil. Which is still an evil.
Yup. 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
#2 it has always been #2 except sometimes those “forces” want the same things or the “forces” that agree with something the public also happens to agree with have a win for a minute
What you’ll notice online is that a lot of these people who want to move the overton window understand this, so their goal is to remove the left from the voting population. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can require ID to vote, and then invalidate trans people’s IDs. You can gerrymander so the votes don’t count. You can just plain old kill people. You can make it very unpleasant to vote. You can suppress candidates who represent the left wing from winning primaries. And if you’re really clever, you can make up a propaganda line that convinces leftists it’s in their own interest not to vote.
I don’t think the US is the outlier that people think it is. Other “democratic” nations are undergoing the same political issues at the behest of the same economic interests.
With the major difference that those nations have a lot more social programs to combat poverty and homelessness, and have health insurance that doesn’t bankrupt people. That really helps with social cohesion and prevents larger scale radicalization.
And yet we’re witnessing a similar large scale shift to the right across many of those same unnamed (but presumably European) nations.
Which is the working of targeted propaganda spread by the legacy and social media and not an innate function of “democratic” nations.
The propaganda that you speak of has much deeper cultural roots than any democratic principles in any of these nations.