Beware the Overton Window

Big Brother Controls the Narrative

As we enter the next presidential election cycle, keep in mind that you'll be pigeonholed into only accepting views within a narrow boundary known as the Overton Window. Every opinion outside of this constrained set of beliefs — including importantly the founding principles of the United States of America — will be considered kooky, spooky, dangerous, and conspiratorial.

You might hear about the vast evils of the “far right”, but in fact, very few people fill out the far right because it’s very hard to co-opt all personal liberty without also impinging economic liberty, and so the “far right” are actually the authoritarian right, and generally have much more in common with the “far left” in terms of political goals than they do with the libertarian right. E.g. Rudy Giuliani and Kamala Harris are practically the same other than the team for which they play. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were long-time friends and in fact Trump backed Clinton in 2012, saying she is a “terrific woman” and spoke highly of her work as secretary of state. The differences between those in the Overton Window is magnified only by the small size of the window. So relatively speaking, Trump is to the right of Clinton, but not practically speaking.

Meanwhile left-of-center Bill Maher, Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Dennis Kucinich, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Tulsi Gabbard, et al, are now often considered "alt-right", which is basically just a name for anyone on the more libertarian side of the Overton Window. Today, social, economic, and religious control are acceptable while free thought and free markets are not. Anyone who wants you to have choice and control over your own life isn’t alt-right, they’re classical left, libertarian, and traditional conservatives. But we’re supposed to forget that those categories even exist.

Classifying everyone not within the Overton Window as the same small bucket ignores the vast spectrum of political ideologies and gives undue importance to those who fight within the Overton Window. Even though Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Vivek Ramaswamy are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and more closely align with the majority of Americans, they cannot be allowed to be the candidates of the two major parties because that would expand the Overton Window to almost the entire array of possible beliefs. Keeping the Overton Window narrow and in the bottom-left quadrant best empowers the government and their cronies.

That’s why the mainstream will fight tooth and nail to ensure that the next election is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden (or should he bow out due to health, then someone like Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, or Gavin Newsom, who are inside the Overton Window). This will ensure that all debate is closely controlled to only consider the degree to which big-government, statist solutions are implemented. Candidates like Larry Elder aren’t even in the same time zone as the Overton Window and will therefore be considered nonexistent by the mainstream. At the same time, real crackpots like Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders continue to get mainstream attention.

Think absurd socialist ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI) have no chance at being implemented? Think again because these ideas will continue to be praised and justified during this political cycle, particularly as the economy crashes again and vast swaths of the populace are unable to deal with stagflation. Never mind that stagflation is caused by central planning and central banking in the first place — they’ll propose even more centralized solutions that can only make things worse. And the people will vote for and accept these policies because they’ve been talked about incessantly as if they’re the next big idea. But real solutions like freedom will be downplayed, ignored, and vilified.