The Overton Window: It’s Not A “Both Sides” Problem

*The United States definitely dresses to the right.*

Yesterday, I proposed the concept of the “Asshole window” as a way of thinking about how society can collapse just from having too many assholes around.

I was in a mood.

But that idea is inspired by an actual concept from social science called the Overton window.

The Overton window proposes that for any group there is a range of ideas that’s it’s socially acceptable to support, and that this range can shift over time. It can even be moved by conscious effort to normalize concepts that would have previously been viewed as too extreme to consider.

I’ve touched on this idea before here, though I didn’t mention Overton at the time.

It’s a useful concept.

The image at the top of this post shows the Overton windows of the two major parties in the United States.

It’s not a scientific illustration; the exact layout and scale don’t represent any particular public opinion research. It’s more based on what ideas I see being espoused publicly by representatives and supporters of each party and where I’d personally place those ideas’ extremeness in relation to each other.

It’s “vibe political science”, but without any generative AI being involved.

But since there’s no one right way to organize political ideas, and any particular layout will necessarily be subjective anyway, that’s kinda unavoidable.

In social philosophy, “vibes” are a real thing.

And there is a major imbalance between how much actual philosophical space is outside the two parties’ windows.

The left side of the Democratic party just barely touches on democratic socialism, which describes folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and newly-elected Zohran Mamdani; they are about as far to the left side of the spectrum as the actual Democtratic party goes. This leaves a pretty wide swathe of legitimate political philosophies on the left, ones with actual historical and philosophical backing, completely beyond the pale in mainstream discourse.

The right side of the Republican party, on the other hand, goes all the way out to actual Nazis with folks like Gavin McInnes and Nick Fuentes; not to mention all the folks who’ve been throwing Nazi salutes around from various stages this year. This leaves very little real philosophical space on the right that’s outside mainstream discourse.

There’s not much of anywhere to go that’s to the right of actual Nazis, after all.

The purple bit where the two windows overlap is where you’d find things like the “socially conservative/fiscally liberal” Blue Dog Democrats and the “socially liberal/fiscally conservative” Log Cabin Republicans.

These are people that could be aligned with either party without falling outside that party’s normally-accepted views.

They’re the “center” that political consultants are always trying to push everything towards, in the belief that the only way to gain voters is to take them from the other party where their windows overlap. And that is very probably true for the Republicans, because there really isn’t anyone to the right for them to pick up.

But it’s definitely not true for the Democrats.

There’s a whole world of political ideas to the left of the Democrats that they’ve never really explored or tried to reach at all.

And those ideas definitely have adherents even here in the United States.

And while many of us to the left of the Democrats will vote for them, many of us just won’t and none of us are actually excited about it. For us, voting for a Democrat is nothing more than the only way we have of voting against the Republican.

But that’s all we can do in this system.

Failing to vote for a Democrat increases the chances that the Republican will win, and for anyone to the left of the Democrats’ Overton window a mediocre Democrat is the preferable option.

The lesser of the two evils.

Which is why we need a system that would allow many, many more political parties to compete.

But for now, we need the Democrats to realize that there’s a whole world to their left that they could engage with now if only they would see it.