Dear Diary Moment 1/31/2021:
I have, as of late, been listening to the audio book for Kurt Anderson’s Evil Geniuses: a book I highly recommend: and came up against a concept I had encountered in a previous audio book I cannot recall the name of: the Overton Window. As it was explained in the previous book, what rightwing factions had done is work persistently to make fringe belief systems more mainstream. Think: Tea Party –the very Tea Party we dismissed as being so frivolous as to not even worry about. And basically what the Tea Party did was do the footwork of stacking government at all levels and use contingent events in order to put their selves in the middle of Overton’s Window. A similar approach was used in the 70’s (as Anderson suggests and Naomi Klein describes in her Shock Doctrine (when Neo-Liberals (kranked on Freidman (charged into the 80’s through the Overton Window created by the stagnation of the 70’s.
But as Anderson also pointed out, we may be looking at an Overton Window for progressives given the self-destructive path Republicans seem to be going down. He even, Lewis, connected it with a Kuhnian Paradigm Shift. On top of that, we as progressives and social democrats have time and demographics on our side as my fellow white baby boomers are dying off and have no way of avoiding what is coming: whites becoming a majority/minority.
This is our Overton Window, our Paradigm Shift. But as Anderson also pointed out, when societies come up against a crisis (such as the emergence of fascism in America (that could change things, people generally turn to the orphan ideas that happen to be lying around (much as America did when the great depression hit: the New Deal based on previous Marxist ideas about how to create a more just society.
This is why we as progressives and social democrats have got to be patient and persistent, why we have to keep hitting the right in the voting booths (at all levels), and why we have to keep having these discourses in the good faith of the democratic process and what is best for all parties involved: the very ideas that might lead to the kind of society we could live comfortably in. Once again: time and demographics are on our side. This is our Overton Window as long as we don’t fuck it up.
To put it in more nominal terms, guys: we are in the fight for our lives as citizens of a democratic society. We either meet the challenge and exploit this opportunity (this window (or we are fucked.