Closing the Overton Window

I'm not very fond of political commentators and analysts. They have an annoying tendency to talk about party politics as something legitimate. It's as if they never stopped to ask themselves where political power comes from. How can something immoral become morally justified, simply because a majority of people find it acceptable? Rather than pondering this fundamental problem, political commentators skip lightly across it. Anything is fair as long as it's popular.

However, this doesn't mean that political commentators never stumble upon something interesting. One useful concept derived from political analysis is the Overton window, a concept that applies to both political discourse and political action. The assumption being that whatever is discussed can also be enacted.

The idea is that the full range of policies permitted in discourse, and therefore possible to turn into law, is defined by the public. Lawmakers do not act freely. Rather, they are limited by what the public are willing to accept.

This is interesting from an anarchist perspective, because it explains the constant need for political spin. Without spin, the Overton window remains relatively narrow and fixed. There's very little lawmakers can do. However, with political spin, any crisis, real or imagined, can be used to expand political power.

With this in mind, we find that tyranny is achieved through an expansion of the Overton window. When everything is open to discussion, then everything is possible from a political perspective. Lawmakers can make whatever laws they care to make. Liberty, on the other hand, is achieved when the Overton window is closed to anything that isn't merely an extension of the golden rule.

This explains the great eagerness for discussion among people who seek to limit our liberties. They want us to discuss things so that policies can be made for the purpose of laying out what's right and what's wrong. So the first thing we have to do in order to fight this type of encroaching tyranny is to make it clear that some things are not up for us or them to decide. Discussing the merits of a certain way of doing things doesn't automatically open for law enforcement. People should be free to choose for themselves what they want to do. Anything that doesn't violate the golden rule should be permitted.

We must also be clear about what the golden rule states. To do onto others what we'd like to have done onto us, doesn't mean that the rule is a subjective vehicle for tyranny. The rule requires empathy. We might personally dislike something that somebody else likes. We might dislike drugs, and state on this basis that we would love for others to come into our house and remove any drugs in our house. However, that's not the golden rule. The golden rule requires us to imagine ourselves in possession of drugs and very much opposed to having them taken away from us.

Once this is clear, we can simply ask rhetorically if some suggested law isn't in violation of the golden rule. Why should it be up to us to decide whether our neighbours are allowed to own drugs, guns, pornography, and so on? If this doesn't stop the discussion, we can lament the other person's lack of empathy. We can express disappointment in them. That won't go down very well, but it will stick, because there isn't any way for them to argue around the fact that what they have suggested is in violation of the golden rule. Their only recourse will be to claim that what they are suggesting is for some greater good, such as saving the planet, to which we can respond that it sounds contrived and no less lacking in empathy and logic.

Done persistently over time, people in our circle of friends and family will reduce the scope of things for which they think that there ought to be a law. Then the network effect kicks in, and the Overton window gets smaller.

Window

By Beautiful Buildings Pics - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link