The Overton Window

You may have heard of the "Overton Window" but weren't sure what it was referring to. An article by William F. Marshall at Townhall.com explains where the term comes from and what it means.

Marshall writes,

A term that became popular in the last decade or two is the Overton Window Principle. It was a theory conceived in the 1990s by a brilliant young engineer-turned-lawyer, Joseph Overton, who was a libertarian and executive in a libertarian think tank, the Mackinac Center, in Michigan.

While working in fundraising for the Mackinac Center, Overton developed his Window principle, while explaining to audiences the purpose of think tanks. The essential idea is that there is in every society a “window,” or range, of thoughts and policies that are generally acceptable to the wider population.

Ideas that were formerly considered unthinkable become thinkable and then acceptable by constantly pressing them onto the culture. As the idea gets discussed more it becomes less outlandish, more "reasonable," and the "window" opens wider. We've seen this happen with, among other things, divorce, gay marriage, abortion, and more recently, the cluster of notions attached to transgenderism.

Marshall goes on:

Overton died in 2003 at a tragically young age (43) in an aircraft accident, but had he lived to see our society today, the free marketeer that he was probably wouldn’t appreciate the results of his theorizing. The rise of socialist and communist politicians in America, like Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reveal that the window of acceptable economic policies, particularly for young Americans, is shockingly anti-free market.

But the ideas that were perhaps most outlandish were those involving transgenderism and race- based preferential policies in the form of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

In a shockingly brief period of time, the Left managed to convince many, if not most, Americans that we must accept absurdist notions, such as a person’s sex not being defined by the chromosomes which inhabit every cell of their bodies. We were told that a person’s gender was “assigned at birth.” And that the genitalia that tells mom and doctor whether you are a baby boy or baby girl is just an arbitrary construct, and the real factor determining your gender is how you feel.

The window of acceptable ideas surrounding transgenderism has opened very wide indeed. At the turn of the millenium it would've been unthinkable to suggest that men could get pregnant, that men should be allowed to compete in sports against women, and should be permitted in women's restrooms and locker rooms.

The left has been persistent in prying that window open ever wider and one wonders how much wider it can be.