This Guy Nails It - Overton Window And How Trump Recalibrates "Normal"

Here's what I realized back in the early 70s: the Vietnam war protestors who were burning draft cards and pouring blood over Selective Service files, were making conservatives crazy, but they were making my quieter protests seem much more rational and reasonable.  And this phenomenon seemed true for all sorts of issues.  The crazies on the extreme push the conversation.  My ideas, that seemed extreme before, now seemed moderate.

I've been saying that that's what's happened in this country in the last 20 years - but now to the right.  Ronald Reagan, then Fox News, and talk radio have redefined normal.  My best example of this is Richard Nixon - the 'evil president' under whom we got the Clean Water Act, The Environmental Protection Act, The Freedom of Information Act, The Privacy Act, the opening to China, and on and on.  But the right has pushed the scale so far to the right that all those things now seem far left.

So Carlos Maza explains all that in this video.  I'd had no name for this phenomenon.  Carlos calls it  the Overton Window and explains it in terms of Trump.  But of course, the US political debate had shifted way to the right way before that.*  Here's Wikipedia's description.




*I'd note that people on the right would say things have been shifted way to the left, and on a few issues they're right - gay rights and legalization of marijuana for example.  But I would argue that in part this has to do with the fact that there are plenty of gay Republicans and pot smokers, so they've been infiltrated from inside on these issues.  But on guns, climate change, consumer rights, tax fairness, deregulation, the money of the very rich who have a vested interest in these issues has helped push things way to the right, compared to where we had been going.