What is the Overton window and how is it used in conspiracy theories

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Is it really possible to make any idea, even the craziest, socially approved?

What is Overton Window

The Overton Window is a concept that implies that there is a certain range of opinions that society approves or condemns, and that politicians, the media, activists and media personalities act as their spokesmen.

Another name for this idea is the "discourse window."

In the views of Joseph Overton

American lawyer and public figure Joseph Overton was the senior vice president of the largest independent think tank in the United States, the Makinsky Center for Public Policy. In the 1990s, he proposed a model that made it possible to assess whether certain ideas were acceptable for open discussion.

According to this model, public figures will not offer ideas that are outside a certain framework.

Simplified, this "window" can be represented as a scale - from extreme lack of freedom to extreme freedom. It applies to any area of human life: economics and taxation, marriage and minority rights issues, and so on. Opinions on these issues can vary and take the most radical forms. But in the public space, only what is in the center of the scale will be actively discussed - because it is precisely these positions that are most likely close to the majority.

According to Overton, politicians are constrained by the window of discourse, that is, by the views of the voters. They have to listen to popular opinion, know their audience and make appropriate decisions.

Through his model, Overton sought to explain to potential investors in the center that his mission is to educate legislators and the public. He believed that the notorious "window" could be moved, gradually creating the basis for the approval of useful initiatives and their implementation.

As an example, he cited the issue of the right to choose the format of education in Michigan in the 1980s. Gradually, the idea of a free alternative between home schooling, private or public school became the norm there, and the idea of restrictions in this area, on the contrary, became unacceptable.

Actually, the concept of the frame of statements, based on the views of Overton, appeared after his death: Joseph died in a plane crash in 2003. The first publication describing his proposed model came out three years later. This is how the specialists of the Makinsky Center immortalized the name of their colleague.

In subsequent interpretations

Having gone beyond the Makinsky Center, the Overton concept gradually became the subject of active discussion. Already in 2006, publicist and politician Joshua Trevinho proposed Marsh L. The Flaws of the Overton Window Theory. The New Republic has six steps for the scale describing the discourse window. He also put forward the idea that this concept can be used to deliberately manipulate people and social processes.

The biggest buzz, however, was the Levingston S. Glenn Beck's paranoid thriller, The Overton Window. Washington Post after the publication of the thriller "Overton Window" by American writer and political commentator Glenn Beck in 2010. The book, in which an aging public relations specialist manipulates the public and imposes his radical ideas on them, "shifting" the Overton window, has become a bestseller.

From this point on, Overton's concept was perceived not as a strategy for promoting political principles, but as a conspiracy theory.

And in 2011, the religious research organization First Things published an article by Carter J. How to Destroy a Culture in 5 Easy Steps. Joe Carter's First Things titled How to Destroy Culture in 5 Easy Steps. In it, in accordance with the Trevigno steps, a hypothetical technology for the destruction of traditional values in American society was described. This article also caused a public outcry.

Want to kill a baby in the womb? Call it dilatation and extraction. Procedures for miscarriages and abortions. - Approx. the author., and infanticide will become a medical procedure. Want to include sodomite unions in your marriage? Change the meaning of "marriage" to mean a government-approved copulation of any two (?) People who wish to share a bed and a tax return.

Joe Carter "How to Destroy a Culture in 5 Easy Steps"

It is because of this that the Overton window is one of the most popular concepts in social disputes, including in Russia.

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How an Overton window should work in theory

According to the employees of the Makinsky Center, politicians, contrary to popular belief, can rarely move the Overton window of their own free will - for this they must be very strong leaders. Most often, the initiators of serious changes are social institutions: families, work collectives, the media, religious organizations, and so on.

The concept of the Overton window describes only the fact that politicians hardly risk implementing endeavors that are unpopular with the majority. That is, this idea is simply intended to explain why some ideas become popular, while others fall into oblivion. Moreover, according to the theory, the framework of what is permitted and condemned can move, become wider or narrower.

How conspiracy theorists use this concept

The Overton Window is popular with conspiracy theorists who seek to interpret changes in society through it. Sexual freedom, liberalization of abortion, blurring of gender roles, legalization of same-sex marriage - they try to explain these and other ideas alien to them not by natural social processes, but by outside interference.

The aforementioned article “How to Destroy a Culture in 5 Easy Steps” describes Carter J. How to Destroy a Culture in 5 Easy Steps. First Things this mechanism:

1. To make the unthinkable radical - to establish a connection with one of the "marginal" groups, where the unacceptable is considered normal. For example, talk about the fact that abortion is practiced in another country or that homosexuality was the norm in the upper strata of ancient society.
2. To make the radical acceptable is to replace the meaning of traditional terms. As an example - the transformation of the term "marriage": from "a union made in heaven" to "formal state registration of cohabitation."
3. To make the acceptable reasonable - to find a natural reason for the new norm: historical, biological, or any other.
4. To make the reasonable popular - to indicate that many famous personalities of the past and present have been supporters of this norm.
5. To realize what is popular at the political level is to consolidate the norm by law.

Thus, the supposedly impossible becomes permissible, the permissible becomes desirable, and the desired becomes an immutable truth. At the same time, the author of the article declares Carter J. How to Destroy a Culture in 5 Easy Steps. First Things, that this process is possible only thanks to the inaction of those who are against such changes.

Because of its name, the concept of the Overton window also acquires an additional meaning - something alien, imposed by the West, because it is consonant with the "cut window to Europe". Since 2014, a note has been circulating on the Runet zuhel. Destruction technology. Livejournal about how "the technology discovered by Overton" supposedly allows you to legalize anything - for example, cannibalism. In this interpretation, it can even be viewed as a continuation of the "Dulles plan", which in reality never existed.

Why the Overton Window Concept is criticized

Interpretations of the theory by employees of the Makinsky Center in the spirit of Trevigno, Beck or Carter have been criticized for turning a political science idea into a conspiracy theory that has no evidence base. So, political scientist Ekaterina Shulman considers Status. 03.12.2019. Echo of Moscow that the discussion of anything else does not make its subject acceptable to the majority. In her opinion, changes in society give rise to discussion, and not vice versa.

But it is not only the interpretations of Joseph Overton's thinking that have been criticized. The employees of the Makinsky Center themselves are accused of simplifying the theory of frames (stable concepts), or even plagiarizing the ideas of frame-analysis. Critics also draw attention to the fact that modern society is highly polarized: a huge number of different social strata and classes coexist in it. And for each of them, ideas about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable will differ. Therefore, it is simply impossible to single out some kind of general discourse window.

It is worth saying that criticism of the Overton window concept did not stray too far from the argumentation of its supporters. There is no genuine scientific research about it - perhaps because the theory itself has never gone beyond the framework of political journalism.

But it is obvious that most people who talk about the Overton window do not really know what it originally was. Overton was not at all the discoverer of the technology of destruction of traditional values and control of the masses, he was simply trying to explain how political decisions are made. And the escalation and paranoia that appeared around these ideas, by and large, only a reaction to the changing world and the inability to find other causes of events, except for conspiracies and intrigues.