the.com/overton window
the range of ideas a society will tolerate hearing out loud without reaching for the smelling salts.
means the spectrum of policy positions considered politically acceptable or mainstream at a given moment in time.
from named after joseph overton, a policy analyst at the mackinac center in the 1990s, who mapped how ideas move from unthinkable to popular to enacted law and back again.
not fixedthe window slides, sometimes overnight, sometimes for decades.
shifted by extremesradical positions can drag the center toward them.
posthumous fameoverton died in a plane crash before the term caught on.
weaponized phrasenow used to accuse opponents of normalizing extremism.