The Overton Window is Broken
Something is going very wrong with public opinion
There has been something bothering me for some time as I’ve watched public opinion swing wildly on some longstanding issues, but until the results for Canada’s election came in last night it has felt difficult to put my finger on it.
Now, my area of specialization is in decision making, and as I have focused more and more on decision making around critical societal issues, public opinion has become a critical component of what decisions are possible and how they can be made. But a few years ago, I started seeing some dynamics emerging that we hadn’t been accounting for in our work, and it was only by working in vastly different domains that I was able to better understand what was going on.
One basic democratic concept in policy work and in politics is that for anything that you might want to do, whether it’s about tax codes, public health, labor rights or foreign policy, it can’t stray too far from what the general public finds acceptable. If you do something that is too unpopular with too many people for too long, you will get voted out.
There is actually an elegant model for this that has become known as the Overton Window, which describes the range of play that leaders might have on any given issue.
In a given society, at a given moment, there is a range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream.1
A key part of the concept is the role that different players in the system play both in responding to issues that are within the window, but also how they work to shift the window to reflect new perspectives.
Generally, the theory went, politicians will only propose ideas that fall within the window. It falls to think tanks (and others) to propose unpopular things outside of the window in the hope of shifting the window and making the previously unthinkable achievable.2
There is an important framing in this model that I really like, and that is the spectrum of acceptability that it lays out, that they intentionally laid out as a vertical so that it didn’t map to the simplistic left/right binary we often use. The spectrum centres on “Policy”, which is something that is so normalized that it can be comfortably enshrined as policy by government, but then has degrees of acceptability that range from there until they fall outside of the window: policy, popular, sensible, acceptable, radical, unthinkable.
The idea goes that when we look at public discourse and public opinion, there will be a window within which a politician can play that can be broad or narrow, but that trying to make the unthinkable into policy won’t be workable.
The Internet Enters the Chat
There are two major factors that have changed the calculations around the Overton Window, in my opinion. The first is the collapse of any shared reality or mainstream, and the second is the effects of personalized media and algorithmic editorialization.
In Musa al-Gharbi’s fascinating book “We Have Never Been Woke”, he outlines a dynamic in which a swing towards a new set of norms in media towards progressive themes creates a response by those that feel left out of those themes to create an alternative information infrastructure. Basically, as media becomes more progressive, people on the political right begin to set up a parallel media environment. This is where we are now with the contemporary right wing and left wing media.
The result of this, however, is that over time, you no longer have a singular “mainstream” like we had in the 90’s, you have increasingly separate media universes with their own parallel realities.
While this is challenging enough, we are also no longer in a network broadcast world, but in a fragmented media landscape where our information diet has radically changed. Whereas your media diet in the 90’s might have been one or two large meals a day - a newspaper and the evening network news - the modern media diet has largely done away with meals and involves constant snacking. And the snacks aren’t necessarily healthy.
Where a proper meal might take a lot of preparation and attention to nutritional balance, the switch to media snacking often consists of highly addictive and over-processed content.
With algorithms and social media platforms, the delivery of this content can also be targeted and tailored to be more addictive to the individual.
Your Own, Personal Window
This fragmentation of the media landscape and the personalization of the media environment means that the idea of the Overton Window is now working with completely different dynamics.
Whereas in Overton’s time, there was a shared, collective conversation in society, where persuasion happened in something like “the public square”, the conversations now happen within increasingly small and tailored bubbles specific to the journey of the individual. Instead of the Window framing what is acceptable to society, it can focus on what is acceptable to you. With every post you like on Facebook, or every explainer video you watch on TikTok or YouTube, your media ecosystem reshapes itself around you accordingly.
This means that rather than public discourse that is being shaped in the political sphere, it is individual thought that is being influenced.
From Discourse to Radicalization and Polarization
Democracy, as countries like Canada practice it, involves periodically asking the population to make a choice of leaders, who will then hold office and push policy for several years before they have to face the electorate again. This means that the stakes are incredibly high for those seeking power to influence that choice at that moment. And because the medium for information is no longer constrained by borders or any traditional institutions, it means that the players in the space can range from individual activists to foreign intelligence agencies, lobbyists, hate groups and leaders of industry.
The idea of “red-pilling” - which uses the famous red pill/blue pill scene from the Matrix as a metaphor - represents the process in social media when acceptance of one piece of an online narrative leads the individual down a rabbit hole of loosely related theories that all “connect” through some shadowy conspiracy. This has gone from a fringe phenomenon to something very widespread. This dynamic is fuelled by recommendation algorithms, as well as the development of intentional radicalization strategies by those pushing the narratives.
An example of this was the “#SaveTheChildren” hashtag3, which coopted activism by a real NGO to promote conspiracy on child sex trafficking rings. The strategy was to take an issue that any “normal” person would be concerned about, and to connect it with something more sinister. This was a classic red pill tactic. Once the unwitting victim took the bait on the first part, they would be exposed to progressively more extreme content.
The result is that the spectrum in the Overton Window becomes more like a triangulation challenge: how do you make the popular seem radical, and the unthinkable seem sensible?
Whereas traditional discourse and debate might be more driven by a set of values and principles, the strategy for the unprincipled pursuit of power is to decouple values and principles from individual issues and policies by transforming the mundane into the maniacal. Life-saving vaccines become “forced medical experiments”; walkable neighbourhoods in 15-minute cities become “walled districts in the Hunger Games”. The goal of these is not to propose an alternative policy, but to tie anyone supporting these formerly “mainstream” concepts to sinister networks intent on implementing the unthinkable.
For foreign governments and geopolitical adversaries, this has become a cheap and easy way of seeding deeply polarizing conflict and paralyzing disagreement into their democratic rivals. For politicians attempting to enact policies that would be otherwise totally unpalatable to the public - like slashing social services and funnelling wealth to the rich at the expense of the working class - it is the perfect tactic for building a political movement without having to declare your intentions: you might not vote for me if you knew what I was planning to do with your pension, but you will definitely vote for me if I promise to protect you from my opponent, who feeds on the blood of trafficked children and plans on imprisoning you in your neighbourhood so they can conduct forced medical experiments on you and your loved ones.
Short Term Gain
What I worry about beyond the short-term effectiveness of this strategy is that it is, in the long run, completely corrosive to, and incompatible with, a functioning democracy. Though many Americans recoiled at the violent insurrection on January 6th in Washington that tried to overturn their election, the uncomfortable part is that many of the participants in the insurrection were convinced that they were actually fighting against a very real threat to democracy. The path that we are on right now is one in which that absolute certainty in parallel realities will only become more common and more pronounced.
As we have seen in countries where the West has tried to impose democracy on populations with deep sectarian divisions is that democracy cannot function when different factions view each other as dangerous, existential threats. It is only through a concerted effort to rebuild some semblance of shared truth and reality that we can hope to stay as a functioning democratic society.
Anand Giridharadas, “How America’s Elites Lost Their Way”
Ibid.