I See Gandhi Peering Through Overton’s Window. And Weeping.

by tristero

I’d like to add some more thoughts to what Digby discusses here. First of all, while it may seem from a casual reading that Digby is endorsing Trevino’s concept of strategizing which he (Trevino) calls Overton’s Window, in fact he is not. Certainly the right has been remarkably effective at getting the screwiest ideas accepted. That doesn’t mean the way in which they go about it will work for un-screwy ideas. Like liberal ones. It would helpful, sez Digby, to discuss how we can think of modern day politics so that we can get those good ideas to become acceptable as policy proposals. That is a discussion well worth having. Boy do we need it!

That said, while (or since) Overton’s Window as described by Trevino (aka Tacitus, who is well known to many of us) is, I believe, a genuine rightwing strategy to advance an extremist agenda, I think it has limited usefulness for liberals. Short version: the Window is an approach that is optimized for inflicting deeply unpopular policies on a country that really doesn’t want them. Most liberal goals are far more popular, or have the potential to be popular, than the crackpot notions of the extreme right and there are more effective ways to formulate ideas that the majority of people actually like.

Nevertheless, it is vital that we understand what Republicans have been doing, be it the Wedge strategy of Intelligent Design, Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich’s framing, or what Trevino says the think tanks are up to. And yes, the Trevino’s take on the Overton Window smells like the Right. It sounds superficially reasonable and plausible, the fruit of apparently careful thought by serious people. But it’s not.

Essentially, Trevino means moving a given idea slowly from the “unthinkable” to the “radical” to the “debatable” and through more steps into policy. In order to do this, you take a topic, say, use of force in foreign policy, and you arrange the possibilities as a continuum that is roughly far right to far left:

— Massive first-strike Hydrogen Bomb assault on dozens of cities with no warning.

— First-strike assault with atomic weapons on 5 cities. Two hours warning.

— First-strike tactical nuclear attack. Twenty-four hours warning.

[skipping across the continuum]

— Invasion, overthrow of the enemy government, and occupation of the country.

[Skip]

— Diplomatic efforts to defuse a serious crisis coupled with covert efforts to undermine the enemy regime.

— Diplomacy, no covert action.

And so on (for the purpose of illustration, as Trevino himself says, the details of what specific action is more right or more left are not critical.). Then you identify what the public will currently accept and that is the “window” in which there is an opportunity to move the debate in the direction several notches in the poltical direction you want.

In truth, this is a distorted, but operational, version of Gandhi’s famous quip,”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

But this is the far right, after all, not Mahatma Gandhi. And what, in the hands of the Great Soul, was a strategy for liberation of an oppressed people becomes in the right’s grubby paws an excuse for blatant lying, outright deception, no-holds barred bullying, intimidation to the extreme of eliminationist rhetoric. As Trevino knows as well as anyone, the particular characterization of the “methodology” he extols for opening up “political possibilities” is actually a recipe for engaging in some seriously intense rightwing shit-slinging.

You see, what Trevino describes hinges upon vilifying and destroying the political center while portraying far right extremists as moderates. It simply cannot work without recasting the political center as extremist. And so, with a breathtaking cynicism for the truth and ethical principle, Trevino and his fellow Fellows – along with their less-privileged familiars in the rightwing punditocracy – have proceeded with tremendous enthusiasm to slime and smear their betters – decent politicians in the political mainstream like Kerry, Gore and many others with a lifetime of exceptional service to their country. These centrists are portrayed, by Trevino and his pals, as far-left extremists, corrupt liars, un-American cowards, and outright traitors. Moderately liberal pro-globalization economists such as Krugman are “quasi-socialist” and Powell is, of all things, a liberal one step removed from Vidal. Because it’s not just “liberals” they go after. Richard Clarke – no liberal – and the other mainstream conservative truth-tellers are rewarded for their decades of public service by having their reputation befouled by an unpricipled bastard like Rove. And when Trevino and fellow operatives like Krauthammer want to be charitable, these sensible, competent, centrists – many of whom, like Powell, have been seriously compromised in the past five years but whose service to their country is far greater than the chickenhawks – are described, with a resigned, pitying shake of the head, as hors de combat due to mental instability.

In Trevino’s world, prominent mainstream voices must be miscast as marginal lunatics because, as it happens – and many commentators have remarked upon this – the vast majority of the American people finds the view of America Trevino, et al subscribe to as a political vision that is quite revolting and frightening. Americans don’t think Social Security or Medicare weaken the moral fabric of the nation and lead to communism. The American majority has an abiding love for and desire to protect the environment. They also like sex a lot, and unlike poor Jeff Goldstein and the odious Rick Santorum, no dogs are necessary. Americans well know that stunts like Schiavo serve no purpose in illuminating the kinds of wrenching medical decisions real American families face but are just grotesque opportunities for sleazy Republican senators to wave Bibles about.

True, the American public may not support – yet – marriage rights for every couple in love. And yes, the American public still has, at best, an incomplete grasp of the sheer immorality and practical stupidity of the death penalty. (And let’s not mention how ignorant we Americans are of basic scientific fact and reasoning.) Even so, that doesn’t mean for a moment the majority of the country thinks the right’s screwy war-mongering, their cultural radicalism, their priggishness, and their greed is a Good Thing. They seriously don’t.

Yes, indeed. Quite a remarkable strategy Trevino depicts. To identify carefully then mischaracterize, mock and discredit many of the beliefs most Americans hold, all the while disguising an extremist agenda with hallucinated Orwellian language.

But enough abstraction, let’s get down to brass tackiness. For Overton’s Window to be effective in the rightwing way Trevino describes, it requires the GOP to brand a genuine war hero (and principled objector to the war in which he acted heroically) as a liar and a coward, while a rich young drunk who went AWOL becomes an American icon. For no other reason than that the war heroes beliefs are centrist and the drunk is a neo-Bircher who can be of use in moving the discourse right.

Make no mistake. For Trevino’s friends, because the war hero is a political centrist, a man far more dangerous than a genuine leftist or serious liberal, he must be utterly destroyed. Popular centrists – for some odd reason, Bill Clinton comes to mind – must be impeached, by any means necessary, no quarter given. Conversely, a genuinely vacuous, malicious coward like Bush – as extremist as any Bircher or Fundamentalist – must get packaged as a brave centrist with bold ideas. Hold their noses the thinktankers might have to do at Bush’s ignorance, but he is crucially important. So… that quip about wanting to become a dictator was just a joke, for heaven’s sake! He’s a regular guy and that’s how they talk.

Sure, Trevino & Co. are very educated people; why given half a chance, they’ll be happy to trot out their superior knowledge of Latin and Greek, which of course makes them quite trustworthy when they assert the solid reasoning behind the statistics in The Bell Curve. And yes, of course they know that arguing ad hominem is a crude rhetorical fallacy, but they also know it’s a very effective persuasive device that can utterly destroy an opponent if used with cunning and in an extreme fashion. And they are more than willing to do so.

Will Overton’s Window work for liberal and progressive causes as well? Not as Trevino describes it, it’s iliberal. (OTOH, Gandhi had a pretty smart attitude we could easily learn from. Let’s start there.)

Briefly, Trevino’s rightwing shtick isn’t necessary. True, liberals need to learn how to show the Trevinos of American politics no mercy; meaning it’s high time we treated them exactly they way they’ve treated America’s most mainstream (many of them superb) political leaders, from Powell to Feingold. And also true, liberals need seriously to polish their ideas and rhetoric.

But in no way does the task of competently advocating an intelligent commonsense (ie, liberal) agenda for the US require the lying and smearing of decent people and majority beliefs that follow from Trevino’s “methodology” as surely as pus flows from a deadly infection.

[UPDATE: Commenter Alyosha makes the good point that

The Overton Window is an extremely useful strategic idea; what you’re arguing about are the tactics, the implementation of how you follow the strategy.

I think it can be well adapted for liberal purposes. Instead of employing unethical right wing games and tactic, we use the power of truth, but in smart, tactical ways that fit the overall strategy.

The Overton Window acknowledges a simple fact that is true regardless the ideas you wish to promote, or the tactics you choose to use: people have to be prepared for new ideas, and there is an evolution in this readiness on the part of people to accept them.

Not quite, as I see it. In thinking about Gandhi’s remarks and the Window a little closer, they both count upon recasting majority opinion as inherently, deeply, profoundly, wrong.

But Gandhi depended upon targeting the actual racism and injustice of colonial rule. His goals were not to “move” the debate in a particular left/right axis, but rather to redress a wrong.

The Window as Trevino described it is a rightwing tactic, a deliberate and cyncial effort to reclassify mainstream political belief as extremist regardles of the contents of that belief. It is not about preparing people to accept new ideas but about eliminating mainstream discourse in order to consolidate/seize power.

Gandhi’s is a tactic to redress a substantive power inequality and therefore is liberal. It stops when the grievance has been addressed. The latter is a tactic to seize power, is inherently limitless, and is illiberal. They are very different. Even if it is difficult to quantify exactly where redressing ends and power grabbing begins in some cases, they are quite different in where they place their emphases.

CAVEAT: The only version of the window I know is Trevino’s. He may be seeing it through his own distorted lens but that is the version I object to. ]