http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/12297.html

The Overton Window is an interesting phenomenon. I tend to think it’s accurate as described, but as befits their surly, self-obsessed politics, the right-wingers who like to hang on it like it’s the Second Coming of Aryan Jesus get it terribly wrong, and every once in a while you see the direct consequences for that.

‘Look as extreme as you possibly can be,’ counsels Overton, ‘and treat the only alternative as being only slightly bug-fuck insane.’ It only works if only one political actor does it; the countervailing force, if given any significant coverage, tends to cancel it out. (The current political climate aside, Italy - a country without the stable political machines necessary to produce an ideological frame for national politics - hosts large numbers of both fascists and communists with relative nonchalance.)
The problem is that most people who read this from the right immediately conclude that this is an excellent way to get everything they want, right now now now!!! They no more have an adult concept of internal or external negotiation than they do an adult concept of other human beings’ thoughts and desires. In a supportive enough community, they wind up brushing against Sensible Moderates fairly rarely, and the poles of the debate are set in a way that automatically excludes almost all of the population from it.

The Overton-mongering of the hard right has completely failed in fixing public opinion to the right. If it has, it has done so no more radically than eight years of Eisenhower or six of Nixon - human societies, and governments dependent on them, can only endure so much stress from sudden ideological shifts. Meanwhile, they have taken a lot of people who (under a normal Overton scheme) might well have accepted a place within the new frame of debate and completely alienated them. Any Overton scheme does this; the trick is to keep the number of people who are suddenly Outside The Mainstream to, you know, numbers approaching the number of people actually outside the mainstream. When your radical-left positions on the minimum wage, the safety net, and executive power are to the right of the dwindling Republican rank and file, you’re going to find it impossible without the kind of state resources normally limited to totalitarian states to convince someone who has political and social experience before the Eternal Ideological Crisis that they’re a dangerous radical.

You’re not going to convince their friends or coworkers of it, either. You’re not going to convince 80% of the population that they’re too hard to the left on wage controls; you’re not going to convince the majority of the country that actively hates the man that the worst we can think of Bush is that he’s just slightly worse than Saint Reagan.

That and, you know, they cannot resist making the fight about their petty political fetishes. They’re intensely self-defeating in that way - they’ve reified all of the grounds for canned hysterics (sex education, school prayer, flag burning, Support The Troops merchandise) and invested billions of dollars into getting the American public to accept their worthless kitsch as tasteful and beautiful. What can you say to a candidate who invests equal amounts of time, money, and energy into convincing the public that (a) his opponent is a danger to all good upstanding pedophiles and (b) his shit smells like roses? Besides, you know, ‘Thanks, flower-ass.’

Between their natural constitutional inability to actually do what the Overton schema requires - they’re too goddamn greedy, too goddamn petty, and too goddamn vain - and the serious effects of insularity, we wind up with a sort of perfect storm of causes leading to a singular effect: the window falling out of its rails and plummeting outward. Katrina was simply the best example of this; watching the federal government treat the poor of an entire state as if they had brought a hurricane on themselves, watching right-wing icons beg for federal troops to shoot people in a disaster area over drinking water, and watching the Beltway treat this as not just reasonable but the winning side of the debate drove Republican voters away by the hundreds of thousands. An electorate that forgave Bush a thousand lives and a half trillion dollars in Iraq could not forgive the odious slimeball Rove, and could not condone him quietly having his measurements taken to renovate Liberty Island.

We have the same thing happening now, just in more subtle ways. The Republican hate machine has largely succeeded in convincing low-information voters that Obama might be a secret Muslim, that McCain is a butch hyper-cowboy, and that the War on Terror will be decided by Reagan impressions at dawn. The telling thing - and what might just be the fatal blow for Republican Overton politics - is that they don’t actually seem to give a shit. You got ‘em singing along to Toby Keith, you fucking assholes, and now they’re voting for the towelhead. Hope you get along great with the neighbors in your gated community.