Biden vs. Trump. Ideas not taken seriously
How politics destroy the best ideas
Politics is the art of the possible. That impression certainly seems to hold if you follow the news from places like Washington and Westminster. But there is another form of politics that is capital P, one that’s not about rules, but about revolution. Not about the art of the possible, but about making the impossible inevitable.
This political arena has room for many more politicians, from garbage to bankers, from scientists to shoemakers, from me to you. And this politics is diametrically opposed to politics with a lowercase p. Where politics acts to reaffirm the status-quo, Politics break free.
Lies and persuasion
Politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves view points that are seen too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable.
Joseph Overton, an American lawyer, who first explained the mechanisms of uppercase Politics in the 90’s began with a simple question. Why is it that so many good ideas don’t get taken seriously?
There is a window of acceptability populated by schemes that are rubber-stamped by the experts, tallied up by statistics services, and have good odds of making it into the law books.
Anybody outside the “Overton window” faces a rocky road. He or she will quickly be branded as “unrealistic” or “unreasonable” by the media, or the fear-some gatekeepers of the window. Television, such as, offers little time or space to present fundamentally different opinions. Instead, talk shows feed us with the same people saying the same things.
And yet, despite all this, a society can change completely in a few decades, shifting the Overton window. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive hat anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.
The masters of this?
Donald Trump in the U.S, Boris Johnson in the U.K, Bolsonaro in Brazil and the count goes on…
Who do you think are the masters and how do you see the window changing in your country? Enlighten us with a comment :)
