Selling Liberty: Moving the Overton Window

To move the needle in the right direction, sometimes you have to break the odometer

This is the ninth installment of the “Selling Liberty” series, check out the introduction for free:

Selling Liberty: Communicating Freedom in an Unfree World

What is The Overton Window?

Created by academic and policy analyst Joseph P. Overton in the mid-1990s, the Overton Window is a representative model of how the acceptance of ideas in society changes over time, and how those ideas impact politics and policy. Society dictates what is considered acceptable, and politicians act within that sphere. The Overton window charts ideas from one extreme to another, encapsulating somewhere what society deems reasonable somewhere in between. Overton, a libertarian himself, initially proposed his theory by plotting ideas on an axis ranging from Total freedom with No Government regulation to Total tyranny with complete government control.

The general premise of the window is that to judge the political viability of an idea, you need to determine its popularity. Overton remarked that the success of a political idea was independent of a politician’s personal preferences, but rather the acceptability of the idea to the people responsible for electing the politician. While this does reinforce the running theory that politicians as a class are largely devoid of principles, it lends credence to the beliefs that policy can in fact be influenced by public will.

When an idea exists inside the Overton window, it is generally accepted to be pursued as policy by legislators and politicians. When an idea exists outside the Overton window, then it is publicly unthinkable to propose or support it. Knowing this, we can tailor our approach to public policy, by focusing on bringing our ideas into consideration of mass appeal using the Overton Window. But to do so, we need to understand it, how it works, how it moves, and know where we are in relation to where we want to be.

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Selling Liberty: Communicating Freedom in an Unfree World

For more tips on how to effectively sell your ideas of Liberty to others, head on over to Amazon today to pick up a copy of “Selling Liberty: Communicating Freedom in an Unfree World”