Trump and the Overton Window: Smashing The Walls of the Leftist Prison

For No Particular Reason Whatsoever

From Ace:

The leftward pressure on the Overton Window has been relentless, with conservatives reduced to applying herculean effort to simply maintain the cultural and political status quo. Yes, the Tea Party has nudged Republicans just a bit to the right, but it’s a sign of the success of the Left that a relatively unchanged GOP can be labeled as ever more extreme and "reactionary." 

And few realities show this leftist success better than the fact that the Window now enables expressions of overt leftist hatred and bigotry -- against Christians, against conservatives, against whites, and often against Jews. Then along came Donald Trump. 

On key issues, he didn’t just move the Overton Window, he smashed it, scattered the shards, and rolled over them with a steamroller.... 

While many of Trump’s actual proposals are misguided, nonsensical, or untenable, by smashing the window, he's begun the process of freeing the American people from the artificial and destructive constraints of Left-defined discourse.... 

To be clear, this change is occurring both for good and for ill. The shattering of the window reflects the shattering of the American consensus, and the result will likely be deeper polarization, and even less civility, with further strains on the ties that bind our nation together. 

At the same time, however, the Left's very success at defining the terms of discourse meant that the price of civility and unity was all too often an acceptance of liberal norms and manners. It meant swallowing liberal pieties and confining your discourse to Left-approved terms. In other words, it often meant surrender. 

It is interesting to note that one effect of this leftist-mediated "discourse" is that conservatives generally only argue in a single (permitted) mode: 

We can argue that our proposals achieve the priorities of the leftist socialist state better than the proposals of the left can achieve them. 

We argue that our policies can better achieve the left's priorities -- but it's much rarer to hear the right object to the left's prioritization of wants. That only happens on certain touchstone issues (notably, cultural issues like guns, abortion, and gay marriage, where the difference between the left and right position cannot just be split in half). 

By and large, we're forced to debate on the left's terms, and that means we're always proposing counter-proposals to achieve the left's priorities. 

I can't express how unsuited Trump is for the presidency -- are we going to have a president so impulsive as to change his mind from "Let Putin handle ISIS, what has it got to do with us?" to "Let's bomb the shit out of ISIS" and "I'll handle terrorism so hard it'll make your head spin" based on a single thing he saw on TV (San Bernardino) which completely changed all of his thoughts? 

But he is useful for plowing through the colossal, coralled-over shipwrecks and dead hulks of leftist thought that clog the trade-routes of political expression and debate.

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.