On the unification of two blogs, we again ask what our mission is about. To provide my answer to our mission, it seems appropriate to republish one of my best articles written before.
Illustrated by Shystee on Corrente. The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named for Joe Overton, who developed the model to help describe the purpose of a think tank, like his own Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The Overton window describes a "window" in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, where basically politicians have to work. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:
- Unthinkable
- Radical
- Acceptable
- Sensible
- Popular
- Policy
Politicians work in the "acceptable, sensible, popular, policy" range, for their constituency. So Keith Ellison is working in a different range than Tim Waltz. One of the great flaws of social movements is that the focus of letter writing has been on the political representatives, when the focus should be on changing people's minds first. By the way, in using the above picture, I would describe there existing many lines in n-dimensional universe, not simply a line. Even the words "push" and "pushback" are coming from this Overton window concept.
It should be the purpose of think tanks and blogs to be pushing that Overton Window.
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