In our political conversations, we encounter ideas that are broadly considered reasonable, and ideas that are considered unreasonable or flat-out bonkers. The latter exist outside the range of the former, with gray areas along the intersections. A couple decades ago, public policy expert Joseph P. Overton codified this idea into into a political concept, the eponymous “Overton Window”.
It’s generally defined as “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” It refers to the ideas we can have common dialogues about. Atheism was once outside almost everyone’s window; ditto Civil Rights; ditto the idea of the spherical Earth. A famous conundrum in this vein was Freud being crippled in advancing his ideas of psychology because the language to describe the concepts could not be created, because they were too far outside normally relatable concepts.
Let’s extend the concept of the “Overton Window” to post-Trump politics. A generation ago, you would be hard pressed to convince any American his countrymen would be raking the halls of congress for political opponents to hang (I’d have said it was impossible in 2018). The event would simply not fit into their understanding. They would ask “what is the great issue that brought this great event?” And you would be hard-pressed to explain. “Something to do with race,” would be one part of the answer they could get. Say factions “energized to action by two mythological narratives,” and you’d have lots more splainin’ to do (they would only begin to understand the role played by media distortion). You’d have to show them the chain of events: the election of Donald Trump was an outlier event, a disrupter, an attempt to break from the status quo. That reviled status quo addressed the attack with a counter-attack; an attempt to undo the election, from the application of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, to a multi-year long investigation into Russian collusion, which proved to be mythological. The counterattack culminated in an actual impeachment attempt, over one phone call. Which is not to say I don’t agree Trump’s removal was wrong IN RETROSPECT, with 20/20 hindsight (but look at the damage the attempt has caused). The man is clearly not sane enough for the office (but I also think most Presidents do things awful enough to relieve them of duty. It’s a distortion of our system that a Starbucks barista has more accountability than a POTUS).
And how the Universe/Karma/God’s Will strives for balance: the Trump faction responded by building a mythos of their own: the “stolen election.” And their faction struck the more dangerous blow, partly because our institutions were not competent enough to contain it, as they had with the Democrats’ attempts at Trump’s removal (that, and people actually lost their lives). Before our post-Trump Overton Window is stretched, we might refer to the Capitol Hill insurrection as another outlier, a one-off. But for the fact that an escalation in our partisan arms race has happened, which the Democrats will no doubt respond to with one of their own.
What has really changed, at least for a while (until the temperature lowers, which I don’t see happening), is that America’s Overton Window has been stretched to encompass concepts of internecine warfare. Americans’ understanding of each other has changed with the new window: over 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump, and there is a serious possibility that they can be censored from their social medias. Both sides have been coloring the other as not just political opponents, but true enemies, for decades. People I know, who are fine and well-meaning, rub against the boundary of believing all Trumpkins treasonous. The frontier of our imagination has been stretched to hold these concept.
To illustrate how warfare stretches thinking, sometimes to total distortion, try a thought experiment: Consider Detroit. If Canada had invaded, and did to the city quickly rather than what our negligence did slowly, we would have destroyed, then invaded (then rebuilt) Canada. Radical action needs radical imagination, precipitated by a radical event. The whole War on Terror is the perfect example of how far this can go, and how quickly… and how intractable the new frontier can become. Another example: we borrow money from China to build waterworks in Afghanistan, even as we fail to repair waterworks in Flint. This conundrum is explained by the combination of radical agitation for war and our chronically dysfunctional ways of solving our “normal” problems. We flout international law to invade Iraq in order to make her lawful. The incongruities come about from the shift in thinking used for rationality to the imagination used for war. And it’s a common feature of wars that they are happening because they are happening.
It is now a normal American’s Overton Window-expanded-imagination-expectation that a President can rule by [pen and phone][] across vast concerns of the voters. That same pen-stroke can conjure trillions of dollars from the ether (from the future, really). Try explaining that to an American of a generation ago. That pen can send warfare, in some form, to nearly half of the countries on our planet.
In trying to explain the enormity of the issue to our traveler from the past, the crucial concept to convey would be: there is more power in that one pen than has ever been imagined before. The system has outgrown the constraints of its design. The fight to wield the pen is turning, inevitably, towards very real conflict. Peoples’ attitudes are primed for a fight that would have been previously inconceivable. Here is an Overton concept any Neanderthal Man can grasp: real power is worth having, and worth fighting for. Two essential halves of the country abhor how the pen is used on them. If we don’t begin to restrain that pen, something worse than 1/6 is sure to happen. But I’m not betting that is the direction we will go.
The Overton of our Founding Fathers clockwork design of checks and balances was great while it lasted.
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“Trump faction responded by building a mythos of their own: the stolen election.”
It is, of course, just another mythos that this is a myth. The problems with this election is inability to know with assurance that all votes were legitimate, that no person voted more than once, that no spurious votes were introduced. If I were on a jury, with the evidence and testimony I have so far tediously watched and listened to, I would not certify the elections in the contested states. It isn’t an issue of fraud, I assume there is ALWAYS some level of fraud, but the usual mechanisms to reduce fraud were dramatically and probably deliberately bypassed this election cycle. How do you KNOW that this pile of ballots that look like they came straight out of a photocopier machine and are identical in every way, represent actual votes? You don’t; you cannot.
To be sure, I dreaded the possibility that those states might actually not certify their results, for that would throw the election to the House, with each state getting one vote, and the outcome of THAT is nearly certain — re-elect Trump. That would produce a LOT of violence since People of the Left simply appear more willing to be violent. Perhaps a bit amateurish at it, but willing.
“we might refer to the Capitol Hill insurrection as another outlier”
As insurrections go, it was pretty pathetic. It was definitely more party-like than Seattle’s “Summer of Love”. So, I don’t use “insurrection” for January 6. I’m not sure what to call it, but it wasn’t an insurrection, and I notice how carefully people avoid saying who exactly got shot (an Air Force woman trying to enter the capitol; which is usually open to the public) and two or three police that presumably committed suicide although I have a doubt about that part. It isn’t at all like the “Beer hall putsch” or the failed Russian revolution of 1905; which failed as a tactic but succeeded as a strategy and paved the way for the ultimately successful Russian Revolution of 1917.
What it DID accomplish was reveal the vulnerability of Congress to physical violence, but you know what? A government OF the people and BY the people shouldn’t FEAR the people! A fence and thousands of armed soldiers surrounding it has done, and will do, more damage to the United States of America than a horned, painted, slightly unhinged and unarmed “shaman” sitting at Nancy Pelosi’s desk.
The behavior of Democrats is the behavior of guilty persons.
“But for the fact that an escalation in our partisan arms race has happened , which the Democrats will no doubt respond to with one of their own.”
Indeed, and it is off to the races to see who can set a new record for the most executive orders signed before the VP activates the 25th Amendment.
Again (ad nauseum): where is the extraordinary proof of the extraordinary claim that the election was decided by fraud? This was investigated by Republicans, and they are not pressing the claims. This was investigated by the FBI. Incidentally, my dad is a retired FBI agent, and he believes the FBI is certainly more than half Republican. They all swear a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution, and they are mainly serious people, true public servants. Not one has come forward with evidence of what would have to be massive fraud? Belief in a massive fraud with no evidence? That is almost a dictionary definition of a mythos. Why would you not then believe the same about Russian electoral interference (I presume you don’t)?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/insurrection?s=t
The crowd was trying to interfere with the certification of an election. Their goals were political. They were looking for political opponents to hang. Several people lost their lives. By the Grace of God, the damage was less than it should have been. A public servant was stomped to death. This is way beyond a debate of Capital Hill PD suicides. This is way more than Q Shaman guy, and your downplaying of the violence is offensive (also by focusing on “feet on desk.)” I agree it was a bad insurrection, but an insurrection it most certainly was, and I agree that the Democratic response will likely prove worse (hence the article). But the spiritual father of this blog, George Orwell, most famously fought for the concept that language must not be allowed to be changed by tribal conflict. If you are not comfortable acknowledging the blood the Trump tribe spilled, the place to look is inward. Incidentally, nobody here excuses any of the riots over the summer. We have written many articles condemning it, I’ve written many.
I look forward to the evidence of insurrection. Maybe there is some. Not that it was needed for the Democrats to proceed with their purges. BLM has already tried to storm the White House, if I remember right, and they weren’t probably intending to put feet on the oval office desk.
You move the goal posts a bit but that’s extremely common in argumentation. I have not claimed massive fraud. I have claimed that it is impossible to say that carefully targeted fraud DID NOT HAPPEN; and you cannot say it either. Nobody can say it, for the chains of custody are broken and there’s an abundance of testimony. Physical evidence probably does not exist; but that works both ways — fraud cannot be proven but neither can absence of fraud.
So I go with what it looks like and feels like, and it feels like the very people put in place to *protect* the election did just that, and knew how many ballots would be needed, whose names to put on them, but this is a thing that could not be known until election night when polls closed.
Time Magazine has published a fascinating article that seems to endorse and explain the election mischief, I mean protection of democracy! It is protection of democracy but only when the left wing wins. Read the last couple of paragraphs. It wasn’t bipartisan.
“The members of the alliance to protect the election have gone their separate ways. The Democracy Defense Coalition has been disbanded, though the Fight Back Table lives on. Protect Democracy and the good-government advocates have turned their attention to pressing reforms in Congress. Left-wing activists are pressuring the newly empowered Democrats to remember the voters who put them there, while civil rights groups are on guard against further attacks on voting.”
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
I think it is called “meddling with an election” on a grand and conspiratorial scale. Choosing who gets to speak, and about what.
But as some commenters point out, they aren’t confessing, they are bragging.
And as I have pointed out, the word “Democracy” is sometimes misused as a synonym for freedom, but only for the 51 percent that will tell the 49 percent what to do, what Congressional committees each person can hold, and so on. That might be “democracy”, but it isn’t liberty and it isn’t libertarian.
I move the goal posts? (But thanks for conceding its commonality.) We got started when you challenged my writing Team Red’s mythos was itself a mythos, that fraud gained Team Blue the election. I retorted that Team Red investigated, as did the fbi, and no substantive proof of such was found. Then you moved the GP by claiming the fraud was tiny, targeted and too small to leave proof. “Stolen election” is a hell of an accusation, and should not be made lightly, given the fact that political violence is escalating. You make the charge, then say there is no way it can be proved.
About that political violence: you seem unable to get your hands to type any acknowledgment that Trump faction followers stormed Congress, and raked it for political opponents to hang (while mentioning it is not so bad they fear the people). They beat a public servant to death. They almost did the same to another. Your addressing it is all whataboutism. BLM had nothing to do with it. This does not make BLM less wrong for the political violence they do. Do I have to point out, in a Libertarian site, that people are only responsible for what they do? The Trump faction bears a heavy price of responsibility for what happened on 1/6 because of what they did.
But thanks for playing
“Do I have to point out, in a Libertarian site, that people are only responsible for what they do? The Trump faction bears a heavy price of responsibility”
So which is it? People are responsible for what they do, or an entire “faction” is responsible for what Donald Trump does? This is a worthy question so I explore it.
I suppose elements of both exist in varying amounts for each person; “sheep” is the word for those easily led by others, and they are many. Are they to be excused for their behaviors, since they are brainless automatons? Yes, they are stupid idiots but they still have a vote. God help us all. OR a different point of view is that everyone is and ought to be responsible; influenced no doubt by the flood of information and mis-information; with each party denouncing the other. It would be better to NOT have a government agency, or private persons, with the power to decide what is “misinformation” as that’s way too easy to weaponize.
the American court system does not actually try to find TRUTH. It is an adversarial system that makes no attempt at fairness! Advocates for the state argue and even lie and misrepresent their cases; defenders do likewise in defending cases. The jury then uses their experience and belief to decide truth; and sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.
A mistrial is declared if it is discovered that one or other advocate was denied the opportunity to present its case. NEITHER side is a-priori, “misinformation”. Both sides make CLAIMS. So it is in politics. There must not be any sort of government agency, or oligarchy, that decides in advance what is “truth” and never lets the jury (you and me) decide the case on its merits having heard the full story.
There is no “Trump faction”. People vote for Trump for many reasons; the main one seems to be he’s not Hillary Clinton or Joseph Biden. Unsurprisingly that’s also the reason so many people apparently voted for a man that cannot remember what city and state he’s in at the moment, or how many thousands or millions or billions of people died because of something. People worry about Trump’s hand on the nuclear codes; is it really better to have someone demented with nuclear codes?
Anyway, a few words about Q:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531
“Qanon is a convoluted conspiracy theory with no apparent foundation in reality.”
“Part of the Qanon appeal lies in its game-like quality. Followers wait for clues left by “Q” on the message board.”
That is the sense I had of the Capitol intrusion; it seemed to me that it was a live-action video game being played; many participants did not seem to recognize the gravity of the action; but I sense a similar unreality about CHAZ and Portland’s riots. It was just another game for them.
So if Donald Trump is not responsible for the Capitol intrusion, who is? The FBI appears to be working on that: “”Make no mistake: With our partners, we will hold accountable those who participated in yesterday’s siege of the Capitol,” he warned. “We are determined to find those responsible and ensure justice is served.” ”
http://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/10456/20210108/joe-biden-labels-trump-supporters-domestic-terrorists.htm
Siege. Well, that’s certainly more accurate than “insurrection”.
In case you are wondering what sort of evidence of election mischief or weaknesses exist, I suggest the following analysis:
https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michigan_forensics_report_%5B121320%5D_v2_%5Bredacted%5D.pdf
It is interesting to note they obtained the actual server disk images for forensic analysis and observed certain logs were deleted on November 4; pertaining to November 3 up to November 4; but prior years logs were still in place. It was a selective deletion of logs. Not all logs, plenty exist to analyze, but the crucial internet connection logs that show who connected to the server on this date and from what IP address.
As that sort of thing is within my own expertise I have an excellent understanding of this analysis and its significance. No voting machine should be connected to the internet during an election, but that is how they work. The Georgia testimony included a description of a malfunction in the machine, a phone call to tech support in Denver, the technician remoted to the voting machine and did something to fix it. Depending on the type of remote, it can be particularly vulnerable and nearly impossible to trace who connected; since the connection will appear to have come from the “broker” or the cloud-hosted server that negotiates connections from the tech support person (behind a NAT router) to the election server (also behind a NAT router).
When you do a GoTo Meeting or Zoom (or similar), your computer does not and usually cannot talk directly to the other computer or computers because of your firewalls. These system punch a hole through the firewall on the way OUT and it creates a channel for reply traffic or anything the broker server wishes to push back into your computer especially if you have installed an “agent” that permits exactly that sort of administrative remote access for anyone on Earth that knows the credentials (or has a backdoor, which is a different set of credentials).
In all fairness, to your point:
https://youtu.be/Lx6OfAdl-UU
A takeaway is that political violence is used because political violence is effective.
Which is why all political violence must be rejected. To reject it, it must be looked at objectively, using objective language. Thanks again
Agreed; but who is going to do the rejecting? The United States of America is, and always has been, a precarious institution never before seen on Earth. It requires willing participation of very nearly everyone; to debate even the undebateable, to unfetter speech, even unpleasant speech. That’s the kind most precious of all. Its easy to get along with friends and think-alikes.
Military service has been, in my opinion, an excellent way for citizens not only to earn citizenship but to be up close and personal with people of very different beliefs; uniting with a common goal is not automatic. Also, the military has not usually been political; I have done my duty for Republicans and for Democrats. To be sure I have opinions about their respective approaches to politics and military but it did not affect my duty. Now it *might* if I knew or believed the Commander-in-Chief wasn’t playing with a full deck but even then it isn’t my decision to make; that’s for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Having political leaders with zero military experience and in many cases also zero business or civilian experience is producing a class of political leader that really has nothing in common with anyone; there is not and cannot be a “social contract” in that setting. In the simple minds of a career politician it is a “team sport”, one side must win and one side must lose; and the win is sweeter if it is a “shutout”; total loss for the other side. Wipe them out.
But that’s dangerous thinking. Where would blue states be without the red states to feed them? Where would red states be without the industrial blue states making stuff?
Well, that’s kinda where its headed. Maybe in my lifetime a few hundred million people will get a reminder why we need each other; and need other nations.
Oh for heaven’s sake. Of course I believe in Russian electoral interference, Chinese interference, Panamanian interference, Canadian interference; is there any nation on Earth that does not have some interest in the outcome of American elections? Some parts of the United States have such a history of election fraud it is part of their heritage (Tammany Hall comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall).
Demanding proof where the scheme ensures there is none is a fool’s errand. But what changed from the 2016 election when it was team Trump accused of stealing the election? Obviously the election is trustworthy only when Democrats are elected.
I will spare you posting the dictionary definition of “Faction.” But there is a clear subset of the Trump following that was willing to resort to political violence to achieve political ends. It’s a big deal to the people consumed by the violence and threatened by the violence. I thank you for your military service, I don’t know what you did there. But I know a thing or two about public service, and I have been in situations where my life was under threat. It’s a big deal.
That’s why it concerns me that you, seemingly thoughtful and reasonable in so many other ways, seem to have a blind spot where you apologize for Trumpkin conduct. A Trump faction no doubt was part of an insurrection, where they plied political terror to achieve a political goal. Political violence is now part of our vocabulary, which is a huge degradation to our unique formula (agree 100% there). I also agree with your point that a citizen republic is a MYTHOS if it is ruled by a cabal of intractable incumbents, serving a rigged system, where almost all law is from the pen of the intractable bureaucrat. All points taken.
I persist in trying to get from you an unequivocal condemnation of the Trumpkin violence .
Very scary, Eugene. Thanks for the commentary.
“It’s not an admission, it’s bragging!’
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/