Let us try this exercise with a policy that does not tickle Democratic fancies so much: private Social Security accounts. Turned out to be outside the Overton Window. Bush had to pull it back.
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But what if Bush had had an Overton Ninja on his staff? Could he have gotten it through by, say, proposing that old people should be liquidated and turned into mulch for the diamond ranches of the wealthy, then settled for private accounts?
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Okay, yes, this is hyperbole; diamonds do not get mulched, because they grow on vines. So let's take a more realistic example: could he have proposed, say, just abolishing social security, and thereby gotten private accounts?
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No! Obviously not! If he'd proposed abolishing Social Security, his approval ratings would have plummeted faster than my mood after learning Counterpart had been cancelled. He'd never have gotten elected; any legislators who had endorsed him would have lost their seats.
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As for having outside activists do it for you--libertarians tried. For like, 50 years. Overton Window stayed pretty much put, because people like the social security safety net. The actual thing, not the words "Social" "security" "safety", and "net".
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People are not some sort of protean cyber creature living in a word cloud, whose every opinion will change if you just make them use new words, or add more words they didn't know before. they pay some (far from perfect) attention to underlying reality.
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Which brings me to Medicare for All, and the three big, stinking stumbling blocks to selling anything universal to the public: 1) Higher taxes 2) Losing the insurance you already have, which people are (mostly) satisfied with 3) Lower pay for health care workers.
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These things are very ... Very .... Very ... Very ... Very ... Very ... Unpopular.
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Replying to @asymmetricinfo
your argument is "the Overton window can't be moved ... because when unpopular group X tried it on things that people REALLY REALLY LOVED, it didn't work". This is like arguing that no one can lift anything, because Pee Wee Herman can't lift Mt Everest.
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that might very well be, and that's a coherent argument, but the evidence she gave doesn't argue against the steelman of "Overton exists", but against the strawman version
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