When liberals started defending ‘female circumcision,’ I knew the country had crossed a line
The “Overton Window” may be loosely defined as the range of acceptable opinions in mainstream political discourse.
The current undeniable leftward ratcheting of this window may yield a few ephemeral benefits for Republicans in terms of extreme Democratic candidates who can be beaten where more traditional liberals might have won, but in the long term, the shift may infect the larger electorate to the GOP’s detriment.
I remember when I realized how dramatically the Overton Window had shifted to the left. I was having one of my frequent jousts with a liberal on the subject of cultural relativism. Typically, in these arguments, I would trigger the liberal by saying something that implied that Western culture is superior to alternative cultures from the developing world.
After the liberal would call me “xenophobic,” “racist,” and — if she had attended a liberal arts college — “obtuse,” I would spring a two-word riposte that would silence her.
“Female circumcision.”
Checkmate. Game-set-match. I win, you lose.
Recently, there has been an insidious and disturbing development in these arguments. When I spring those two words, the liberals no longer hobble off the court and forfeit the match. Instead, they defiantly sputter and come darn close to defending female circumcision — at least so long as it is practiced as part of the sunny, loving, consensual culture of an equatorial people.
When I started getting pushback on the female circumcision trump card from what had once been comparatively benign — due to their propensity to lose — Mondale-Dukakis Democrats, I realized that the overall window had shifted dangerously to the left.
Just 25 years ago, no one would have dreamed of advocating hormonal or surgical treatment for possibly gender dysphoric minors. Even liberal Democrats like Barack Obama opposed gay marriage.
Wealth taxes and racial reparations were not on the table. Single-payer healthcare schemes were a third rail that could not be touched.
No one dared suggest mail-in voting or vote harvesting after the 2000 Florida bruhaha. Court packing was an historical no-no, the only stain on the record of Saint FDR.
Democrats may have always been squishes on immigration enforcement, but they never advocated simply opening up the border and flying in hundreds of thousands of third-world migrants in the dead of night at taxpayer expense. Obama even deported illegal aliens, reminding his objecting comrades that he was obligated to enforce the law as it then existed.
That’s right, enforce even the laws that you don’t agree with. Imagine that.
It is naive to think that this shift occurred in a vacuum among committed Democrats and that independent swing voters will not be affected. Polling is showing independents to be not as hostile to most of the examples above as they were years ago.
The average non-politically engaged swing voter is, in fact, highly influenced by what is subjectively considered “moderate.” They instinctively favor moderation, not taking sides in fights, and compromising. They adhere to the ideological equivalent of a soft rock or adult contemporary radio format.
With the shift in the Overton Window, Democrats who favor “Medicare for all,” court packing, “abolish ICE” and even boys in girls’ sports qualify as “moderates” simply because they have not topped it off by proposing eliminating the U.S. Senate and limiting the police force to the minimum size necessary to arrest Donald Trump.
What happens when a newly “moderate” Democrat, who supports things that were until recently outside the Overton Window, manages to beat a primary challenge from a member of Democratic Socialists of America? The prevailing nominee, by way of comparison, is anointed as mainstream and electable in the media and in the eyes of the unengaged independent.
When an independent voter in Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, or New Hampshire looks at the local Senate race, he may decide that the Democrat candidate in his state is “moderate” because the standard for “liberal” has been established by the likes of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. This is how the shift in the Overton Window works against the GOP.
The truth is that every major Democrat figure in recent history — both Clintons, Obama, Biden, and so forth — has been naturally inclined to tack as far to the left as they can get away with.
Our contemporary problem is that when the Overton Window shifts left, they can get away with more than they could before.
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Original Article: When liberals started defending ‘female circumcision,’ I knew the country had crossed a line
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