Overton Window: noun; the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range.
A Google search produced the above definition (more on the concept here). We are experiencing an attempt to impose the limits of acceptable opinion on certain issues. That word, imposition and its derivatives, will occur a lot in this piece. No better example can be found than the construction of an Overton window on the issue of climate change. As with any imposition, the range of acceptability is being forced upon all, while also being arbitrary with the mode of enforcement more indicative of mob behavior. A highly excitable throng endeavors to manhandle the window leftward.
The Global Climate Strike of students of September 20-27, 2019, brought to mind the idea of the Overton window. Here we have young people ranging in age from elementary to college boycotting their classes to engage in protests demanding more government power to control people for the purpose of “saving the planet”. I have my doubts about whether the goal is to “save the planet” or simply expand government power to impose a political clique’s narrow vision of the good.
Means and ends get muddled here. I was a college adjunct instructor in Physical Geography and was continually exposed to the ideological dogmas of climate change – “climate change” being the more robust and useful term as compared to the mere “global warming”. “Ideological” is the correct adjective for the belief system that riddles the curriculum, support materials (textbooks, et al), and teacher preparation. There is much about the movement’s claims to scientifically question. Yet, the movement glosses over the uncertainty about the climate issue’s severity, the exact nature of the phenomena, and the realities of proposed solutions to immediately rush to the goal of revolutionary social, economic, and political reorganization.
However, before the zealots get to their beloved revolution, prudence requires the rest of us to seriously consider a simple question: Are the zealots’ claims correct? Much has been said and written about the issue but only a small slice gets the light of day. To be clear, the purpose of this article is not to present a detailed examination of the activists’ assertions about “climate change”, but to report on a singular episode – the students’ Global Climate Strike – as part of an ongoing campaign to use politicized science so one may foist on the general public a drastic alteration in our settled social, economic, and political arrangements and confer near-totalitarian power in the hands of a select few.
If interested, if you have 32 minutes, below is a reminder that an honest debate on the science of climate change actually exists, something the fanatics would like to squelch and close the Overton window..
What happens when fanaticism replaces scientific inquiry? Well, we get young and impressionable minds ditching school for a day to help stampede lawmakers into creating the environmentalists’ Leviathan. How were the kids primed? Well, the ideology-as-science corrupted the dogma’s purveyors, the teachers, and permeates the kids’ media-rich social ecosystem. I know; I’ve been there, particularly at the campaign’s pedagogical front.
It’s interesting to know that the professional and degreed people with the least scientific background take up positions as the most prominent mouthpieces of the movement, some in taxpayer-funded government posts and some riding their earlier name-recognition in politics to a new and very lucrative career in climate change. Does the name “Al Gore” come to mind?
Almost any metropolis and city with a university presence will have a municipal position solely devoted to the issue of climate change. For instance, in my state of Montana, Chase Jones serves as the Energy Conservation Coordinator for the City of Missoula with the portfolio of developing and coordinating the city’s climate plan.
In a radio interview, he stipulated that he has a degree in Communications from University of West Virginia. He cut his teeth in Montana environmentalism through the Montana Conservation Corps, an environmental non-profit. The Chairperson of the Corps’s Board of Directors is Jan Lombardi who has a rich personal history in Democratic Party politics, Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), etc. Another member of the Board is Chris Pope, the Democrat representative of Montana House District 65 and possessor of a Spanish Degree from University of Oregon and Masters in Public and Private Management from Yale. Chase’s background and the résumés of those around him are symptomatic of the kinds of experiences that inclines them to accept broad and general scientific claims, especially if they confirm ideological biases, while they lack the detailed understanding to debate the substance of any of the many scientific aspects of a meta-issue like climate change.
These people are impressed by the pronouncements of large groups, as if the announcements put finis to any further scientific inquiry, and closes the Overton window to those who dispute them. They then can announce a “consensus” to dismiss the irritating queries of those of a more scientifically skeptical mind. All the while, they ignore the vast scholarship on groupthink and Public Choice Theory which does more to explain the behavior of large associations and bureaucracies in perverting pure science. The stance may work for the politically-motivated non-scientist, but it isn’t science. It’s partisan politics masquerading under the rubric of science.
Non-scientists are pushing the issue with the assistance of politicized scientists and their politicized associations. Large and long-established professional associations are particularly prone to fashionable political moods. Blacklisting is common. Remember McCarthyism? In regards to climate, remember nuclear winter, global cooling, and now global warming? Remember the Union of Concerned Scientists and their Doomsday Clock during Reagan’s defense buildup to counter the Soviet threat? Remember the blowback to Reagan’s idea of missile defense? Going back further, how about scientists’ enthusiasm for eugenics that would ultimately seep into the Final Solution? The wreckage is astounding whenever science is mingled with politics.
Inevitably, science will be the handmaiden to politics when the two are merged, with disastrous consequences.
The loudest advocates of a Green New Deal are likely to have the least acquaintance with real science. If anything, they have just enough exposure to be dangerous. Their stunted view is propagated to the young in a never-ending torrent from one grade to the next, from one movie to the next, and from one social media post to the next . The stage is set for a critical mass of people who lack the tolerance for opinions cynical of the artificial zeitgeist. The radical all of a sudden becomes the popularly “sensible” and those outside of this favored cohort will be dismissed, or worse. The eco-revolutionaries, hiding behind the innocence of youth, are well on their way to the kind of power to upend our way of life and build a new green order.
Some concessions to popular consent will have to be made, but the threat of an opposing majority will have been lessened by a demography-wide closed mind. It will be a constituency willing to cede great power to a set of elite experts in the arts of the eco-gnosis. But to be on the cusp of power in the first place requires more than indoctrination. It’s necessary but not sufficient. To tip the edifice into a revolution, a panic must be created through crisis-mongering, or as long-dead progressive/socialist leading lights would have called it, the moral equivalent of war. What goes for the “conscience” of the Democratic Party, our giddy sophomore class president and congressional blowhard from NY’s 14th congressional district (AOC), parrots the war line along with sycophants in the party’s presidential derby. After the panic attack produces electoral success, once in power, they aren’t going to give it up because the population happens to be profoundly discomforted by the mandated changes. In this ends-justifies-means world, popular sovereignty will be luxury that can no longer be afforded. The whole scheme could end up being one man (or woman, et al)/one vote/one time.
This is more than a slippery slope. It’s a well-trodden path through the pages of history. Why are eco-activists so intent on repeating the horrifying record? Interesting question but the answer is obvious. They think that they’re immune to the trap many others have fallen into over the past couple of millennia.
They are kidding themselves. Over those very same millennia, power has proven to be quite an intoxicant. It overwhelms a person’s conciliatory and moderating nature. The goal of eco-purity will crowd out everything including tolerance for the opposition. To borrow from Lenin, a vanguard elite leading the way to the green future won’t trifle with elections unless they can be manipulated into validating predetermined decisions. Pure and simple, it comes down to imposing a small group’s preferred mode of living on a broad population who may be unaware of what is happening.
I’m reminded of the circumstances in Russia in the few decades before the Revolution of 1917. One is struck by the wide acceptance of radicalism among the educated classes (teachers, the professoriate, students), many circles in urban populations, and some of the well-off gentry in the years leading up to the Revolution. It even penetrated the military’s officer corps. Denunciations bordering on treason, even advocating the assassination of government officials from the czar on down, riddled the last couple of decades of the regime. Socialism of a variety of shades was trendy, as is the “green future” and “sustainability” today.
Policy mistakes compounded the troubles. One was the decision in 1906 to confer a safe space from police intervention for university campuses. It was hoped that the policy would quiet things down on the campuses. It did no such thing. The radicalism was allowed to fester and boil over to nearly all sectors of society. The radicalized young of 1905 became the violent revolutionaries of 1917 and later Lenin’s shock troops in the imposition of the Bolshevik conception of the good.
Sound familiar as you view the images of the young faces demanding a Green New Deal in the Global Climate Strike? Those scenes of a radicalized youth who are radicalized by a radicalized curriculum, sustained over the many years of their matriculation, should send shivers down the spines of anyone knowledgeable of Russian history circa 1890 to 1921. In the end, a radicalized caste will get the opportunity to impose their narrow vision of the good on a population ignorant of their own children’s indoctrination.
The Overton window of tolerance for opposing views is shifting left. The zealot’s politicized science will be the only approved form of science. That means that the only accepted version of science will be the kind that has garnered the assent of the governing elite. It must, like everything else, serve the ends of the secular dogma’s dream of the good life. It’s so Orwellian.
In the end, prepare to retreat back a couple of centuries in quality of life. These vision quests aren’t concerned about the production of wealth so much as dictating the smallest details of living for 330 million people. Conditions gradually deteriorate as the legacy of prior affluence begins to erode. Some flee and others adjust to a world without variance from the rules of the eco-commissars.
I’ll end this piece where it started: the student Global Climate Strike. Watch the speech of a sincere but naive youngster before a UN panel as she tearfully pleads for the erection of the eco-Leviathan. Also observe the shamelessness of the adults as they exploit a child whose personal identity has been supplanted by a fanatic’s nightmare of impending doom. Watching her as she gives her speech is wrenching enough, but remembering what has been done to her is much more terrifying.
RogerG