The Overton Window is known to many but still most can't see how it shapes acceptable politics. What's left and right in the US is shifted so far right from most other democratic countries.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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I think it's important to recognize the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters. This means that the present state of affairs can only be the result of one or both of these scenarios:
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Enough of the US voting population leans far enough right to move the window, or
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Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
the Overton Window is shaped by what is acceptable to voters
No. It's shaped by what's acceptable to the media, politicians, and their owner donors.
Much more often than not, the vast majority of voters don't get to choose beyond harm reduction by choosing the lesser evil. Which is still an evil.
Political policy is being dictated by forces other than what voters find acceptable.
Yup. 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
#2 it has always been #2 except sometimes those "forces" want the same things or the "forces" that agree with something the public also happens to agree with have a win for a minute
What you'll notice online is that a lot of these people who want to move the overton window understand this, so their goal is to remove the left from the voting population. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can require ID to vote, and then invalidate trans people's IDs. You can gerrymander so the votes don't count. You can just plain old kill people. You can make it very unpleasant to vote. You can suppress candidates who represent the left wing from winning primaries. And if you're really clever, you can make up a propaganda line that convinces leftists it's in their own interest not to vote.
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Bernie isn't far left by international standards, but I wouldn't put him in the centre. Nobody in the centre is trying to make radical changes to things. What Bernie is proposing is pretty radical compared to where the US currently is. And, I think if those reforms actually passed, he'd still be trying to move things even more to the left.
And Biden as "far right"? It has lost all meaning if you're applying that label to him.
Idk. Simping for a fascist ethnostate sure doesn't seem left to me.
... and it's just a meme, homie.
It usually takes more than one thing to label somebody left or right.
And "it's just a meme" is how we ended up with a meme in office twice.
Do you realize how insane our politics are for people to think of supporting a genocide as just one thing on a list of policies?
Yo, the only reason Hitler is considered right-wing, because he wanted to lead the German nation to prosperity. Stop purity-testing!
/s (in case it's not obvious)
Genocide Joe still was a right-wing politician. With his hwole political legacy.
... wait a second... you think Trump became president, because of leftists not con&idering the Dems anything but right wing? Lol.
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Do you mean that supporting a genocide is a centrist policy?
Genocides come in all colours :/
He stopped a rail worker strike for safer working conditions, then six moths latter there was a massive derailment and an environmental catastrophe in Ohio. You would call that left?
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Yeah they sacrificed nuance for effect - but the scale tipping to the right is still effective. A more informative version with brief explanations of what ‘center’ and ‘left’ and etc. are would be great too.
I don't think I would say Hillary Clinton was to the left of Joe Biden. At least he had Lena Khan and a strong FCC. Something I don't think Clinton would have ever done. I would reverse those two.
For that matter I don't know if Obama is to the left of him either.
The right-left divide is a fabrication meant to obscure the fact that the actual division is capitalist-socialist. Do you support the owning class, or do you support the working class?
Yeah capitalism isn't interrupt about free markets and competition or investing in yourself. It's about the ownership class, and the labour class (those that work for the owner class, make all the money and get proportionally none of it). Companies are mini monarchies where you get no say in the policy, the ownership of the company is usually passed on to descendents, you live half your life abiding by the mini monarchy. You vote outside of work, but not at work, work is not democratic. Even so, governments are not mediators between workers and elite, the people that end up in government are of the elite class and have their own interests in mind. We only have our labour rights and aren't complete slaves today because of very strong socialist movements during and after the great depression and ww2. They compromised with some socialism to avoid complete socialism, but these movements are of course not too frequently mentioned in history lessons
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There is no left or right anymore. There are only fascists and antifascists.
Which are basically just synonyms for left and right.
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These memes remind me of my high school religion teacher (I went to Catholic school in Canada, "religion" was what you would call Civics) who introduced the political spectrum. He wrote the usual line across the chalkboard with left/center/right labels, and explained what they were. Then, he extended the chalk line to the right, off the board and onto the wall, and continued past the corner onto the next wall. He was about half way to the back of the room before he started writing down names of any of our political leaders at the time. I don't remember most of the names from 30 years ago, but Conrad Black was on the back wall.
Every political discussion is civil until you say “maybe states shouldn’t exist”
Democrats today are Republicans of 1980s-90s, in my opinion; without a doubt in regards to corporations and billionaires specifically.
"The New Deal" is a dim memory of the beforetimes
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That ratchets been going for decades!
In a sane world centre would be 'status quo making decisions based on objective reality' yet somehow even the idea that we should base our decisions on verifiable data is like super extreme gay communism left by current standards.
No way fr? It's like being a liberal doesn't make you a leftist and that you can definitely be a right wing liberal
You can indeed be a right wing liberal, it is however more difficult to be a left wing conservative
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Could someone clarify the watch this space part?
Pretty obvious but what this country needs is a surge of real leftist politicians. Not that a far left loonie is more moral than a far right loonie. What we need is balance. Its what is missing from every bill and every law.
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Entering that space is risky. For politicians it means endless primary challenges from the right with bottomless campaign funding.
For individuals it means being fairgamed by right wing watchdogs. Online harassment campaigns, doxxing, swatting, squealing or falsifying info to ICE, etc.
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Now watch Schummer fall in line with Trump, now that the Iran war has begun. This is how we know he was never a lefty!
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Disillusioned since 'Hillarycare" scandal 1993. US is run by popularity. Social media seems to run the head space of every US citizen.
You know how some international cuisines have to cater to the taste of the country they're operating in? Like Chinese or Mexican food, if they don't add a lot of sugar in the ingredients, US people won't eat it. Same with leftism. If they don't add a little bit of right, they can't cater to the political palate of the average Joe.
And this, of course, is by design. The American people are heavily propagandized and indoctrinated.
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See, we have to support genocide because we can't win without it!
Later:
Stupid fucking voters won't accept the genocide we worked so hard for!
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