Using the 3.5% Rule to Put Constitutional Purpose in the Overton Window

Ground Rules for Elected Officials Who Want to Earn Your Vote

What is the Overton Window and why is it important? I have copied the following from The Overton Window – Mackinac Center and it does a fine job of defining it and why we should care:

The Overton Window is a model for understanding how ideas in society change over time and influence politics. The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support — they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. Other policy ideas exist, but politicians risk losing popular support if they champion these ideas. These policies lie outside the Overton Window.

After years of Trump’s incessant lying and grifting, the Overton Window has been split into two frames. One frame is seen by the approx. 1/4 of Americans who are the MAGA cult chumps that believe Trump’s tyrannical bloviating (they love their big stern daddy). The content found in Trump’s corner of the Overton Window is delivered by master propagandists (like Rupert Murdoch and his media whores) and it can be found everywhere you can see, hear, and/or read their hate and fear-filled disinformation.

Whether it’s what can be found on the radio, your social media, or TV, if you have learned to be shitty at learning, you are an easy mark for the corporatist movement that has been taking our democracy apart since Reagan was in office. The oligarch-led propagandists know how to control what is acceptable in their kleptocratic world and, when you add in their 21^st century gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election fraud tactics, they are hard to beat.

But for about 3/4 of us, the frame that remains in the Overton Window is a daily hodgepodge of distractive topics (like the criminally stupid statements-of-the-day from Trump and his cabinet stooges), and that keeps a majority of us unaware of what really matters. In other words, we are not exposed to the issues that we need addressed if we are to fix our democracy.

I submit that the issues, policies and concepts that do need to be framed in the Overton Window must address why our elected leaders are unable to fulfill their Constitutional Purpose. To make that happen, we need the majority of us to understand the one grievance we all should acknowledge; the fact that unlimited and anonymous money is speech and corporations are people. Those powers of corporate personhood are the root cause of our democracy’s backslide into autocratic rule. (Remember, there’s was nothing dodgier that DOGE led by a drug-addled neo-Nazi and his band of racist geeks.)

The powers of corporate personhood are the basis for the one grievance that we all share, if only because it is the root cause of all of our other grievances. Therefore, before we have a democracy that works the way it should, we need to redress that master grievance.

The problem with that is the Catch-22 that blocks every legitimate effort to fix our government. Our national Catch-22 is that those who can exploit the powers of corporate personhood will not let our elected officials end their powers of corporate personhood.

But there’s a way around the problem and it’s the only proven method to end the tyranny of Trump’s regime.

By the persistent and nonviolent resistance of 3.5% of us (about 12 million citizens), we can frame the issues that we need in the Overton Window. This 3.5% Rule was discovered by Professor Erica Chenoweth after extensive research and analysis.

If we can frame our issues in the Overton Window, we can get the majority of us to understand that we should expect two things. First, we should require our elected officials to fulfill their Constitutional Purpose, and two, we need our elected officials to end the powers of corporate personhood.

(And one other suggestion for a concept that needs to be framed in the Overton Window is the concept of the Overton Window.)

Once we get a majority of citizens to accept those expectations, we can elect a supermajority of competent progressive representatives who will serve to promote our general welfare and protect us from those who are doing things adverse to our rights and our communities’ interests.

In the 250-year history of America, there has never been someone who has done more things adverse to our rights and our communities’ interests than Trump. We need to stop him (as well as the powers of corporate personhood) and our best chance to end the autocratic decay in our government is to get 3.5% of us to unite in getting our issues framed in the Overton Window.

What do you think?