Mamdani And The Left Are Moving The Window – Good

Shift Your View

Zohran Mamdani

What if everything you believed since you have been politically awake is wrong? It isn’t that you have bad intentions or you’re fundamentally stupid, but what if instead you believed for so long that the existing menu of political options was one group of beliefs but in reality, that was a really limited menu that excluded some really tasty items you never considered before?

When a rising progressive figure like Zohran Mamdani makes bold statements about what he wants to achieve, it can make regular old mainstream Democrats/liberals like myself wince. Government supermarkets? We shouldn’t have billionaires? Immediately that kicks in concerns about how Democrats are perceived. It isn’t just Mamdani. Ideas like defunding the police, universal basic income, free health care, etc.? Sure, we say, they may sound good on paper – but they also sound like left wing fantasyland, they’re just not “practical.”

And maybe they are impractical, unworkable, and election losers. But – what if not? We should at least have the conversation, I think.

Because for decades now American political discourse has been operating within the parameters set by the right wing, not the left. Since 1980 we have had 20 years of Democratic presidents and while I think they did a decent job of domestic politics between the three of them (Clinton, Obama, and Biden), much of what they did was within the narrow paradigm of what was acceptable behavior.

Clinton frequently talked about cutting the size of the government, Obama spoke about lowering the deficit, and Biden also used the language of “fiscal responsibility” as the right envisions it. All three men accepted the existence of billionaires and even pushed policies that would theoretically create even more of them. None of them would argue that the police needed to be defunded, and in fact they all oversaw federal spending that sent billions to police departments.

I was among the millions who supported these three presidents, along with other Democrats who ran for office with a similar world view both at the presidential and congressional level to varying degrees of success.

But these people have all been operating within the right’s paradigms. Collectively we never openly debated how we could have it all wrong. Maybe the prison system should be abolished? Maybe billionaires should be taxed out of existence?

Even if we don’t ultimately reach those conclusions, these are debates worth having.

Because while we have been limiting ourselves, the right hasn’t. Since Barry Goldwater in 1964, the right has been shifting the Overton Window – what is considered acceptable public discourse – steadily to the right. We have gone from Republicans like Nixon creating agencies like the EPA to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cutting funding for vital agencies to Donald Trump trying to completely destroy agencies like the Department of Education.

Things that Trump treats as uncontroversially right-wing today would have been laughed out of the room as the ravings of lunatics in 1958. The right has mounted serial challenges to what was the liberal orthodoxy (not on every issue but most issues) in the 1960s and they have molded public perception of what acceptable dialogue is.

We are worse off for this. One can praise what Democratic leaders have accomplished in a progressive manner (health care, infrastructure, overall policy) and still admit that the thinking has been severely limited and inhibiting.

Voters are making this clear to the party. They keep showing in multiple federal and state elections that they are unhappy with the status quo and in some instances, like with Trump, they are far too eager to flirt with fascism versus maintaining the system as-is.

Think about the world that millennials and Gen-Z have lived in for their entire lives. Not only has it been shaped by Reaganism and Trumpism, but it has also been peppered with Democratic leaders like Obama, Clinton, and Biden who didn’t fundamentally challenge the bedrock of what the right laid but instead focused on (well needed) nibbling at the edges.

It has been a very long time, probably not since the Great Depression, where Democrats articulated the notion that something beyond the acceptable was possible. When Franklin D. Roosevelt first took office, the consensus was that bad stuff just had to happen and that the government had to lie back, helpless. Herbert Hoover couldn’t truly conceive of a universe where the government swooped in and actively combated the forces making things worse for ordinary Americans. Roosevelt shifted the window and set up the infrastructure of the safety net that still exists today (for now).

We need more of that, not less. Liberalism can’t just be about fending off the right and maintaining the status quo. The boundaries need to be pushed, or at the very least we need an open discussion about what those boundaries should be.

It’s the best way of fending off the right’s murderous dystopia.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on BlueSky @owillis.bsky.social

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Kal-El has shifted the Overton Window to the point where dogs are in control.