By Chris Satullo
So what happened to Bernie Sanders?
Here’s my theory: He couldn’t find the Overton Window – because he couldn’t navigate the Yankelovich Curve.
I’ll explain.
If you’ve never heard of the Overton Window, don’t feel bad. I hadn’t either until Billions (God, I love that show) used the term as an episode title.
The window is named after the late political scientist Joseph Overton. The Overton Window is the range of policy options on a given issue that garner enough understanding and support from the public that a politician interested in self-preservation (that is, every politician) can safely advocate them. In other words, the Overton Window maps the realm of the politically possible, at any given moment.
The Overton Window is not fixed. It can expand. It can shift. How do those things happen? A number of ways. Sept. 11 expanded the window on a passel of issues; heck, it even got Republicans to support forming a huge new federal department. COVID-19 probably will have similar impact, though it’s hard to predict exactly how.
Politicians do not shift or expand the window single-handedly. Their job is more to see the window’s shape and maneuver through it. That said, politicians particularly gifted at myth and narrative can help slide the window in their preferred direction, not only making new ideas they favor seem plausible, but making ideas the other side takes for granted seem sketchy. In my lifetime, Ronald Reagan was the singular master at this.
Before him, even Republican presidents like Richard Nixon did things such as create OSHA and EPA and impose wage-and-price controls. After Reagan, anyone proposing any increase in government regulation or taxes faced a much heavier lift, while formerly outside-the-window ideas such as school choice became mainstream (if still contested). He shifted the window rightward.
But, again, politicians do not change the window by themselves. A host of think tanks, opinion writers, talk show hosts and religious leaders tilled the ground for Reagan, which he seized by capitalizing on events — the energy crisis, the Iran hostage situation etc.
Donald Trump is expanding the Overton Window on some issues – immigration, trade and isolationism – but, unlike Reagan, he hasn’t shrunk the window’s leftward reach, hasn’t exiled progressive ideas from the conversation. In fact, the window has been expanding left a bit e.g. Green New Deal.
For that, I give Sanders a lot of credit. Interestingly, Sanders’ diagnosis of America’s central problem is not all that different from Trump’s. Sanders also says the system is broken and elections rigged, all to benefit a self-interested elite that gets to run the show for its own gain and to the pain of the common man. Their favored solutions, of course, are very different (except perhaps on trade).
Still, Sanders’ stubborn insistence that government can and should do big things to help the mass of Americans – and that those things could be done easily if only we drained Big Money out of elections, then taxed Big Money heavily to pay for them – has begun to expand the Overton Window leftward for the first time since Reagan exerted his rhetorical magic.
But here’s Bernie’s electoral downfall: He sees the Overton Window not as it really is, but as he wishes it would be. He insists there is vast support for proposals that actually lurk on or just outside its left edge.
On the last two Super Tuesdays, Democratic voters have tried to teach him his error, but Bernie is not good at redirecting his aim.
Sanders’ problem is he has no patience for navigating the Yankelovich Curve.
I’m not sure whether Daniel Yankelovich, a famed public opinion pollster, ever met Joe Overton, but his curve, outlined in the book Coming to Public Judgment, explains precisely how Overton Windows shift, contract and expand. The answer: slowly, with great effort and in fits and starts.
Yankelovich’s curve is a bit like a sine wave, but I know you don’t recall high school trigonometry any better than I do. So let me describe it this way: Imagine a roller coaster, starting out on the ground on the left of the page, then passing through a couple of upward and downward slopes on its way to the right side.
This, Yankelovich posited, describes the movements of public opinion on the issues he tracked for decades.
The leftmost end of his curve represents the phase of ignorance, not even knowing that an issue is an issue. Think where America was on climate change in the 1970s. Next, as the roller coaster begins to chug uphill, comes awareness. People begin to hear about something called “global warming”; they know vaguely it has to do with pollution and a syndrome called “the greenhouse effect.” Next comes what Yankelovich calls urgency: Some people begin to play Paul Revere … holy cow, the polar bears are dying, the icecaps are melting, Trenton will soon be beachfront property! We’re all going to fry!!
So does America then move swiftly from urgency to solutions? If only.
Next, Yankelovich’s roller coaster rolls downhill to phases he calls resistance to change and wishful thinking. These are the places of ideological intransigence, magic bullets and pet solutions. (“It’s just sunspots … a liberal hoax … tech will save us … we just need to recycle … we have to end all consumerism.”) People may know something is a problem, even a crisis, but they latch onto proposals that take into account only their interests, that uphold only their favored values or ideas, that minimize their need to sacrifice or compromise.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bernie Sanders on tax reform, health care reform, campaign finance reform, trade reform et al.
As well as most Americans on most issues. Wishful thinking – whether of the left, right or middle – is a trough where our nation stays stuck on many matters for very long periods of time.
But big solutions, Yankelovich says, particularly ones that stick, that change the landscape, only happen when Americans, both leaders and the masses, are willing to do the hard, patient work of what he calls working through.
In the working through phase, people begin to acknowledge not only the benefits but the pitfalls of their favored solutions. Likewise, they grant some of the pros of other people’s ideas, instead of merely calling out the cons. They become clearer about the values that animate their positions and become willing to admit that other positions may be based, at least in part, on sound values, too. They begin to weigh and define acceptable tradeoffs. This need not result in grinding proposals down into weak mush. It can help find the vocabulary and faming to sell a big idea to the skeptical.
On the rare occasions when America does this hard work on an issue, it can reach what Yankelovich calls “stable public judgment” – a shared ground for action on an issue that is not subject to being reversed by the next election or event. A key feature of stable public judgment is that even people whose behavior is constrained by it in a way they dislike still bow to the societal consensus.
I can think of only a few clear examples of stable public judgment in my lifetime: the end of overt Jim Crow segregation, the ban on smoking in public places, and the crackdown on drunken driving. Perhaps someday gay marriage will be added to the list, but not yet. Abortion rights are an example of an unstable judgment, perpetually threatened with reversal, because they are based on a premature (albeit proper) court ruling that ran considerably ahead of the Yankelovich Curve and pushed national policy outside the Overton Window of that time.
Bernie Sanders’ positions and his way of talking about them tend to fall into Yankelovich’s wishful thinking category. He is adamant about not addressing the possible pitfalls of his ideas. He is utterly impatient, to the point of contempt, with people who want values other than his own to be honored in any solution. He has no interest in discussing possible tradeoffs.
He may be catnip to people who share his precise sense of urgency and set of values, but he’s annoying as hell to anyone who sits anywhere else in the Overton Window or on the Yankelovich Curve.
Sanders may be loved by many for breathing purist progressive oxygen, but that won’t propel him to the presidency of a huge, diverse, complicated and contentious nation.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.