Recently I wrote up a post about Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and the Overton window, but I have since decided to throw it all out. In a way, further reflection has convinced me that the whole Overton window concept may not even be useful any longer, as my earlier post was in fact implying, even if I hadn’t realized it. At this point I think a single “window” of what’s possible in American politics, at the national level, is not even accurate as a simplified model. It feels like a relevant update would now involve something out of a nightmarish video game, with multiple holes opening, closing, changing size, etc., simultaneously without any reference to one another.
Obviously Republican America has ceased giving any heed to any universal idea of what’s practical, or of anything else. I mean, what is there to say? The latest word from those pundits still attempting to make meaningful observations is that the GOP establishment is, now, preparing to embrace Donald Trump for president because they find him less offensively deranged than his leading rival. I’m not even sure what part of that sentence it would make sense to emphasize; it’s all surreal.
In the meantime, some kind of much more modest but still dumbfounding suspension of reason seems to be creeping through Democratic America. I’m certainly not unbiased, but here’s what I’m seeing. A growing number of putative liberal voices are
- Advocating Mrs. Clinton, who supported the invasion of Iraq that has (until now) been one of the most reliably unifying objects of scorn among liberals and Democrats, and not only
- Criticizing Bernie Sanders on the grounds of being too enthusiastic for single-payer health care; but also, in more than one instance,
- Overtly defending Clinton’s support for war, which they claim to find abhorrent, by complaining about Sanders’s support for single-payer health care, which they (and last time I checked Mrs. Clinton) all claim to find admirable.
