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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

This is a discussion about the Overton Window moving in ways that one disagrees with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

There was always an Overton Window and it has always been moving around. And often people (usually older people) do not like when they have opinions which are being excluded from the Overton Window when previously they were acceptable.

I find that it is best to be specific about what should be in and what should not be in the Overton Window rather than being general.

Why? Discussions of "cancel culture" seems to me to pretend to be meta discussions on whether the Overton Window should exist, but usually they are actually about whether certain topics should be within it. I find that this is a bit of a deception and used to disavow that you are unhappy with the current position of the Overton Window with regards to very specific issues, usually because if they discussed the specifics of their concern, it would actually fall outside of most people's Overton Window - thus the need to argue the meta route.

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>I find that this is a bit of a deception and used to disavow that you are unhappy with the current position of the Overton Window with regards to very specific issues, usually because if they discussed the specifics of their concern, it would actually fall outside of most people's Overton Window - thus the need to argue the meta route.

I think a lot of the concerns about "cancel culture" in particular is that there's an unusually large (and growing) chasm between the Overton Window that exists in certain elite "captured" institutions and the Overton Window that exists in broader American society - and that the enforcers of this "vocal minority" Overton Window are unusually zealous about trying to punish heresy in their captured spaces.

Also, there's an amusing critique that is increasingly forceful in my view that this is all a way to create a new sort of social class divide. I went to school for a long time and although I do not adhere to the scriptures of wokism I am accultured to its mores and can adopt the requisite Taqiya-style practices to survive in a culturally-hostile environment. Many cannot do the same and are excluded from opportunities accordingly - look at how many cancellations are predicated on "it's not what they said but how they said it" to see this sort of shibboleth-like status filter in action.

I disagree. Many of those concerned about this do not hold any view that is currently suddenly outside the window. For you to claim that this is the case with is just a form of ad hominem.

Rather, what is going on is a slippery slope (in reality, not in fallacy) being recognized for what it is. People see that their friends, parents, neighbors, children, coworkers, and eventually themselves are quite possibly going to be labeled with a scarlet letter for holding any view whatsoever except what was decided at yesterday's HR meeting, which nobody has been notified of yet.

In other words, this is not a question of the Overton Window moving. This is a question of whether the Overton Window should become the Overton Pinhole.

The strongest objections to "cancel culture" (it's a bad term, but I'm not arguing semantics, let's just go along with it) are procedural.

Because the public often lacks the entire picture, "cancel mobs" are effectively operating a form of vigilante justice with imperfect information. While strictly speaking people do have a right to do so, when "cancelled" people suffer real-world consequences (pressure on employers to fire them, etc.), the entire thing starts getting scary, regardless of the merit of the accusation.

I'd also argue that, for a well-intentioned person, it's tactically stupid to engage in such behavior, because this circus allows truly bad actors to credibly claim they're being unjustly accused.

Confusingly, cancellation proponents argue that they aren't enforcing justice, but only exercising their "freedom of association" which, they argue, includes depriving dissidents of income and healthcare. "Social Consequences" (TM).

> There was always an Overton Window and it has always been moving around.

Has it always been getting narrower, though? That seems to be what's changed more than anything. What happens when nothing can be discussed?

Has it been getting narrower, or do you feel as if it does as you slide closer to the edge, relatively?

I don't know, both are possible. But there are a lot of people that claim it's getting smaller but really it's that they're failing to cover up ideas that were always unacceptable.

Considering left-wing cancellation only, I'm guessing the enforced views are favored by less than 30% of the population. I don't think virtually any conservatives or many moderate liberals agree with the enforced viewpoint. Surely that means the Overton Window is narrowing. When have the views of 70+% of the population ever fell outside the OW? If it excludes the views of 70+%, is it even an "Overton Window" by definition? What's the difference between enforcing an extremely narrow window on the whole population and cultural authoritarianism (or perhaps just "authoritarianism"--I'm not exactly sure on the terminology?)?

The other question is that, while rarer, right-wing cancellation is a thing. Notable examples are Dixie Chicks and Colin Kaepernick. While I could believe that the Dixie Chicks were a matter of an OW shift a few years in the making, and while I can believe that the window shifted gradually leftward from there, I can't believe that it shifted to the extreme left, then abruptly back to the right in just a week's time for the Kaepernick cancellation, and then a week later back to the far left for various left-wing cancellations.

Even if it is the Overton Window, is it eminently desirable that people's livelihoods and healthcare should be subject to expressing views within the OW?

EDIT: Downvoters, I would be very interested in your feedback, genuinely; where am I wrong?

It may seem narrower to people who's views are sliding out of the window, but I see no evidence that the overton window in the US is any narrower now than say, the 1950's.

If anything it feels like it has effectively widened, or at least fundamentally changed to lose some of it's bite, since there is no longer truly national media and everyone can quickly find a bubble with a window that fits their views.

You may be able to find a bubble, but can you find a job?

>It may seem narrower to people who's views are sliding out of the window, but I see no evidence that the overton window in the US is any narrower now than say, the 1950's.

I can probably think of several views supported by the median American in 2021 (or at least 30% of Americans) that would get you summarily dismissed from most high-visibility jobs if publicly expressed. You probably could too.

What views in the 1950s do you think were similar? Again, there was undoubtedly an Overton Window in the 1950s. What's peculiar about 2020s cancel culture imo, however, is how zealously it goes after people who hold views that are extremely common among the broader population.

A view in the 1950's that could get you dismissed from a high-visibility job? How about being a communist? Have people forgotten about the McCarthy Era?

You'd probably still get dismissed from a high visibility job for being a communist, actually. IIRC in California being a communist bars you from holding office still today.

In that case there wasn't even a requirement to actually be a communist. You could be dismissed for simply being accused of being a communist.

dismissed from a high-visibility job: agree

supported by the median American in 1950's (or at least 30% of Americans): not a chance

Ah but you see, you didn't actually have to be a communist, you just had to close enough to one. For example, Eugene Debs despite getting more electoral support than the Libertarian party ever did, was branded as a communist, and also made a political prisoner.

If your response to being challenged about the 1950s political climate is to raise a story about someone who died before 1930, then that says a lot...

It got even worse after 1950, it's just that at that point all socialist were already atomized.

But afaik it's simply not the case that 30% of the population was sympathetic to socialism in the 1950s. Maybe if you really tortured the term "socialism", but come on.

30% is an arbitrary number, but even at the time where more people in the US were sympathetic to socialism and were ever sympathetic to modern libertarianism, it was violently suppressed by the state, much less "canceled".

As far as how many people were sympathetic to socialism at that point, 15-20% isn't a bad estimate.

But if you want something closer to 30% in the 1950s, how about just being black?

Eugene Debs was an out and out socialist, who led the most violent strike in US history. You can make an argument that he didn't make it violent -- that was the Pinkertons -- but he didn't get tossed in jail because he ran an opposition party a la Navalny.

He's not the boogyman that some would make him out to be, but he didn't pull punches, either.

Got 3% of the US vote behind bars, too.

He actually went to jail twice. The first time was for screening an anti-war movie.

Were 30% of Americans Communist? The argument isn't that there wasn't anything you couldn't say, but that the window doesn't cover the full range of opinions a substantial part of the population actually holds.

> What views in the 1950s do you think were similar?

How about professing atheism, or believe in communism?

Being in a same sex or different race relationship in the 50's wouldn't just get you fired, it could lead to people refusing to give you a mortgage or the police driving you out of town.

It's difficult to find examples from the 50's america of a widespread belief that wasn't in the "mainstream" acceptable view because the effects of going against the acceptable view were so harsh. I doubt we could find a reliable poll from that time period to hit your arbitrary 30% threshold, but I like to flatter my ancestral countrymen at least enough to think that miscegenation laws weren't thought of as morally right by 70% of the population.

The difference, as you point it out, is that today's "cancel culture" can target people from the majority classes.

> How about professing atheism, or believe in communism?

Even today these are sub-5% viewpoints.

Okay, how about allowing mixed race marriages?

I think the 30% threshold is arbitrary and not worth fixating on, but there are certainly counter examples.

In 1958, only 4% of Americans supported interracial marriage. (And in 1951 you had Support was around 30% by the 1970s. It was below 50% into the mid-1990s. In 1975, The Jeffersons featured an interracial married couple on TV. So that’s not a great example of being cancelled for something 30% of Americans supported.

Another example is catholicism; Catholics absolutely were barred from some jobs in the 50's, despite being nearly a quarter of the population.

We can keep looking at examples, but I don't think the 30% is a meaningful number, as I wrote above it seems impossible to find an opinion that the majority felt comfortable expressing that went against the stringent vocal monitory setting the overton window. I hypothesize that the vast majority of people just did not care strongly about interracial marriage but did not want to tangle with those who did. It seems to just be another way of saying that today's overton window doesn't include some of the views common in conservative white america, and before it was defined by conservative white america.

30% is an arbitrary number, so if you find an example with or 29% I'd be happy to hear that too. I probably could find some examples of majority views in 2021 that would get you predictably fired if you expressed them as say an adjunct professor. Think "All Lives Matter" and such.

But if you have to reach down to 20% or 10% or whatever then yes that's a significant enough difference that I see it as conceding my original point about that this isn't like the 50s. It's also notable that the examples that you're reaching for seem to involve elite bigotry that eventually collapsed - do you think that cancel culture will collapse in the same fashion?

> The difference, as you point it out, is that today's "cancel culture" can target people from the majority classes.

I think the difference is that "cancel culture" targets speech that is acceptable to well over 70% of the population.

“Cancel culture” works because a majority goes along with it.. if it really was just the shrill minority everyone frets about everyone could ignore them, but it’s also lots of persuaded people who either agree or don’t disagree strongly enough to ignore them.

I think the truth is the majority has no appetite for the culture wars and mostly doesn’t want to be out of step with “normal” - their default lack of conviction is often mistaken for tacit support by both sides of an issue.

> “Cancel culture” works because a majority goes along with it.. if it really was just the shrill minority everyone frets about everyone could ignore them, but it’s also lots of persuaded people who either agree or don’t disagree strongly enough to ignore them.

Your comment made me curious, and I found out Politico took a poll: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000173-7326-d36e-abff-7ffe7.... 46% think cancel culture goes too far, 10% thinks it goes not far enough, 18% say 'neither', and 26% don't know. The kicker, however, is that Politico defines cancel culture as "withdrawing support for a public figure or a company". That is the softest, most benign definition I can think of and it notably excludes all of the ordinary people who were terminated because of a coordinated harassment campaign. It strikes me as almost pleasant--"we're angry with you, so we're going to go away and leave you be!".

I think for a more reasonable definition, and especially when primed with specific incidences of cancellation (especially ordinary people who lost jobs), far more would disapprove. I don't want to quibble about definitions, but I'm expressly not concerned about celebrities "losing support" and much more interested in low and middle class families losing income and healthcare.

I think "cancel culture" mostly just works because it takes society some time to collectively identify a problem and organize to find a solution. At present, there are at least a handful of bills in the pipeline of various state legislatures to combat cancel culture, all of which would be horrible from perspectives of free speech and academic freedom (the best approach I can think of is to strengthen employment protections and take away the bullies' stick). The point is that just because political opposition hasn't organized yet doesn't mean that the majority of people are ambivalent or supportive.

You seem to assume people accepted the definition and ignored the term. Try asking about withdrawing support for a public figure or a company without calling it cancel culture.

They came close actually. 53% said "people should expect social consequences for expressing unpopular opinions in public" was closer to their opinion. Only 31% said "There should not be social consequences for expressing unpopular opinions in public, even those that are deeply offensive to other people because free speech is protected" was closer to their opinion.

How many ordinary people were terminated because of a coordinated harassment campaign? Numbers not anecdotes.

> Try asking about withdrawing support for a public figure or a company without calling it cancel culture.

Sure, it’s not a very good term. No argument from me.

> Social consequences

Is “being fired from your job” a “social consequence”? When I think of social consequences, I think “you might lose friends”, not “you won’t be able to pay your bills and your kid won’t get the treatment she needs to survive”.

> How many ordinary people were terminated because of a coordinated harassment campaign? Numbers not anecdotes.

I’m guessing anecdotes are the best we have. I doubt anyone has numbers because employers are rarely going to be forthcoming that they fired their employee because they were afraid of the Twitter mob. Moreover, it’s not just the people who are fired, but the people who self-censor for fear of losing their jobs.

Personally I don’t understand why this is controversial. Surely we can all agree that Twitter mobs shouldn’t hold sway over people’s employment in order to suppress dissent? How much fear and chilled speech is optimal for a democratic society? Even if you think critics exaggerate the impact of cancel culture, can’t we all agree that canceling is vile, there’s too much of it going around, and we should condemn it and if necessary neuter it by passing employment protection laws or regulating social media or similar?

>Is “being fired from your job” a “social consequence”?

Of course it is, when employment is not a right but a privilege granted by society. Exceptions regarding protected groups aside, no one has the right to embarrass their employer and potentially negatively affect their image or customer relations and keep their job. That is functionally no different than bringing shame to one's household or community.

That’s a harsh take in a society that lacks universal income or healthcare. It’s also ripe for exploitation in that anyone can harass your employer into firing you if you offend them. I’m sure that works great if the mob is on your side, but mobs aren’t exactly known for their fidelity.

Perhaps it's harsh, but it's true, and it's always been true. Employment has never existed in some pocket universe entirely separate from society or its consequences.

And many of the same people most vocally complaining about cancel culture belong to the political axis that opposes universal income and social safety nets, labor rights and protections for special classes, and if the "twitter mob" came after progressives, feminists or LGBT people wouldn't lift so much as a finger in protest. So it's difficult in that case to have sympathy with people who want to have their cake but refuse to eat it.

> Perhaps it's harsh, but it's true, and it's always been true.

Perhaps it's always been true in the US, but other countries protect employment.

> Employment has never existed in some pocket universe entirely separate from society or its consequences.

By that logic, someone murdering you is likewise "Social Consequences".

But fair enough, if you're ruggedly in favor of at-will employment and you're fundamentally opposed to free speech, then cancel culture poses no contradiction to your views. I think such a position is odious, but I can at least respect your principled stance as a staunch illiberal conservative.

>Perhaps it's always been true in the US, but other countries protect employment.

True.

>By that logic, someone murdering you is likewise "Social Consequences".

Of course it is. Have you never heard of honor killings? Crimes of passion or revenge? Something can be a social consequence and also be a crime. No one is arguing that all social consequences must be legal, or should always be tolerable.

>But fair enough, if you're ruggedly in favor of at-will employment and you're fundamentally opposed to free speech, then cancel culture poses no contradiction to your views. I think such a position is odious, but I can at least respect your principled stance as a staunch illiberal conservative.

This is why I should stop trying to have political conversations on Hacker News, in the end, everyone just makes it personal.

I'm actually opposed to at-will employment and I support free speech, albeit not the absolutist definition of free speech that Hacker News seems to believe in. I do support the right of groups to petition anyone they like - even employers, to air whatever grievances they wish. Cancel culture, while it can be abused, is an expression of free speech.

And that's the rub - everyone wants to abridge the free speech rights of the "twitter mob" because of politics, but no one wants to address the fact that the only real power in "cancel culture" lies with the employer.

> Of course it is. Have you never heard of honor killings? Crimes of passion or revenge? Something can be a social consequence and also be a crime. No one is arguing that all social consequences must be legal, or should always be tolerable.

I understand your point, but I'm assuming that when people say "free speech doesn't mean freedom from Social Consequences", they're not talking about honor killings, and if they are that really takes the moral wind out of their sails.

> This is why I should stop trying to have political conversations on Hacker News, in the end, everyone just makes it personal.

Not making it personal; just following the logical breadcrumbs.

> I'm actually opposed to at-will employment and I support free speech, albeit not the absolutist definition of free speech that Hacker News seems to believe in.

It's not free speech if it's threatening, coercive, harassing, etc. If you're intimidating people into silence by showing that you can get people fired for wrongthink, that's inherently threatening and harassment. Cancel culture is decidedly not free speech.

It would be free speech if we strengthened employment protections such that the mob can "petition" your employer all they want, but your employment will remain secure. In that case, there's no threat or coercion, only persuasion. Of course, then cancel culture would go away because it was never actually about speech in the first place.

> And that's the rub - everyone wants to abridge the free speech rights of the "twitter mob" because of politics, but no one wants to address the fact that the only real power in "cancel culture" lies with the employer.

Raises hand. I don't want to abridge the free speech rights of the Twitter mob; I want to prevent employers from terminating people on account of Twitter mobs.

Saying anyone can harass your employer into firing you if you offend them is begging the question.

I don’t believe it is. At will employment allows for the abuses we see in cancel culture. If you’re asking “are people organizing campaigns to have people fired?”, there are numerous examples. One which springs to mind is Lee Fang—he was targeted by coworkers although he wasn’t ultimately fired. Another would be David Shor.

That claim is much weaker.

Didn't you say cancel culture isn't a very good term?

"cancel culture" isn't a very good term because it can encompass different things, but I've established several times in this thread what I mean by it: harassment campaigns for the express purpose of having an employee terminated because they caused offense. I don't understand why you say this claim is weaker (weaker than what?).

You claimed previously anyone can harass your employer into firing you if you offend them. The new claim is weaker.

Cancel culture is also a bad term because it isn't a culture.

Anyone can harass your employer into firing you if you offend them because we have at-will employment (or more precisely, because we don't legally protect one's employment from cancel culture). Those aren't rival claims...

> Cancel culture is also a bad term because it isn't a culture.

No argument here, but I'm going to keep using it for lack of a more precise, widely-agreed-upon term.

54% supported Blake Neff being fired. Slightly more than supported unspecified social consequences.

Why is firing anyone for any reason acceptable if lost jobs mean dead kids?

Companies often say something about the fired employee not representing the company's values when they fire someone who offended members of the public. And seeing how many people even claim they were fired because of public pressure would establish an upper bound.

Canceling would need a consistent definition to say anything about it. But it shouldn't surprise you some people aren't inclined to restrict freedom of association and freedom of speech without compelling evidence.

> 54% supported Blake Neff being fired. Slightly more than supported unspecified social consequences.

I'm guessing people interpreted the question as "Do you think posting racist remarks is a fireable offense?". I don't think he should be fired because a Twitter mob harassed his employer. Ask them about David Shor and see what happens.

> Why is firing anyone for any reason acceptable if lost jobs mean dead kids?

I don't think it is acceptable, and neither do many other lefties with the notable exception for cancel culture--then it's just Social Consequences (TM).

> Companies often say something about the fired employee not representing the company's values when they fire someone who offended members of the public. And seeing how many people even claim they were fired because of public pressure would establish an upper bound.

Maybe, but it's still going to be a slog to get that data. Good luck to any researcher who is investigating this, but I'm not holding my breath. Probably a better approach would be to look at periodic surveys that ask "How comfortable do you feel talking about X?" every few years, and look at how the results change over time. I'm guessing these exist. Maybe the effect of cancel culture is actually smaller than I'm expecting? Who knows?

> Canceling would need a consistent definition to say anything about it.

No, it just means we need to be clear when we discuss it. As previously mentioned, I'm talking about ordinary people being terminated because of an organized harassment campaign.

> But it shouldn't surprise you some people aren't inclined to restrict freedom of association and freedom of speech without compelling evidence.

Nor should they be. But a harassment campaign for the express purpose of having an employee terminated because they offended you isn't "free speech" any more than any other kind of harassment.

Public outcries have underlying causes. Justified or not. Separating the outcry from the reason for it isn't an accurate model.

What you call cancel culture isn't limited to 1 political group.

You haven't provided any evidence of ordinary people being terminated because of organize harassment campaigns. And you keep equating self censorship to cancellation.

Calling for someone to resign or be fired isn't harassment.

> Public outcries have underlying causes. Justified or not. Separating the outcry from the reason for it isn't an accurate model.

In the Neff question there is no outcry in the first place. The question posits that Neff was fired by his employer as a result of CNN's revelation. That's the whole point; the question reads like "Do you think Neff should have been terminated for his conduct?", not "Do you think Neff should have been terminated due to public pressure?". The former isn't cancel culture, the latter is.

> What you call cancel culture isn't limited to 1 political group.

No, it's not. Conservatives cancelled the Dixie Chicks circa 2003 and Kaepernick just a few years ago. I'm not aware of any cancellations of ordinary people, though I wouldn't be surprised if there were a handful.

> You haven't provided any evidence of ordinary people being terminated because of organize harassment campaigns. And you keep equating self censorship to cancellation.

David Shor and Emmanuel Cafferty spring to mind.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

> Calling for someone to resign or be fired isn't harassment.

Harassment: aggressive pressure or intimidation.

Call it what you want, but a rose by any other name...

I would say the "window" enforced by most cancellation represents <30% of the population. I think it's largely the "woke" subset of the progressive population, however big that is, but certainly less than 30%. I don't think the window represents the views of over 70% of the rest of the population; I don't think that was the case in the 50s and certainly not in the 90s or 00s. It seems very likely to me that the window has narrowed to the point that it can't reasonably be called an "Overton Window" as I understand it (i.e., 'views tolerable to the majority' if I understand correctly). Whether or not this kind of super-narrow window constitutes an Overton Window, I certainly think it's an undesirable development.

It's far less than 30%, maybe less than 10%. And you're correct, that's what I think is driving the response to "cancel culture." Being ostracized for expressing views contrary to those of the majority is just human history. Being ostracized for expressing views consistent with those of the majority is quite an odd situation. That inversion is only possible because particular ideologies have overtaken elite universities, and most of our cultural institutions are controlled by graduates of those elite universities.

Well put, as usual.

> It's far less than 30%, maybe less than 10%.

Agreed, I was trying to be overly generous with the 30% figure.

If cultural institutions are captured and weaponized by people whose views represent <10% of society, won't the rest of society simply choose new cultural institutions to care about?

This seems to me to be already underway. Right wing media has been around for decades, and more recently youtube, podcasts, substack, etc. have provided a platform for a huge number of cultural institutions opposed to the tyrannical 10%.

So what's the problem?

Well, I think the problem is that it's not <10%. Sure, some of the more extreme examples of woke-ism would have very little broad support. And sure, the aforementioned ecosystem of alternative cultural institutions are incentivized to make sure those examples get as much exposure as possible. But the "steelman" version of woke-ism probably has 40-50% support in the US. The steelman version of anti-wokism probably has around the same support level.

So we're at a stalemate. The old-guard of tyrannical college elite institutions and the new breed of alternative working class everyman institutions co-exist in the same attention marketplace, competing and trading blows.

So again I ask, what's the problem?

> Right wing media has been around for decades

Not really, right wing media (as we know it) came about precisely because of this problem. Rupert Murdoch created Fox News in 1996 because it was becoming increasingly clear that the erstwhile media had moved in a direction that alienated a broad section of society. This marked the end of the Walter Cronkite era.

As for why this started in 1996, and why the Walter Cronkite era was so tranquil, I read one theory on a recent interview with Patrick Collison (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-patrick-collison...) which shows a consistent pattern:

"Culture. As Ezra Klein recently described in the New York Times, and Marc Dunkelman has written about in his great piece about Penn Station, a particular version of distorted, hypertrophic progressivism that took hold in the 1970s may have had (and still be having!) quite significantly stifling effects. We perhaps shifted from placing emphasis on our collective effectiveness in advancing prosperity and opportunity for people to the perceived fairness that was embodied in whichever particular steps we happened to take. Or, to say that another way, we shifted our focus from sins of omission to sins of commission."

This "hypertrophic progressivism of the 1970s" was broadly started in college campuses of the time, and by around the late '80s and '90s, college students from the '70s were beginning to find themselves within the ranks of leadership in most of our institutions.

> So again I ask, what's the problem?

The problem is the perceived impedance mismatch between professional institutions (media, white collar corporate America, etc) and society at large. Because this is an issue that has existed since at least 1996 (the advent of Fox News), the assertion is that the root cause is ideological movements that begin on college campuses that have historically not aligned with the ideologies of broad swaths of society; and adherents of those ideologies eventually going on to run our professional institutions.

(I didn’t downvote you). Because we still have to make decisions as a collective. We need to have a functioning government and we have to suffer each other in our communities and workplaces. How does a government run when it is highly polarized and there are no common epistemological institutions that both sides can turn to for resolution? How does a business make decisions when different parties have different ideologies?

The Overton Window hasn't widened. It hasn't narrowed. Instead, it shattered.

Take gay marriage, for example. 50 years ago, 95% of the population thought that gay marriage was ridiculous. That meant that 95% of the population thought that the position of 95% of the population was reasonable. That's an Overton Window.

Now, 30%[1] of the population still agree with the previous view. 40% of the population thinks that gay marriage is perfectly reasonable, and that thinking otherwise is completely unacceptable. And 30% are somewhere in the middle (gay marriage is acceptable, but it's OK to think that it's not, maybe). That means that 40% of the population has an Overton Window that excludes 60% of the population, and a separate 30% has a window that excludes 70% of the population. There isn't a society-wide Overton Window on the topic any longer.

---

[1] All numbers are gut-feel estimates, with no statistical validity.

I think that even in the past the default position of most Americans on these issues is one where they just don’t care one way or another very strongly and don’t want to deal with those who do.

Even in the days where it seemed that 95% thought gay marriage was ridiculous, it seems more likely to me that maybe 30% hated the idea and 50% didn’t care strongly either way but certainly didn’t want to face the 30%. This is almost the same dynamic you are talking about now; the difference is who the vocal 30% is these days. The majority of people maybe mildly disliked gay marriage but didn’t really care about it and mostly just don’t want to deal with the people who care a great deal about it, only now the vocal 30% who care a great deal is for gay marriage.

That’s the shifted Overton window, and a bunch of people who hated gay marriage are complaining how “it seemed like everyone was with me just a decade ago!”

Your premise is that in the past a vocal minority of conservatives controlled the Overton window on this issue, and that’s not what the polling shows, and if you look at contemporary societies where homosexuality is still taboo, it’s clear that the polling accurately reflected reality.

It's not like there weren't controversial topics before. They were just different topics. Instead of gay marriage, it was interracial marriage that had that kind of split.

> What happens when nothing can be discussed?

At that point, not discussing anything clearly means that you're a witch.

If the old Overton window (A) and new Overton window (B) are like circles in a Venn diagram and you are determined to stick in the old one, you will find that the intersection between it and the new Overton window is shrinking (A intersects B).

This phenomenon explains why old people who do not want to change with the times will find that their Overton window is shrinking.

I agree there's always been an Overton Window, but I think you're leaving out important context. When conservatives controlled culture, championing free expression was a way to expand the Overton Window to make it okay to say liberal things. To older liberals like Pinker, the change in tack comes across as hypocritical. (Of course, it's not actually hypocritical, insofar as we're talking about different individuals.)

I don't think this is a very good characterization of the debate. Most importantly, the debate as far as I can tell centers around whether or not it is appropriate for your livelihood and access to healthcare to be at the mercy of a Twitter mob, specifically about whether or not threatening someone's livelihood, etc (namely by way of harassment campaign against one's employer) constitutes 'free speech'--more abstractly, the debate is about whether or not threats and harassment constitute free speech.

Further, I don't think the cancel culture debate is about the Overton Window as much as rank partisanship. For example, I don't think progressives would argue that nonviolent protest falls afoul of their OW, but they canceled (and defend the canceling of) a data scientist who so transgressed. Similarly, do progressives really think it's so offensive to publish a quote from a black man in the context of BLM in which he wished for more attention to other problems his community faces--is that actually outside of their OW, or is it more likely that the journalist's crime was publishing a viewpoint that failed to toe the ideological line? Similarly, the Hispanic utility worker who accidentally and absent-mindedly made the "OK" gesture from his truck--whose Overton window is that out-of-bounds of? Or the professor who said a Chinese word in appropriate context which sounded sort of like the N-word? Are these really outside of people's Overton window, or is this just overt bullying? In the other direction, the sitting Prime Minister of Canada has dressed in blackface so often that he's admittedly lost track, but he was somehow not cancelled? Is blackface really within the left-wing Overton Window, or are we observing ideological partisanship?

EDIT: Downvoters, I'm really interested in hearing your opinions!

> EDIT: Downvoters, I'm really interested in hearing your opinions!

Best guess is that they just very strongly disagree with your points but have no rebuttal. So a downvote has to do.

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