As some may know, I work at a free-market think tank, and as such, qualify as a full-fledged member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. While places like the Heritage Foundation , the American Enterprise Institute
and others are justly famous for their national-level work, it's the network of state-level think tanks
that are, to my biased mind, the unsung heroes of the movement.
So, with that being said, and mindful of my business-related absence for the latter half of this week, I'm going to share with you a little strategizing exercise from the bowels of the VRWC.
The mission of a think tank is to introduce ideas into public discourse and normalize them within the public discourse. The steps an idea takes to full legitimacy are roughly as follows:
Unthinkable
Radical
Acceptable
Sensible
Popular
Policy
This is a rough continuum. Not all ideas start at the same point, not all make it to the endstate -- and some travel backwards. The think tank, with its advocacy and scholarship, does its best to make sure that its preferred ideas reach their endstate. But how does it do this in a systemic way? How does it stay within the bounds of possibility -- the acceptable, sensible, and popular -- even as it reaches for long-term goals in the radical and unthinkable categories?
One useful tool is the Overton window. Named after the former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy who developed the model, it's a means of visualizing where to go, and how to assess progress. Let's say, for example, that you want to make education as free and choice-based as it can possibly be. Let's start by developing a continuum of educational states, from the desired extreme of total freedom, to the undesirable extreme of total statism. It might look something like this:
No government involvement in education.
All schools private with government regulation.
Voucher system with public schools.
Tuition tax credit with public schools.
Homeschooling legal.
Private schools restricted.
Homeschooling illegal.
Private schools illegal.
Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
Now, back when Joe Overton drew up this notional list (which is meant to be illustrative, so don't get hung up on its particular accuracy), the range of actual, reasonable possibilities as perceived by the general public in Overton's state of Michigan were the items bolded below:
No government involvement in education.
All schools private with government regulation.
Voucher system with public schools.
Tuition tax credit with public schools.
Homeschooling legal.
Private schools restricted.
Homeschooling illegal.
Private schools illegal.
Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
The bolded items, representing the politically possible amongst all conceivable options, are the Overton window. The idea is to shift that window in the preferred direction. In Michigan today, the Overton window looks substantively different:
No government involvement in education.
All schools private with government regulation.
Voucher system with public schools.
Tuition tax credit with public schools.
Homeschooling legal.
Private schools restricted.
Homeschooling illegal.
Private schools illegal.
Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
Step by step, ideas that were once radical or unthinkable -- homeschooling, tuition tax credits, and vouchers -- have moved into normal public discourse. Homeschooling is popular, tuition tax credits are sensible, and vouchers are acceptable. (On the latter, they've been soundly defeated in Michigan of late, but the point is that they are a part of normal public and political discourse.) The de facto illegality of homeschooling, by contrast, has gone the way of the dodo. The conscious decision to shift the Overton window is yielding its results.
So there's your tip from the VRWC for the day. It's a methodology that could work for the left as easily as the right, although I'm not aware of a single left-wing think tank (and they are few) that operates so systemically. If you're of an analytic bent, and want to figure out where a legislative or policy strategy is heading, try constructing the scale of possibilities and the Overton window for the subject at hand. Change can happen by accident, true: but it is just as often the product of deliberation and intent, and it does all of us well to understand the mechanisms by which it occurs.
I will return full-time on Sunday.
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