Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has become the Right’s favorite laughingstock over her two months in office. A quick look of headlines from Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, for example, describes her ideas as “stupid,” claims that an insult went “whistling over her head,” and oddly compares her to a meme from Dr. Phil. These three were just from the first page of articles tagged with her name when I wrote this.
Conservative joke-crackers should beware: Ocasio-Cortez has established herself as a force to be reckoned with, and her so-called “radical” ideas should be taken seriously lest they take hold — a lesson taught by the Overton window.
In the mid-1990s, Joe Overton of the free-market Mackinac Center think tank in Michigan developed the concept of a window of political possibilities. For a policy to be enacted, it must fall within a range of ideas considered “sensible” and “popular” by the public. Moreover, at any given time, actors outside of the window can shift it by making their “radical” ideas more mainstream.
Enter Ocasio-Cortez. In just two months in Washington, she has injected ideas that seemed radical before now into the national conversation, like a 70 percent top marginal tax rate and the Green New Deal. Her January “60 Minutes” interview with Anderson Cooper mentioned raising taxes on the rich and subsequently generated endorsements from the likes of mainstream commentators like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman and presidential candidates like Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.
As the Guardian’s Nathan Robinson explains:
In short, Ocasio-Cortez is single-handedly shifting the Overton window. Today, we may be laughing at her wacky ideas, but tomorrow, we could be living with them unless we take them seriously. Throughout the 20th century, top marginal tax rates regularly topped 70 percent, and major works projects like the New Deal and the Great Society were the norm for liberal presidents.
Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas have only seem “radical” because the Overton window firmly shifted toward the right in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan. Even Democratic President Bill Clinton proudly proclaimed “the era of big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union address. While libertarians like myself may laugh at the idea that either of these men were successful in shrinking the size of government, the rhetorical point remains: The past few decades have been defined by a neoliberal consensus, and Ocasio-Cortez is shifting the Overton window towards socialism.
Let’s stop laughing and start arguing against her.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices.
