How words stopped mattering: The destruction of the Overton Window

When Joseph Overton came up with his theory in the mid 1990s, I doubt he could have guessed how much the view would change since then.

The Overton Window is a political model used for understanding how ideas in society change over time and therefore influence politics. The basic theory is that politicians are limited in what policy will be supported by the public, leading them to only pursue those which are widely accepted as legitimate. This puts them inside the Overton Window. 

While the theory accepts policy ideas exist outside this window, it asserts that politicians risk losing popular support if they are seen to support such ideas.

Political communication is intrinsically linked into the window. How a politician speaks to the public, how they communicate their ideas and how they convince an electorate to vote for them traditionally rested on how delicately they placed themselves within this window.

But what happens when a politician tears up this rulebook, placing themselves firmly outside the classic Overton Window, and starts winning elections because of it? 

To get a flavour of what is considered acceptable politics in 2025, just take a look at what the president of the United States is putting out on his own social media platform Truth Social, dutifully retweeted on X (formerly known as Twitter) by official US Government accounts.

In a singular rant posted on Thanksgiving, Donald Trump said gangs of Somalis roamed through American cities searching for “prey”, called the governor of Minnesota “seriously retarded”, insulted a Muslim congresswoman’s hijab, and called for any foreign nationals who are “non-compatible” with “western civilisation” to be removed from the country. 

Pick any sentence at random from this incoherent and grammatically questionable rant and the chances are high it would have crippled a junior politician's career less than 15 years ago. If any normal leader, let alone the president of the most powerful country in the world, had written a post that included even a tenth of the language contained in Trump’s rant, a resignation would be forced immediately, and the story would be leading the news for weeks.

But Trump gets away with it. He does not care that his tirades exist outside of the classical language of the Overton Window, he just rants and he rants without consequence, redefining what is acceptable in political discourse and creating an increasingly polarised world where conversation, let alone civil debate, is a rarity.

The architect of this overtly aggressive political strategy is former White House chief-of-staff Steve Bannon. The former chairman of American far-right news website Breitbart and current host of the highly controversial War Room podcast was unapologetic about the strategy in an interview with Michael Lewis. 

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis when describing his approach to political campaigning. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

Flooding the zone with shit is an accurate way to describe Trump’s strategy, where he overwhelms the media landscape with an inescapable torrent of content, but hidden within the inflammatory rhetoric and needlessly capitalised words are the tell-tale signs of an insidious trend that has spread across the pond and into political discourse in the UK.

Earlier this month, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was accused of making racist comments about schoolchildren in Glasgow by First Minister John Swinney. In a campaign video Farage highlighted how nearly one in three pupils in the city speak English as a second language, describing this as a “cultural smashing of Glasgow”.

Farage then went on to say that it was unfair on taxpayers that “people like this” should come into the country illegally, promising that Reform would make the fact a “really big issue” in the 2026 Holyrood elections. 

The comments are a thinly-veiled attempt at dog-whistle politics, the subtle “art” of using coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a specific audience who want to hear certain keywords without provoking huge opposition from the general public – a tactic reminiscent of Trump’s early approach to campaigning.

Swinney called the language out, saying it “demonstrated that Nigel Farage is a purveyor of racist views”, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Farage was a “toxic, divisive disgrace”. 

Despite this pushback, Farage has faced no consequences, and Reform actually won a by-election the following week – a huge vote of confidence in a party that has been criticised for its language and approach from all sides of the political spectrum. 

This result begs the question: does the public not care about language a politician uses if they offer a potential solution, however controversial, to a perceived problem? The ideas that Farage is proposing are not necessarily outside of the Overton Window, but the language he is using to convey them is right on that line.

A world where politicians can refer to their opponents as “retarded” and use multilingual children as a political punching bag is not one where sensible, measured and effective policy is created. As this style of communication becomes more common, the result can only be a shift towards more divisive policy creation where the policy ideas that are pitched mirror the harsh language that is used to communicate them, leading to the complete destruction of the Overton Window as a concept.