"After all, do undocumented immigrants with purported gang tattoos truly deserve due process? Is it really so bad to urge citizens to turn on their neighbors and co-workers for saying something outrageous? And is it problematic to punish journalists for reporting facts that the government would rather keep hidden? ( Yes, yes, and yes! come the emphatic cries of constitutional-law experts, civil-liberties advocates, and others who care about this sort of thing.)"
"Or, as the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it to me, the Overton window is moving so far, so quickly, that the more apt way to understand Trump's strategy is: "Fuck the Overton window." Bannon continued: "He's driving deep. Remember, our strategy-I say it every day-is maximalist, a maximalist strategy. You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven't met any resistance.""
"A year into Trump's second term, the emboldened president's maximalist strategy-pushing every norm to its most elastic, and then a bit beyond, and from that new breaking point pushing yet again-conjures the boiling-frog theory, in which a frog placed in boiling water will immediately hop out, but a frog placed in cool water that is slowly heated will complacently boil to death."
Significant portions of the population have been persuaded that the gradual erosion of rights is acceptable. Authorities question due process for undocumented immigrants with purported gang tattoos, encourage citizens to police neighbors and co-workers for speech, and punish journalists who report inconvenient facts. In a second term, the president pursues a maximalist strategy that repeatedly stretches and breaks norms, pushing beyond new breaking points. The tactic functions like the boiling-frog phenomenon, desensitizing the public to incremental harms. Steve Bannon frames the approach as rejecting the Overton window and driving deep until resistance appears.
Read at The Atlantic
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