The Overton window is one of many metaphors that circulate through my imagination and awareness daily. Oftentimes, these are windows in the political arena, though my attempts to apply what’s right and good, instructive and compelling about how this window shifts possibilities are when I’m using the window in other fields other than politics. Today’s Overton is squarely within politics, which I read decades ago was the ability to use power.
A Politico headline that contesting Chuck Schumer is improbable if the Dems win 51 seats in the Senate. This would be below-the-fold, not noteworthy, except for Heather Timmons reporting in The Guardian four days ago, a feature of Ralph Nader, in which he said:
“The best thing that could happen for the Democrats is for [Senator Chuck] Schumer and [Hakeem] Jeffries to be voted out in January,”
Maybe Jordain Carney and Caleb Razor’s article in Politico is a speculative nonfiction piece that Schumer will be challenged and cast out, in the purportedly 12% chance that the Dems don’t win a majority. It’s a story that features a bizarre quote from New Mexico’s junior senator that is him asking a reporter if anybody has said that they’re running for the majority leader seat. It’s a wise statement to give since it doesn’t answer whether he would or wouldn’t vote for Schumer though it does hint that he wants to consider. Or at least that the lede of this article is moot until somebody else announces, and nobody has said they’re coming to oust Schumer, regardless of the results.
Where the two articles do overlap, possibly intertwine, is that Nader said “the best thing” and maybe the caucus of U.S. Senators of Democrats don’t want the best thing for the rest of us. Though, I’d attest that another two years of middling, milquetoast Chuck isn’t in their interest either. It’s a symptom of how shitass the system design, the ineffective, unhealthiness of the current functioning of the two party, federal, political apparatus that the barriers to entry are so steep, that a role with such duty and power is so unwanted, if not loathed, by the few dozen people who could make a contest for the role and also are the few dozen arbiters of who leads the Democratic majority in the upper chamber. This reveals how divergent who Nader is concerned with and what’s happening, the inside baseball of the U.S. Senate. Timmons wrote that 3 ways Nader suggests that Dems could be bold are:
- Prosecute corruption
- Restore federal agencies
- Change things for the working class
It’s been true for decades that rarely do we experience the best things in politics. The compromises squander and shrink windows when the values of so many across the aisle are grossly unjust, denigrating and dehumanizing vast classes of people due to their gender, nationality, skin color. Where the Dems have bound themselves in a broken two-party system is attempting to negotiate on policies, to arrive at the coveted bipartisan with men and women who do not treat all people as equal. The Dems have not broken through the logjam by figuring out how to identify and support candidates who could show how craven and awful their opponents were. The Dems have been resigned to being a mediocre team for longer than I’ve been alive. Rather than boldly change how politics happens, they’ve opted to benefit mightily rather than fight and win on the issues that most people — that is both most U.S. citizens and most people throughout the world — value, seek, and want for bigger plans. When politics has been so callous for so long, it’s no wonder the imaginations are numbed after reservoirs of political will evaporate.
