this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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I enjoyed when I was a teen but nowadays it seems very both sides-ish.
They didn't change, they always made fun of whatever was there to be made fun of. It was the Overton Window that moved left. They started in the 90s when Bill Clinton was president. If Bill Clinton was running today on the same platform from that time he would be called a South Park Republican.
The overton window didn't move left it's sprinting right.
Depends on your point of reference. Compare it to the 90's, not with 2008.
No it really doesn't.
Just to see if this conversation is worth having: how old were you in 2008?
I finished my university degree by then.
The Overton window moved left? Are you okay?
Compared to when South Park started and was at its peak, it definitely moved left.
You can argue that there has been a rebound to the right post-2016 (which I wouldn't really agree, but at least it would be understandable), but anyone from the 90's who got transplanted to 2025 would be with no shadow of the doubt surprised at how much more accepting of progressive values society has become.
I keep forgetting that Lemmy is dominated by people under 30, which is the most annoying age group to have these type of discussions: they are old enough to think they've lived enough, but still carry this juvenile sense that anything that happened before they were born was either ancient history or not culturally relevant.
I’m 45 you idiot.
Fox News has moved far, far to the right. Some guy was on there the other day talking about how “we” need to take back the word “Nazi” the way black people took back the “n-word.”
Literal, self-identified, Nazi host on a news show on the US’ most popular news channel.
And there are two more news channels much further right than Fox News.
You are a complete lunatic to think the Overton window has moved left.
You can have extreme polarization on both ends while the median gets moved to one direction, idiot.
Name any politician to the left of Reagan.
Oh, that was funny!
Nice talking to you.... good night.
Didn’t think you could.
I could make a list of 100, per year, but by making that kind of anchoring you just showed how you are the extremist one who is out of touch with reality.
I thought you went to bed.
Dude, there was a guy at the presidential inauguration celebration that gave a Nazi salute. Twice. Who afterwards proceeded to get a high ranking job in the government.
The Overton window is travelling right at relativistic speeds.
Are you saying that it has become (a) politically acceptable and (b) by the mainstream to make Nazi salutes?
Of course you can find an extremist minority that would support any type of absurdity, but the Overton Window is about mainstream values. To say that the Overton Window is going right because of Musk's factoids is as baseless as saying that it has gone left because of Jaguar's latest campaign ad.
Let's be real for a moment: imagine you are a high school kid growing up in the 90s and you hear rumors about one of your teachers being gay. There is a good chance most parents would be surprised at this, and even that some would be concerned about it. Today this is a nothing burger. Same if one of the classmates was raised by a single mom, or their parents were divorced.
Similar about usage of recreational drugs. We went from "I smoked but I didn't inhale" in the Clinton's years to "Of course I inhaled, the point was to get high!" from Obama and the biggest scandal around drugs nowadays are around vending machines for edibles close to school.
Depictions of non-traditional nuclear families were still frowned upon, today we make fun of Seinfeld and Friends as "the sitcoms where everyone was white".
Any news about conflict in the middle east were always framed in terms of "terrorist attacks" in Jerusalem, nowadays the discussion is whether or not there is genocide in Gaza.
I have no doubt that the polarization is increased and that the extremes are getting further and further apart, but there are so many things that would be considered taboo then and are completely acceptable by the mainstream today, it's impossible to look at all that and think mainstream society has regressed.
If that was unacceptable by the mainstream, he wouldn't have been able to keep his ceo positions or get his department. The public and the media voicing some concern but otherwise accepting the situation proves that this is within the acceptable mainstream boundaries. It's not an "extremist minority" if it's the president's aide.
The mainstream has no direct influence over the Tesla board, and the ones that do have influence over the board are also interested in destroying the democratic institutions as much as possible.
The mainstream has indirect influence though. If the mainstream had found those actions intolerable, he either wouldn't have done it or there would have been a strong enough backlash from society for him to face consequences. But he did and there wasn't. We all (hopefully) agree that 30 years ago, what he did would have been unacceptable. So there you go, shifted Overton window.
Mainstream means "used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of population, market, scientific community, etc.". There was an action, there was some debate, then everybody shrugged it off and/or moved on. That's acceptance. You can't just say that something isn't mainstream because you feel it isn't.
Sorry, that's a non-sequitur. Aside from his bootlickers and the already extremist voices, there might have a good amount of people trying to downplay it, or trying to excuse him for it, but no one in the mainstream looked at what he did and argued that it should be acceptable to go around making Nazi salutes.
If more people had started doing it after he did it, you'd be totally right. But after all the backlash it was clear that he didn't get any support there.
Anyway, I feel like arguing over specific actions is not helpful when the Overton Window is more about shifts in cultural trends. I'd take the surge of "trad wife influencers" much more seriously as an example of "right shifting" than any controversy over what Elon or any asshole billionaire did or did not do.
Wot ? I'm 60, its gone from a slow drift right to a speed sprint right, since Carter
The Overton Window is about what is "politically acceptable by the mainstream", not the values defended by the majority view. Pick anything that is openly discussed today on NBC and tell me how it would fare on Carter's time.