The Overton Window and Violence

Since 1945 the Overton Window in the West has been anchored in the centre. That post-war consensus − democracy, mixed economy, NATO, welfare state, social mobility − has kept us steady for nearly eighty years. Whenever the window has been dragged too far left or right, violence has followed.
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The far left’s high point came in the 60s and 70s. The Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weather Underground in America − all turned to bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. They achieved nothing but a backlash. Ordinary people wanted stability with fairness, not permanent revolution, and the left’s promises of sacrifice and solidarity soon curdled into fatigue. That is why the far left burned hot and fizzled out.

The right’s story is different. Thatcher and Reagan shifted the window on economics with privatisation and deregulation − and those changes stuck. Then came the nationalist wave: Le Pen in France, Haider in Austria, Fortuyn in the Netherlands, making immigration the totem of politics. In our own time Trump, Farage, Orbán, Salvini − and Charlie Kirk − have gone further, telling supporters nothing should be taken from them. Not their guns, not their low taxes, not their cultural dominance. Fear of loss was sold as liberty, greed dressed up as common sense. Kirk even dismissed gun deaths as an “unfortunate cost” of freedom.

And now, in death, he is being sanctified. Erika Kirk insists her husband “never hated anyone,” that he “always acted with compassion,” that he was a man of “virtue and good character.” The record says otherwise. He vilified migrants as invaders, mocked LGBTQ people as threats to civilisation, sneered at climate science, and made a career out of humiliating students for the camera. Compassion? He treated gun deaths as expendable. Virtue? His stock-in-trade was scorn. Hate was not absent from his politics. It was the engine.

And the violence has followed. Today it is not the far left planting bombs in banks. It is the far right storming the Capitol, gunning down worshippers in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Buffalo and El Paso, torching mosques and turning conspiracy into carnage. In Britain, it was a white supremacist who murdered Jo Cox. When the window shifts right, rhetoric does not stay rhetorical − it leaks into militias, “lone wolves,” and young men with rifles convinced they are heroes.

That is why the far right endures where the far left collapsed. It does not demand sacrifice but flatters baser instincts − fear, greed, the urge to defend what you imagine is yours − while corroding democratic institutions from within. And when the violence comes, the leaders who fanned the flames call the fallen martyrs. Trump hails Kirk as a hero of “truth and freedom.” Farage hints he might be next. Both demand loyalty, never reflection on the poison they have poured into public life.

Charlie Kirk’s death is not proof that free speech is dying. It is proof of what happens when the centre ground is abandoned and grievance is enthroned. Drag the window from the centre and you don’t just risk violence − you invite it. And then you sanctify it as martyrdom.