Ruminations on living outside the Overton window

Aweh, My Dearly Beloved Fellow Ruminants & Groupies,

On Monday, Elongated Rusk graced X with this gem: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” That’s it. That’s how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced the collapse of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

And collapse is the right word. USAID’s sudden death has sent a shockwave through South Africa’s healthcare system. Clinics like Wits RHI are shutting down, leaving over 100,000 people, including thousands of children, without lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment. PEPFAR, which once propped up 13,000+ healthcare workers and funded 17% of the national HIV/AIDS budget, has vanished overnight. The damage isn’t theoretical—it’s happening now. And beyond South Africa? The chaos spreads. Food aid programs disintegrate, disease control efforts falter, and education initiatives collapse. The U.S. hasn’t just stepped back from the global stage; it’s tripped over the curtain and taken half the set with it.

Critics of foreign aid argue that taxpayer money should be spent at home rather than abroad. They see it as fostering dependency, enabling corruption, and ultimately failing to create lasting change. From that perspective, USAID’s destruction isn’t a disaster—it’s a long-overdue course correction.

But whatever the rationale, torching a decades-old aid program over the weekend is like setting fire to a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean—sudden, brutal, and leaving millions scrambling for survival while the arsonist yells, “Just swim harder!”

Let’s introduce the concept of the Overton window to analyse this. The Overton Window is the range of ideas society considers acceptable at any given moment. Named after policy analyst Joseph Overton, it shifts over time—what was once extreme can become mainstream, and what was once mainstream can become unthinkable. Politicians don’t push the Window; they follow it, adapting to what the public is willing to tolerate.

Normally, the Overton Window drifts like a lazy river—slow, meandering, reshaping the landscape over decades. But this? This was no gentle current. This was the dam bursting overnight, a tidal wave obliterating the old consensus in one chaotic rush. On Friday, USAID was an untouchable institution; by Monday, it was political mulch. No long debate, no careful shift—just the sound of the woodchipper roaring to life, swallowing decades of policy in one violent, grinding weekend. The Window didn’t just move; it was yanked off its hinges and hurled into the void.

And here’s the thing: Will the woodchipper stop once it starts running?

Once upon a time, dismantling USAID was a fever dream, the kind of thing muttered by a lone crank at the end of the bar. But shift the Overton Window far right—frame foreign aid as wasteful, spin “America First” as gospel, let crisis fatigue set in—and suddenly, “feeding USAID into the woodchipper” isn’t radical, it’s weekend plans. The impossible became inevitable, the unthinkable became policy, and now we’re sifting through the shredded remains while being told it was always meant to be this way.

Now, you might say, “But Bruce, aren’t you also trying to push the Overton Window? Isn’t that what you do?” And fair enough—Ruminant Pink Friday pisses into the wind with the best of them. The difference? I’m an obscure blogger screaming into the void, not the richest man on Earth reprogramming the future like a toddler smashing buttons on a self-driving car.

But still, the Overton Window isn’t always a force for destruction. Slavery was once the norm; now, it’s universally condemned. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, and gay marriage—all started as radical ideas before becoming inevitable. Even the 40-hour workweek and smoking bans were once laughable. The Window moves, and sometimes, it moves toward progress.

If one weekend can turn USAID into sawdust, what happens next? The woodchipper’s still running, and Elongated Rusk’s got that look in his eye—the one that says bored now, let’s break something else.

Next weekend, maybe it’s the Department of Education, gutted like an old mainframe no one bothered to update. The weekend after? The Environmental Protection Agency tossed into the grinder with a shrug and a tweet: “Nature will balance itself, trust the algorithm.” By the time we hit April, who knows? The Federal Reserve, replaced by Dogecoin? The IRS, outsourced to a chatbot? At this pace, the only thing left standing by summer might be SpaceX, Tesla, and a stack of libertarian manifestos.

Has America gone full goblin mode? Take it to the extreme, and America isn’t just retreating—it’s barricading itself in a titanium panic room, mainlining tariffs and protectionism like an overcaffeinated doomsday prepper hoarding bullets and baked beans. Borders? Locked down tighter than Fort Knox. Imports? Replaced with patriotic mandates to “just make our own.” Elections? Why bother when a handful of billionaires and tech bros can “steer the ship more efficiently?”

Meanwhile, the middle-class Trump voters who cheered this on might start noticing that the factory jobs aren’t exactly stampeding back and that everything now costs more. Maybe this is the start of a bold new era of self-reliance, or maybe America just stormed out of the global playground, daring the rest of the world to get by without it. Either way, history’s next report card is going to have a big fat note: Does not play well with others.

And just like that, the Overton Window isn’t creeping along—it’s been strapped to a rocket and launched into the stratosphere. What was unthinkable last month is reality today, and what seems absurd now might just be next weekend’s executive order. The shift isn’t orderly or predictable; it’s a freefall, a chaotic lurch from one extreme to the next, driven less by ideology than by impulse.

Maybe this all settles into a new normal. Or maybe the Window keeps accelerating until nothing is off the table. Either way, the lesson is clear: Once the woodchipper starts running, you never really know what’s getting fed into it next.

Thanks for all the comments and input.

Bruce