When Elon Musk appeared on screen at a far-right protest in London and told his audience that violence was coming, he spoke with the air of a man delivering prophecy rather than making a speech. He warned the “reasonable centre” that they could not remain quiet, that politics would come for them whether they liked it or not. He called for the dissolution of Parliament. He framed the matter starkly: fight back or die.
Downing Street promptly condemned the remarks as “dangerous and inflammatory.” The Guardian explained that, while many were appalled, Musk had not broken the law. Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, reassured the public that martial metaphors are common currency in political speech. Musk had not instructed his audience to march on Parliament immediately. He had stayed just the safe side of incitement.
This is the language of the Overton Window. It is the language of strategists and advisers who calculate what can be said, what cannot be said, and what might be made sayable if introduced artfully enough. The Window is not a theory of history but a theory of messaging. It was coined in an American think tank in the 1990s and has since been adopted by politicians across the West. The idea is simple. The public will only tolerate a narrow range of proposals at any one time, but the range can be shifted. Float an extreme proposal and the merely radical begins to appear moderate. Repeat the once unthinkable often enough and it may come to seem inevitable.
Musk understands this instinctively. He speaks not to persuade by reason but to normalise by repetition. By presenting violence as an inevitable feature of the political landscape, he changes the terms of what can be spoken of. What was once the rhetoric of cranks becomes fodder for discussion on primetime news. The Guardian’s paradox, that his speech was inflammatory yet not unlawful, is not a flaw but the very mechanism of the Overton Window at work.
This way of doing politics stands in stark contrast to the tradition of the dialectic. Hegel’s dialectic is not about what can be marketed but about how contradictions drive history. Thesis meets antithesis. Out of their conflict comes synthesis, a resolution that contains what was true in both positions. The dialectic is not a rhetorical trick. It is an attempt to think with and through the stubborn contradictions of the age.
The dialectic acknowledges tension. It assumes that societies are riddled with irreconcilable forces, and that history is the slow working out of their confrontation. To ignore contradiction is to ignore reality. The dialectic demands patience, reflection, and a willingness to be schooled by experience. It is the opposite of the communications consultant’s art.
The Overton Window, by contrast, promises a shortcut. Why labour to resolve contradictions when you can declare them settled by making one side unsayable. Why cultivate the virtues of statesmanship when you can hire an adviser who knows which phrase will make tomorrow’s headline. The dialectic is philosophy and history. The Window is advertising.
In Britain, no one mastered this new politics more thoroughly than Margaret Thatcher. She declared that “there is no alternative” to her programme of liberalisation, privatisation, and the weakening of organised labour. It was not an argument in the dialectical sense. It was the narrowing of the Window so that anything outside it appeared absurd. When Labour returned to power under Tony Blair, it did so only after conceding the ground Thatcher had made unassailable. New Labour governed with communications strategists at its core. Peter Mandelson was not an adviser in the Burkean sense of an elder statesman offering counsel. He was the embodiment of the new political class: part pollster, part salesman, part conjuror of appearances.
This was not progress in the dialectical sense. The contradictions between capital and labour, between globalisation and local security, between market efficiency and social solidarity, were not resolved. They were masked. They were marketed as settled. Inequality deepened, but it was presented as the price of dynamism. Communities hollowed out by deindustrialisation were invited to celebrate the knowledge economy. It was a triumph of perception management. It was also a papering over of cracks that would later split wide open.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump offers a grotesque variation on the theme. He does not finesse the Overton Window so much as kick it off its hinges. Yet the logic is the same: shift the bounds of the acceptable by repetition, by spectacle, by sheer audacity. The contradictions ignored by decades of bipartisan neoliberal consensus, stagnant wages, cultural dislocation, the corrosion of trust, have not disappeared. Trump exploits them, but he does not resolve them. He speaks of the “forgotten men and women” but governs as a plutocrat. He inflams the contradiction between democracy and oligarchy without offering synthesis.
Against this theatre of perception one might recall the warnings of Edmund Burke. For Burke, society was a partnership not only between the living but between the dead and the unborn. It required care, humility, and restraint. It demanded a recognition that institutions and traditions embody more wisdom than any individual strategist can claim. I use the word statesman here in its older sense, not to exclude but to invoke that tradition of politics which prized seriousness, prudence and humility. No modern synonym quite captures that gravity. Statesmanship was stewardship. It was not the business of conjuring slogans. It was the business of holding together a fragile fabric, respecting the slow work of history, and treading carefully upon inheritances we barely understand.
Burke had no patience for shallow schemes imposed by theoreticians who ignored the accumulated wisdom of practice. One suspects he would have had still less patience for government by focus group. What we have in place of statesmen are ministers briefed not by historians or philosophers but by communications consultants. Their craft is to “shift the narrative.” Their measure of success is whether a hostile headline can be avoided. They are shallow people with shallow ideas, elevated far beyond their capacity.
The trouble with treating politics as perception management is that contradictions do not vanish when ignored. They accumulate. They return in forms that are harder to control. The neoliberal settlement that declared there was no alternative eventually encountered the antithesis of populist revolt. The climate targets that were marketed as corporate responsibility now collide with the reality of a warming planet. The manufactured culture wars that fill airtime distract from, but cannot eliminate, the underlying economic discontents.
Contradictions will be resolved one way or another. If politicians will not confront them deliberately, then history will resolve them violently. That is the real danger in Musk’s words. Not that he crossed the line into criminal incitement, but that he plays upon unresolved contradictions and offers only the false clarity of apocalyptic choice, fight or die. The dialectic becomes caricature, stripped of synthesis.
Law can do little here, nor should we wish it to do much more. Free speech must be protected even when it is distasteful. The deeper problem is cultural and political. We have trained ourselves to believe that politics is a battle of perceptions. We reward the consultant who finds the killer line, not the statesman who tends patiently to the contradictions of society. Musk’s words are not an aberration. They are the logical consequence of a political culture that has confused advertising with argument, messaging with meaning.
The task is not to out-message Musk, to invent a cleverer slogan, to shift the Window back by a few degrees. The task is to confront the contradictions that give his rhetoric its purchase. To do otherwise is to indulge in illusion. The dialectic will not be cheated. Contradictions ignored today will return tomorrow. They will be resolved, but not necessarily in ways we would wish.
Politics was never meant to dominate these pages. My work began with quieter pursuits: the study of old texts, reflection on the sacred, attention to nature. Yet Burke reminds us that society is a trust handed down across generations. To neglect politics when it corrodes that inheritance feels like an abdication. Slogans and spin may drown out memory, but history does not forget. The duty remains: to write of what we have received, so that something endures for those who come after.
Consilium 
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