Bronze-level articleHorseshoe theory

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The horseshoe theory in political science stipulates that the far-left and far-right are more similar to each other in essentials than either are to the political center.

It was formulated by the French post-postmodernist philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye, who believed that the extremes of the political spectrum both represented totalitarianism of different kinds; this meant that the political spectrum should not be described as a linear bar with the two ends representing the far-left and right being ideologically the furthest apart from each other, but as a horseshoe in which the two ends are closer to each other than to the center. George Orwell also noted this phenomenon in his writings, although he never attempted to give it a formal definition.

Contents

[edit] Examples

Diagram of the political horseshoe

On the left side of the horseshoe are placed communist countries such as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba under Fidel Castro, North Korea under Kim II-sung, and, well, every other communist country, with "happiest-barrack" countries like Hungary under "goulash communism" and Yugoslavia furthest from the end.

On the right side goes (in order from the end) Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, Pinochet's Chile, Fascist Italy, Franquist Spain, and various clerical-fascist regimes, military dictatorships, and monarchies.

In the center is the center-left to center-right continuum occupied by mainstream political parties in the countries that have adopted democracy and liberal capitalism.

One rather explicit example of the horseshoe theory in action is third positionism, which intentionally blends far-left and far-right politics. Fringe political movements such as the one initiated by Lyndon LaRouche also take ideas from both fringes of the spectrum. Certain other ideologies, such as North Korea's Juche, have also been known to mix far-left and far-right politics.

[edit] Authoritarian parties

Authoritarian type parties on the hard-left and hard-right may not represent the furthest ends of the political spectrum but still mirror each other in significant ways.

Take the anti-pragmatic side of the United States Republican Party (especially the Religious Right) and compare it to the modern Communist Party of the Russian Federation and you can find quite a few similarities (besides the obvious one that both are ideologues focused on the "purity" of their movement), especially on social policies. In fact, if each party's leaders avoided talking to each other about economics they would find more common ground than they may expect, especially considering their vehement hatred for each other. For instance:

Bob Altemeyer's research backs the theory that authoritarian types tend to mirror each other, even if they aren't as extreme to the right or left as they could be.

[edit] Objectivism and Marxism

John Galt
Che Guevara

Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism has frequently been described as the "Marxism of the Right," mainly by its critics.[20] For example, Whittaker Chambers, in his review[21] of Atlas Shrugged, suggested that Rand's materialism, despite all protests to the contrary, was functionally almost identical to the Marxism that she so despised. The similar personality cults that have been developed around each of them has also caused parallels to be made between Karl Marx and Ayn Rand- both are small political groups that base themselves around a largely discredited economic philosopher (or a shitty novelist, in Rand's case) who is seen as a divine authority on how life works and what the ideal moral system would be like. Both are obsessed with ideological purity within the group and especially on who (if anyone) can take up the writer's mantle now that they are no longer alive, and both have significant infighting because certain members couldn't be bothered to put their small differences aside and try to advance the movement's credibility in the academic and social spheres.

Further parallels could be made between the New Left and the libertarian movement. Both are stereotyped as largely recruiting from middle-to-upper class teenagers who have enough leisure time to actually read radical manifesto's and members of both movements tend to hold extreme economic views that have "silver bullet" solutions with a Utopian-edge to them which are widely discredited by mainstream economics. Furthermore both were/are rather paranoid of the United States government and their primary appeal to younger people tends to be in their uncompromising social[22] and foreign policy[23] views that can actually be agreeable if not admireable but even then tend to be taken to unfortunate extremes (ie. much of the New Left wanting to outright align with Communist countries and libertarians holding absurdly hardline isolationist views). Finally both tend to overlook times when their economic systems were put in place and failed, usually by claiming it's not a "real" example of their system being put into effect and next time it will work out fine or, even more crazily, by presenting such times as Golden Ages. Neither can adequetly explain why no countries have major movements supporting their cause and when they do they tend to argue it's because most people are just too dumb to see the truth because the bread and circuses are keeping them from seeing it.

[edit] Birchers and Communists

Historian Richard Hofstader noted the similarities between the recruiting methods used by both radical left and radical right groups when he wrote "The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through 'front' groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy." Hofstader also quoted New Right leader Barry Goldwater, who said "I would suggest that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not."[24] Cue the historical origins of neoconservatism. Important figures in the parallel development of Thatcherism, such as Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman, similarly modelled their tactics on the Leftist idea of the "long march through the institutions". Another rather explicit example of this is some Tea Party members reading the writings of leftist Saul Alinsky because of his suggestions on how to have a successful "radical" movement.

Hofstader also points out the other examples of the radical right and ultraconservative emulating the "enemy". For example, while the "paranoid" may be an anti-intellectual "the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry." Glenn Beck has been cited as a modern example of this.[25]

In fact despite the dislike and paranoia many hard-right figures have for acadamia they often end up mimicking academia in many mays because as Hofstader notes their style of writing "is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies." The modern right-wing pundits habit of overstuffing their book with unneccessary footnotes has become so cliche that even Stephen Colbert mocked it in his book "America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't".

[edit] Islamists and Islamophobes

Islamists and Islamophobes (as in actual Islamophobes on the order of Britain First, Geert Wilders, etc., rather than people who've been labeled as such by people nervous of racism) seem to have more in common with each other than either mainstream Western or Islamic society, to the point that each could be described as an identical phenomenon occurring in different cultures.

Both share extreme social and often religious conservative views, have a clear sense of their own culture's superiority, a tendency to see other cultures as morally deficient and a threat to one's own culture, a powerful sense of group belonging, a tendency to view the opposing side as one homogeneous horde of evil (and thus if one member of the other side does something awful it reflects badly on all of them), a tendency to dehumanise the other side, a desire to "cleanse" their perceived homelands of all foreign influence, and a keenness on violence as a solution.

Furthermore, they have a complete blindness to the failures of their own culture and will without any apparent sense of irony rip into the other side's culture for things their own is guilty of. For instance, Islamophobes have a nasty tendency to morph into feminists as soon as the subject is Islam yet will revert to their natural sexist form when discussing their own culture and will gladly call feminists all the names under the sun. Conversely, Islamists see Islam as the only culture in which women are respected, unlike in the West where women are forced to behave like "whores" (that are allowed to drive, leave the country of their own free will, choose who they marry, testify in court, etc.).

[edit] TERFs and the Religious Right/MRAs

One of the more extreme wings of the feminist movement, trans-exclusionary radical feminism ("TERF"), has, in the past, worked closely with religious conservatives on some sexual matters, despite their otherwise fervent hatred of each other.[26] The two seem to get along on matters that have to do with wanting pornography and prostitution to be banned, being hostile to the transsexual community, and a dislike of certain other sexual minorities (bisexuals, the BDSM community, etc.).[27] Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale even presents TERFs as having colluded in the formation of the theocratic Republic of Gilead over such issues.

Similarly TERFs have been repeatedly compared to MRAs[28] (men's rights activists) due to both having the tendency to direct overly aggressive rhetoric at the opposite sex, which is almost always based around hasty generalizations. Both may also overestimate the power of their enemy, believing that there is an organized effort by the media/society to destroy/oppress their gender. Some MRA's have even emulated fringe radical feminists, such as through the Men Going Their Own Way movement which encourages straight men to avoid women, much like what fringe radical feminists do with political lesbianism, which encourages women to stay away from men. Also both groups are (obviously) typically transphobic, and have both attracted certain homophobes.[29] MRA's also have a tendency to look for bias against them in the media even where none may exist, such as if a women bests a man in combat on television there is a tendency to immediently assume this is for "PC empowerment" as opposed to more likely reasons such as plot convenience (apparently the idea this is very possible is too crazy to be taken seriously).[30] This is especially ironic considering this is basically what they decry radical feminists of doing (i.e. eagerly looking for bias against women where none may exist).

[edit] White and black nationalists

White nationalist and black nationalist groups have been known to get along and even collaborate in the past. The founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was invited by Elijah Muhammad to speak at a Nation of Islam rally; in turn, Rockwell "praised" Muhammad as the "Black People's Hitler." White supremacist Tom Metzger has also praised the Nation of Islam for their anti-Semitic views, and future British National Party leader Nick Griffin distributed Nation of Islam publications in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s.

From a purely ideological perspective, it makes sense. Both white and black nationalists believe that their respective races ought to be kept separate so as to "protect" their ethnic/cultural identities from being diluted through contact with the other, and would thus see a movement trying to enforce such separation from the other side as a natural ally. As a result, both sides have little love for the pro-integration wing (MLK, the NAACP, etc.) of the civil rights movement. There also exists shared belief in racialism, albeit in somewhat different forms. While white nationalists tend to follow the discredited ideas of turn-of-the-20th-century scientific racism, black nationalists likewise have melanin theory and Afrocentric pseudohistory. Lastly, a lot of the same anti-Semitic conspiracy theories circulate in both white and black nationalist circles, with the latter in particular claiming that the Jews were responsible for slavery.

There is also a tendency for Leftists and Rightists to join together in condemnation of white people who take from black American or Jamaican musical influences, with the former attacking them for "cultural appropriation" (or simply "theft") and the latter attacking them for being "race traitors" (sometimes glossed up, especially in Britain, by calling them "class traitors").

[edit] The Unabomber

The American domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, has been embraced as a hero by people and groups on both the far left and the far right. On the left, a number of hard greens have embraced his anti-industrial, neo-Luddite ideology on environmental grounds. The anarchist collective CrimethInc., for example, has an extended hagiography declaring Kaczynski "a hero for our time", claiming that the actions of his targets against people and the environment made his bombing campaign justified.[31] On the right, he's also won the affection of radical traditionalists and other reactionaries due to his view that modern technology was responsible for the decadence, crumbling moral values, and tyranny of the modern world. Right-wing pundit Keith Ablow, for one, has defended Kaczynski's ideology; while he took great pains to state that he thought Kaczynski's actions were wrong, he went on to state that his ideas "are increasingly important" and "cannot be dismissed", saying that his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, deserved a place alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.[32][33] According to Ablow's logic, since the NSA is spying on us and Barack Obama heavily employed the internet as a key campaign and outreach tool, that means that the internet is totally rotten to the core and that Kaczynski was right about technology.

[edit] In fiction

One of the most famous demonstrations of the horseshoe theory was in George Orwell's Animal Farm, a satirical critique of Soviet communism and how it had betrayed its working class revolutionary roots. The animals' revolution, after overthrowing the farm's cruel human owners, quickly turns into exactly the same sort of tyranny that the humans had once imposed upon them — all in the name of stopping counter-revolutionaries, of course. To represent this evolution, the pigs, the leaders of the revolution, start taking on an increasing number of human-like qualities, until at the end they cannot be distinguished from them.

[edit] In religion

The horseshoe theory can be seen in other ways besides far-right/far-left politics. Anti-Catholicism and Traditionalist Catholicism, seemingly opposites, share the same predilection to anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, and New World Order conspiracy theories, and to conspiracy theories about the current Catholic Church leadership. One can see similar parallels between the conspiracist views of Mormon writer W. Cleon Skousen and anti-Mormon writer Ed Decker, and between New Ager David Icke, and fundamentalist Christian, anti-New Age writer Texe Marrs.

Even when it comes to religious prejudice Richard Hofstader can note examples of extremists emulating the "enemy". For example, he references the fact that despite the Ku Klux Klan's extreme protestant views and anti-Catholicism they ended up imitating Catholicism "to to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy."

[edit] Similarities

There are several common features of far-left and far-right politics and political movements.

[edit] Use of othering in rhetoric

Both far-right and far-left movements portray their enemies in a dehumanizing manner as a faceless mass. Often the enemy group is portrayed as having much more power than they actually have, approaching the near-omnipotence of Satan.

Enemy groups used by the far-right can be defined by ethnicity or class; common targets are local ethnic minorities, as well as international bankers and foreigners in general. The far-left largely uses class to define its enemies, such as bankers (these guys just can't catch a break!), industrialists, and other Bourgeois Capitalist Oppressors; however, some anti-colonial and similar movements associated with the left-wing, such as Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, use race or ethnicity as the defining factor.

The "othered" group is portrayed as having to be swept aside in some way in order to make things better; this has led to the groups in question being marginalized, or further marginalized, or subjected to mass slaughter as in Nazi Germany, the Holodomor, communist Cambodia, the slave trade etc.

[edit] Insistence on orthodoxy

Far-left and far-right movements often require adherents (or all people in their jurisdiction, if they get into power) to adhere to a very rigid set of beliefs, expelling or punishing heretics and dissenters. These beliefs are often accompanied by an ad hominem to be used against any dissenter; for example, that a non-communist has false consciousness, or that a non-Nazi is of Jewish descent, or that an opponent of apartheid in South Africa is a communist, or the simple "sheeple."

In a cult-like manner, people who defect from the "true faith," or else are insufficiently doctrinaire, are not merely said to have changed their minds or voiced dissent: they are viewed as traitors and apostates, who have have sold their souls completely to the hated enemy for the most venal of motives. This is the logic that motivates Tea Party supporters to accuse pro-bailout Republican presidents of being secret socialists (a sure sign that the accuser has read neither Marx nor any mainstream economic textbook). It also explains the mutual loathing between the various strains of communism (e.g. between Stalinists, Trotskyists and Maoists[34]).

Often this can take form in accusations that anyone who disagrees with them must be an extremist working for the other side. An example of this would be American radical right pundits constantly trying to "prove" fairly moderate presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower or Barack Obama were/are political radicals/socialists (or in Ike's case a communist agent) in order to portray them as dangerous while ignoring the fact that they themselves are very far from the political center. Likewise Stalinist groups label(ed) anyone who broke from the Soviet Union's idea of communism, including Trotskyists and social democrats, as secretly being fascists or agents of capitalism. Of course this makes a kind of sense, if you're very far from the political centre then anyone even slightly closer to it would appear (to you) to be far to your "right" or "left".

The most obvious manifestation of this is the hundreds and hundreds of splinter-sects that have grown out of right and left-wing movements through disagreements on fairly minor points, with more infighting than cooperation going on between them. This was satirized in the film Life of Brian as a dust-up between the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea.

[edit] Conspiratorial thinking

Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.
August Bebel

Fringe ideologies often appeal to neurotic and paranoid types, and actual political positions often take a back seat to their mental states. Thus, conspiratorial thinking beyond the bounds of reason tends to characterize political extremes, so much so that the libertarian right and the anarcho-(your movement here) left seem interchangeable. Take the 9/11 truther movement, which thrives on both political fringes because conspiratorial ideation and extreme values are correlated. This is not, of course, to say that all belief in the existence of conspiracies is irrational. But when someone views conspiracy as the prime mover behind history, or sees a unified conspiracy theory behind fall of every leaf, they've gone off the edge of the map.

Historical revisionism is common on the political fringes. A wide selection of isolationist weirdos and unreformed anti-Semites on the Old Right have famously sought to rationalize, downplay, or flat-out deny the Holocaust. So too have a vocal minority of crazy assholes within the anti-Zionist movement.

Likewise, a few hard-core leftists have denied that the conduct of the Bosnian War constituted a genocide. Some of the absolute worst revisionists, like Edward S. Herman,[35] even claim that the Bosnian Serb militias' massacre of at least 8,373[36] unarmed Muslim civilians at and around Srebrenica was a legitimate act of self-defense, a shadowy Muslim mass-suicide, or an elaborate hoax. Presumably, these deniers fear it would be "imperialist" to say that big bad NATO, which eventually intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo, once did a good thing. Even Noam Chomsky has occasionally indulged in this intellectual dishonesty: He once claimed that the Trnopolje camp[wp] was not a concentration camp, because "people could leave if they wanted"[37] (although he has since backed off on this). In this particular debate, moonbats align with Orthodox Christian fundamentalists (defending the Serbs as they're predominantly Orthodox too), pan-Slavicists in Russia, neo-fascists like Golden Dawn, paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, and Islamophobic "thinkers" like Pamela Geller and Michael Savage; strange bedfellows indeed.

[edit] Pseudoscience promotion

Quite a large number of extremists have but little regard for science, and are often openly dismissive of it, seeing it as part of the bourgeois/liberal/Jewish/what-have-you establishment. As a result, they are very prone to promoting various pseudoscientific ideas. Well-known examples include:

  • Christian, Muslim, and other religious fundamentalists deny any scientific findings contradicting their religion, such as evolution or global warming.
  • The Nation of Islam, also denying certain parts of evolution, teaches that white people were created by a mad scientist six thousand years ago.
  • Racist groups deny any scientific findings suggesting that the races are not separate sub-species or something of that description, while promoting bullshit claims such as those found in The Bell Curve and outright pseudoscientific theories such as scientific racism.
  • Marxists promoted their philosophy as "scientific socialism."
  • The Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, banned scientific disciplines that contradicted their view of society, such as genetics and Darwinian evolution.
  • Nazi Germany attempted to suppress the work of Albert Einstein and other Jewish physicists simply because they were Jewish, instead promoting Deutsche Physik as an "Aryan" alternative.
  • Fringe groups on both the left and right are prone to promoting crankier forms of alternative medicine, often accompanying it with conspiracy theories about Big Pharma. Survivalists, New Agers, Occupiers, Teabaggers, Huffington Post readers, Alex Jones readers, and Christian and Islamic fundamentalists all can be found in the big anti-vaxxer tent.
  • 9/11 conspiracy theories are a recreational sport on both the far right and the far left, as is anti-GMO wackery.

[edit] Criticism

The horseshoe theory has come under some criticism — mostly from extremists who see themselves as being complete, utter, Manichaean opposites of the people on the other side of the spectrum. The simplest criticisms are from those who acknowledge the similarities between the two extremes, but say that they are fighting for the "right people" while their enemies are not.

On the right-wing side, the criticisms are often couched in terms of religion, with right-wingers claiming that they are completely different from left-wingers because they believe in different "gods," or different takes on the same God. One example is the contrast drawn during the U.S.'s Second Red Scare between Christianity and "Godless Communism."

A common gambit on the left-wing side[38] is to claim that none of the communist states are representatives of 'True' (Classical Marxist) Communism, which has nothing in common with the evil right-wing fascist extremism. One would be mistaken to think that this is an example of the No True Scotsman argument, if it weren't for the fact that Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, described it as 'State Capitalist' (as opposed to Socialist) himself, explaining that State Capitalism was a path to Socialism as proposed in his 1921 New Economic Policy.

Another variant of the same argument is that the term "left-wing" refers to philosophies that promote broader democracy, political participation, and social equality, and that any form of government straying from this ideal is automatically right-wing instead. In considering this criticism it is instructive to look at the origins of the term "left-wing," which originally referred to the people who sat on the left side of the National Assembly during the French Revolution. Among these original left-wingers was Maximilien Robespierre, on whose watch the revolutionary government, still seated on the left wing, staged a series of political purges, executing about 40,000 people in the space of ten months.

From the other direction, abuse of the horseshoe theory can lead to the balance fallacy and appeals to moderation. This is a problem common among Very Serious People and radical centrists, who, in their desire to avoid slipping into one partisan extreme or another, often have the opposite problem and go out of their way to characterize both sides as being fundamentally crazy, even if one side or the other may very well be clearly in the right in this instance.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Communist leader proposes reinstatement of death penalty for terrorists
  2. Russian communists attack liberalism and abortion
  3. "Zyuganov declared that national culture and morals are being deliberately destroyed in Russia"
  4. A popular talking point for Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others
  5. Damn liberal media!
  6. Damn pro-Putin media! (Arguably more justified in this case, but it's still exaggerated)
  7. "The peaceful development of the USSR was interrupted by the perfidious attack by Nazi Germany and its satellites."
  8. Such as Texas "revising" textbooks to fit an American exceptionalist point of view
  9. Or wingnuts such as Glenn Beck who claim MLK was a conservative.
  10. They openly call for the "Re-Stalinization of Russia." Seriously.
  11. Can the GOP be saved from its obsession with the 1950s?
  12. "They're snuffing out the America that I grew up in"
  13. Who'd have thought the commies don't like taxes either?
  14. Zyuganov and Religion: On the Current State of the Russian Communist Party
  15. Wanting to outlaw flag burning is common for wingnuts and commies
  16. See link #14
  17. This can be said for many other political parties, but they are especially abusive.
  18. Stop the lies about the Founding Fathers and slavery!
  19. Stop the lies about Stalin and Lenin!
  20. For example, George Monbiot, in this article for The Guardian.
  21. Chambers, Whittaker. "Big Sister Is Watching You", National Review, 28 December 1957.
  22. opposing racism and supporting sexual freedom for the New Left, opposing the War on Drugs for libertarians
  23. Opposing the Vietnam War for the New Left, opposing the Iraq war for libertarians
  24. Richard Hofstader, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Boston: Harvard University Press 1964) p. 33 ISBN 0674654617
  25. http://www.salon.com/2010/09/15/hofstadter/
  26. Sheila Jeffreys supports the radical right
  27. Janice G. Raymond, Ph.D., Transsexual, Transgender, and Intersex History, 1998, [1] (See Raymond working with Jesse Helms.)
  28. Skeptics seem to agree on this actually.
  29. TERFs, MRAs and lies about trans people
  30. This is also an odd complaint considering that weaker men regularly defeat stronger men on television so long as they're the hero.
  31. "The Unabomber: A Hero For Our Time." CrimethInc.
  32. Bishop, Thomas. "Fox News' Keith Ablow: Unabomber Was Right That Liberals Are 'Psychologically Disordered'." Media Matters for America, 26 June 2013.
  33. "Dr. Keith Ablow's Political Hero, the Unabomber." Respect the Blankie, 28 June 2013.
  34. It was pretty much de rigueur for every proper communist dictator to get his own -ism. Hence Albanian Hoxhaism, North Korean Kim Il Sungism (Juche), Yugoslav Titoism and so on and so forth.
  35. Edward S. Herman: Genocide denier caught
  36. http://www.war-memorial.net/victims-of-the-srebrenica-massacre-1.171
  37. Noam Chomsky's Denials of Serbian War Crimes
  38. See, for example, Noam Chomsky discussing how non-socialistic the Soviet Union was: [2] [3]
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