the stupidity of the horseshoe theory
The horseshoe theory is probably one of the funniest pseudo-scientific political “theories” out there. In case you’re unfamiliar with this theory, I’m sorry to be the one to disturb your blissful ignorance of it (that I’m jealous of), but here’s what it is: It’s the understanding that the political spectrum is shaped like a horseshoe in which Far-Right and Far-Left beliefs, like illiberalism and anti-establishment positions, converge and both become functionally the same.
I would like to discuss why this theory is an outlandish, misguided, and simplistic vestige for obscuring the nuance of the drivers for different people holding superficially similar beliefs for completely different reasons. Yes, this has been discussed at length, I’m just young, I know. But this theory’s permanence in political discourse deserves a constant reminder of why it’s stupid.
Before I write any more, I would like to preface that (1) some uncited things are from lectures I had and I can’t cite them without completely doxxing myself, and (2) the terms Far-Left and Far-Right encompass a variety of different, sometimes contradictory currents that I don’t want to get into the weeds of because I’m writing a blog post and not a dissertation. Understand the Far-Left as the political current that is queerfeminist, secular, internationalist, direct-democratic, environmentalist, anti-imperalist, decolonial, antifascist, socialist and antimilitarist, while the Far-Right is monarchistic, fundamentalist, right-libertarian, militarist, and fascist.
Horseshoe theory is appealing because political power in liberal democracies is attained through the electoral process, unless it’s bypassed from which nobody’s safe, that favors parties to form governments or coalition governments which leads the Far-Left and Far-Right to employ superficially similar tactics to get there. A commonality between Far-Left and Far-Right political parties is populism which is defined by Cas Mudde (2004) as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This means that people subscribing to populist political parties—left or right—are generally dissatisfied with the political center, considered the establishment or elite, that needs to be replaced with a good elite that turns the general will of the people into good policies. Populism is simply a consequence of mass politics: To rile up the masses for a cause, an “Us vs Them” mentality is necessary. Depending on the type of populism, sometimes the outcome is productive, other times destructive.
Since both the far-right and far-left parties tend to be anti-establishment, it is easy to equate their politics—only if you have maggots for brains. While the Far-Right caricatures the establishment as being secretly controlled by a cabal of one or various marginalized scapegoats of the zeitgeist, like Jews and other racialized minorities or LGBTQ+ people, the Far-Left views the establishment as bound by economic forces, also known as The Capital®, constraining their public policy to favor capital. Far-Right conspiracists, usually lacking even the pretense of class analysis, blame this on the “International Banker Jewry,” which, aside from being divorced from reality since most rich people aren’t even Jewish (but why am I even bothering to debunk that!), ascribe contradictory attributes to the Jews as a homogenized group, like being collectively communists but also greedily capitalist. It stems from the complete conflation of political theories while using buzzwords to instill fear from a constructed boogeyman because the target audience is neither discerning nor are the propagators themselves in many cases.
Interestingly, you often see statistics of antisemitic crimes that are used to bolster the claim that antisemitism is equally present on the Far-Left as on the Far-Right. Not only do these statistics count acts of anti-Zionism—prevalent among decolonial activists—as antisemitism, they frequently show higher crime rates on the Far-Right than the Far-Left anyway. For example, the numbers on the German Federal Criminal Office website (which make no distinction between ideologies aside from left, right, and the source of bigotry) show the Right committing far more hate crimes of every variety than the Left. This isn’t to say that there isn’t antisemitism on the Left—there is, but equating the two when one commits 27 times the amount of antisemitic crimes than the other boggles the mind.
Returning to anti-establishment sentiments, the proscribed course of action for fixing the establishment differs between the two poles: While the Far-Right would want to replace the elite with good people and wipe out the bad ones, the Far-Left tends to be more constructive in how it blames the systems for their outcomes rather than the people steering the wheel. Thus, they’d want to change the system instead of the people. This is where the next accusation of illiberalism comes into the center: The Far-Right wants to cleanse the system from bad people (fascism) while the Far-Left wants to abolish capitalism and liberal democracy in favor of a grassroots, direct democracy in the political and economic spheres for more public control which I’ll elaborate on later. Both want liberal democracy and specific liberal values (differing wildly in the values they disdain) gone, but not for the same reasons or with the same outcomes. And don’t even bother bringing up the Soviet Union or China to discredit my point because the former was fascist with a socialist veneer while the latter is literally a capitalist dystopia and just as fascist, if not more.
I would like to break from my preface for one exception that I think is really relevant to US politics in particular which is libertarianism. Libertarianism is split between left-wing and right-wing libertarianism and both want the state as we know it gone. The difference between the two lies in why and what should come after. Left-wing libertarianism, usually called anarchism in English, views the state as a tool for oppression and considers socialism unachievable within a state framework because the state functions as a guarantor of debt and ownership relations which must be abolished (meaning no police, prisons, militaries, or secret services) in favor of communal ownership, worker cooperatives, direct democracy, decentralization, and mutual aid. Were the state to own everything, the state would become the sole capitalist. Right-wing libertarianism, on the other hand, is what Elon Musk and Peter Thiel dream of: Everything becomes a market and follows its logic. It follows the belief that were markets left to their own devices and not meddled with by a third party (such as the state), they would be most efficient at the allocation of resources. The state wouldn’t be abolished, but reduced to a security apparatus (police, secret service, military, prisons) remaining to guarantee ownership and debt repayments. The result would be everyone living in subjugation and abject poverty except for a select few who own the most—eventually, one person would own everything. Again, basically the same idea for different reasons and with wildly different outcomes.
When either “faction” is accused of illiberalism, what the accuser usually means, I’d argue, is an opposition to the liberal-democratic order which itself is a synthesis of liberalism, republicanism, and democracy. Liberalism centers the individual and the market, and requires a rule of law to ensure individual autonomy and reliability; Republicanism is present in the division of powers and political representation instead of direct action; Democracy is in the feedback mechanism at the end of an electoral cycle when people choose their rulers (Schaal & Heidenreich, 2016). What, then, do these two broad factions oppose in a liberal democracy? The Far-Right opposes the division of powers, the “checks and balances,” the rule of law, the rule-based international order, but respects the supremacy of the market and the One True Leader. The Far-Left, on the other hand, opposes class society, private property, inequality in all forms, objectifying living beings, punitive justice, and the layers of proceduralism weakening the will of the people. One wants to drive liberal democracy to its logical conclusion, as Chantal Mouffe (2007) would argue is necessary, while the other wants tyranny. How could they be any more different?
In my view, the only way you could subscribe to the horseshoe theory is if you take political slogans of and the accusations levied against the Far-Left at face value. If you don’t investigate why the Far-Left is illiberal or allegedly antisemitic, and believe the self-descriptions of Communist countries—which would only give you away as politically illiterate—then you’d feel threatened instead of empowered by the rising popularity of far-left ideologies such as democratic socialism, let alone anarchism. In the end, only a centrist (for fear of change) and a capitalist (for fear of redistribution and the abolition of private property) should be afraid of the Far-Left while everyone who isn’t far-right should be terrified of the Far-Right.
bibliography
Mouffe, C. (2007). Die Politik und das Politische (N. Neumeier, Trans.) [PDF]. In Über das Politische: Wider die kosmopolitische Illusion (1. Edition, pp. 15–47). Suhrkamp. (Original work published 2005)
Mudde, C. (2004). The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x
Schaal, G. S., & Heidenreich, F. (2016). Einführung in die Politischen Theorien der Moderne. Verlag Barbara Budrich.