This is the season for columnists to offer some new idea that encapsulates the year that was. I got nothing. But 2023 was the year I finally abandoned my opposition to an old idea — the horseshoe theory of political ideologies.
The term is often attributed to French author Jean-Pierre Faye, but the concept is much older. It basically holds that the extreme right (“fascism”) and extreme left (“communism”) bend toward each other like the ends of a horseshoe.
While I’ve always thought totalitarian regimes — Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany — have more similarities than differences, I didn’t believe that the horseshoe theory mapped well in the American context. For starters, it depends heavily on the European understanding of the left-right ideological continuum. In contrast to the Anglo-American tradition, in the continental tradition, right vs. left fights were more about how to use state power, rather than how to limit it. Statism just wasn’t much of a dirty word for either side.
Meanwhile anti-statism, including an ornery passion for civil liberties — i.e. classical liberalism — has always been a core component of American exceptionalism. Indeed, left and right in U.S. politics often become less statist as they become more extreme. This is a familiar observation about the right. Wanting to abolish government agencies, privatize or deregulate state functions was long a hallmark of the American right; it’s hard to see how becoming more libertarian makes you more “fascist.”
But the American left has an anti-statist streak, too. For instance, defunding the police, legalizing drugs, open borders, abolishing the “prison industrial complex”: These are more anarchic ambitions than statist. True communists like their cops and prisons.