So I Looked Up a Term Today...

[unspeakablehorror]

I finally took the time to look up what in the world 'horseshoe theory' means and I can see why I've so often seen that term in the context of people criticizing it.  What a way to vastly oversimplify how politics works and how people with different politics actually behave and interact with others.   I think it would be more accurate to say that people at the same 'end' of a political spectrum may not even tend to be willing to work with each other, much less people on the other 'end', because politics are actually multidimensional in too many dimensions for us to even depict. 

But also, the different dimensions are definitely not completely independent from each other, and while I would argue that certain ideas don't have to be linked, that does not mean that they have no relation to each other whatsoever.  If we could actually see people's political inclinations graphed in this space, they would probably fall generally onto some sort of...function.  Like a scatterplot where the points are clearly not random but you can also still have weird outliers here and there.

I'd even argue that 'extremism' is kind of incoherent politically if it implies that being a centrist makes someone more peaceful or less dangerous.  After all, I don't see many centists oppose war or militarized violence, and though I would not assume that that's incompatible with being a centrist, it's also clearly not inherently a centrist priority.  If centrists do not, by nature of being a centrist, do everything they can to stop such violence, then they cannot argue that centrism is any less 'extreme' or brutal than anything else.

Comments

[nozomi604]

IMHO, the one insight of horseshoe theory is that people with left-wing economic views and right-wing ones can share similar politics in other ways; for instance, people in favor of government social programs who are nationalists and anti-immigration. But it falls apart if you claim that every Left or Right position becomes its opposite when it's taken far enough.

WRT extremism, I think there's an assumption that there's a kind of golden mean between two poles or opposing influences. But where those poles are (and /what/ they are) is subjective, and what's "extreme" or "moderate" to me is going to be different from someone else's. Which goes back to what you said about politics being multidimensional.

(Also, hi! I stumbled upon your journal semi-randomly, and have been enjoying reading it)

[unspeakablehorror]

Yeah, and just in general what's typically called centrism is not what I'd view as actually being anywhere close to 'halfway' between whatever the farthest left position and right positions are. Given that one can even pick apart what that means when both left and right ideology have multiple possible endpoints. I personally would describe my own politics as being somewhere significantly farther than average toward the leftward end, but I also think that's an extremely vague descriptor given all the different (often incompatible) ideologies I've encountered that could be described as 'leftist' ideologies.

Also, welcome! Glad you're enjoying the blog! I just like to talk about whatever's on my mind!