So I Looked Up a Term Today...

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.