Horseshoe theory
[1] The theory is attributed to the French philosopher and writer of fiction and poetry Jean-Pierre Faye in his 1972 book Théorie du récit: introduction aux langages totalitaires, in relation to Otto Strasser.
Existing studies and comprehensive reviews often find only limited support and only under certain conditions; they generally contradict the theory's central premises.
The concept, if not the name, appeared as early as the 1850s, as in this remark by Bayard Taylor about two French travelers he met in Beirut:In the midst of [the debate] I was struck by the cordiality with which the Monarchist[9] and the Socialist united in their denunciations of England and English laws.
[15] In his 2006 book, Where Did the Party Go?, the American political scientist Jeff Taylor wrote: "It may be more useful to think of the Left and the Right as two components of populism, with elitism residing in the Center.
[17] In an essay from 2008, Josef Joffe, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, an American conservative think tank, wrote: Will globalization survive the gloom?
He wrote: As the political horseshoe theory attributed to Jean-Pierre Faye highlights, if we travel far-left enough, we find the very same sneering, nasty and reckless bully-boy tactics used by the far-right.
But in the United States in 2021, a softer version of this iron law is at play, with the center-left and the center-right mushily converging toward expensive authoritarian policies that look astonishingly similar despite their supposedly opposite goals.
However, not only do recent studies fail to support such beliefs, they also contradict them ... Van Hiel also found that left-wing respondents reported significantly lower endorsement of values associated with conservation, self-enhancement, and anti-immigration attitudes compared to both moderate and right-wing activists, with individuals on the right reporting greater endorsement of such values and attitudes ...
[4][5] Chip Berlet, an expert on right-wing movements, has dismissed perceived far-left–far-right flirtations as an oversimplification of political ideologies, ignoring fundamental differences between them.
Within the context of the anti-globalization movement, they also mentioned that those on the political left were concerned about the far-right infiltrating anti-World Trade Organization groups, including those led by centrist liberals and social democrats that did not want to be associated with "right-wing nationalists and bigots".
Some, such as the Peoples' Global Action, responded to this perceived threat by amending their manifestos to specifically reject alliances with any right-wing groups, on principle.
[3] In a 2014 paper, Vassilis Pavlopoulos, a professor in social psychology at the University of Athens, argued: "The so-called centrist/extremist or horseshoe theory points to notorious similarities between the two extremes of the political spectrum (e.g., authoritarianism).
[35] In this sense, he argues that the horseshoe theory is used to engage in red-baiting or reductio ad Hitlerum, which allows them to "discredit the left while disavowing their own complicity with the far right.
"[28] Choat says that "it is patently absurd to compare Stalin to present-day leftists like Mélenchon or Corbyn",[28] and concludes: "If liberals genuinely want to understand and confront the rise of the far right, then rather than smearing the left they should perhaps reflect on their own faults.
In the 1938 article, which was first published in the United States by the theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers Party of the International Left Opposition, he wrote: The fundamental feature of [arguments comparing disparate political movements] lies in their completely ignoring the material foundation of the various currents, that is, their class nature and by that token their objective historical role.
Instead they evaluate and classify different currents according to some external and secondary manifestation ... To Hitler, liberalism and Marxism are twins because they ignore 'blood and honour'.
