Horseshoe theory

The horseshoe theory in political science asserts that advocates of far-left and the far-right politics, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together. The theory is attributed to the French philosopher and writer of fiction and poetry Jean-Pierre Faye in his 2002 book Le Siècle des idéologies ("The Century of Ideologies").

Quotes

[M]any people believe, as the "political horseshoe" theory states, that there is a lot more common ground between the far left, where Loewenstein dwells politically, and the far right views of someone like Betty Luks than people on the left would care to admit.
- Tzvi Fleischer, "The Political Horseshoe again" (31 October 2006), Australia/Israel Review, AIJAC

[N]ormally it takes till middle age to realize that Left and Right are essentially at the extremes, the equivalent, totalitarian, they have different words for them. You know that nationalism, extreme nationalist, extreme socialism they don’t just meet in Berlin in 1933, they can meet at McGill in 1968, or whatever that was. So I became very acutely aware of the dangers, the hypocrisies, and sort of the extremism of the political extremes. And it cleansed me very early in my political evolution of any romanticism. I detested the extreme Left and extreme Right, and found myself somewhere in the middle.
- Charles Krauthammer, interview with Bill Kristol (13 March 2015)

[T]he nutcase Left and the nutcase Right are alike in virtually every particular. They should get a room somewhere -- far from here.
- Jay Nordlinger, Twitter post (4 September 2018)

There's a point at which left and right join.
- Jay Nordlinger, "Jaywalking" (12 September 2018), National Review

External links

Encyclopedic article on Horseshoe theory on Wikipedia