The basic idea of Horseshoe Theory is that the further you go to the extreme right and left, the more they actually bend around and mirror each other. Much of this is simply how much disgust the extreme right and left have with the status quo. You are out there on the fringes, precisely because "normie" politics is broken in your estimation.
One thing I've noted recently, though, is how much "identity" politics fuels this horseshoe dynamic. Basically, identity politics takes the quip "All politics is personal" and turns that into the overriding ideology of the group. What's important is not tax rates, public spending, public goods or foreign policy. No, what's important is that you are part of X group and that means more than any tangible outcome. Voting and organizing with the tribe is the paramount concern.
We see this, certainly, with the Trumpenproletariat, whose embrace of their Christianist politics overrides even their attachment to basic ideas surrounding democratic governance. But that's exactly the point, Liberal democracy must be pluralistic. It must organize itself around actual ideologies surrounding the proper balance between freedom and equality. It's ideally rational, at least in theory, and people decide whose policies will improve their condition.
Trumpist politics have precisely none of that. There was famously not even a platform in 2020 and his platform in 2024 is pretty much "destroy our enemies". Biden is running on a policy platform of mild industrial policy, mild wealth redistribution, climate mitigation and reproductive freedom. Trump has expanded from "Lock her up!" to "Lock them up!"
It's not just Trump either. In Argentina, they've elected a madman with ideas that can charitably be described as lunacy. The freaking Dutch, with a long history of pluralism, have given the most seats to Geert Wilders, one of the avatars of European anti-immigrant populism. Then there's Brexit and obviously the Israel-Hamas war.
It's the latter that has galvanized a sort of unthinking identity politics in America with absolutely bizarre statements about "indigenous rights" that fall apart at the slightest prodding and analysis. Hamas is awful. Netanyahu is awful. But once you've decided that your identity means that you're pro-Palestinian, then your critical filter for how awful Hamas is gets turned off, in much the same way that the critical filter for Trump voters gets turned off when you point out that Trump is literally one of the worst Americans to have ever lived.
Pluralism is hard. Yet, that is arguably the reason why America has emerged as the strongest country on earth. Our willingness to improve to at least try to live up to our ideals means that while we do engage in anti-immigrant movements, they tend not to succeed in the long run. Still, keeping an America where everyone is valued seems critically important to me.
What that means in practice is that while you absolutely should be proud of your ethnic identity, you also have be committed to principles that extend beyond that. What we see with ethnic identity politics in the end are concentration camps. Maybe they are run by the Far Right. Maybe they are run by the Far Left. In the end, however, people of the wrong group wind up oppressed. Our own history has shown this with Natives and Blacks.
I can understand why it's easier to hate the status quo than work to do the incremental work of improving conditions for people through coalitional politics. Revolutionary rhetoric is intoxicating.
However, if we understand that revolutionaries look as much like Trump as some romanticized version of Che Guevera, maybe we'd be a little less likely to erect the barricades.
No comments:
Post a Comment