Plus, if one has to ignore policy stances and only look at the authoritarianism and/or batshittiness of two positions, one is not actually comparing political positions.
Bingo. I'm referring to their similar approaches in the way they advance their agendas and respond to the opposition.
And that is something that many of the critics of Horseshoe Theory (that I've read/heard) totally miss; it was originally a critique of the totalitarian language used by extreme political ideologies, and not of the specific ideologies themselves.
Yes, I'm sure there is a reddit article out there somewhere which lazily and summarily dismisses HT as something "overly simplistic" used by "laymen."
Oh look, I found one. It calls people who like HT "laymen" and immediately jumps into the "argument to moderation." Was that your source? I seriously doubt that a quick Google search will provide you with a nuanced, informed opinion on political psychology.
As I stated earlier, most of the critiques of HT that I've come across seem to miss the main point, and they seem to do so for very partisan reasons. HT theory (if we can even call it a "theory," because it's technically more of an observation) is, broadly, meant to refer to tactics and language, not specific ideology.
However, whenever I see a vociferous critique of it (this is, of course, my own opinion), the person seems to always provide a critique that largely misses the original intent of HT and is nothing more than a "Nuh uh! That's stupid! How can you say that they're both the same when those other people from that other party believe all of these things that our party believes are horrible?!" They then attack a strawman of what they wrongly think HT is, rather than disagreeing with what HT actually is.
Usually, it goes something like, "HT is wrong because there's just no way you can say the left is as bad as the right when the right voted for Trump and wants to control women's bodies!" or "...as bad as the left when the left wants to tax us into poverty, take away our guns, and kill innocent unborn babies!"
Those types of responses totally miss the point of HT (which, ironically, proves the point HT is making) and devolve into a strawman attack, and those are overwhelmingly the types of critiques I usually see of HT on various political websites.
But, I freely admit that there are likely just as many poor arguments made in support of HT as are made against HT. I've seen plenty of people who like HT who make very poorly constructed, partisan arguments for it (e.g., the horsehoe meme that Dave Rubin shared in that tweet above).
Jean-Pierre Faye (the writer who came up with HT), expounded on it in his writings on totalitarian languages (he was mainly referring to the Nazi politics of Germany from his day). HT was not (totally) meant to be a critique of specific ideologies. Broadly, it was simply pointing out that adherents of extremist ideologies, in Faye's opinion, tend to engage in very similar uses/abuses of language to advance their agendas, specifically their use of strongly authoritarian and totalitarian language.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that he was more of a philosopher and he was not a scientist, so when people call this "Horseshoe THEORY," it's a bit of a misnomer, because he wasn't putting forth an actual scientific theory.
However, at the present moment, this type of extreme authoritarian use of language is occurring on the far right and the far left, so it's hard to see how Faye was too far off the mark (when looking at HT for what it really says, and not the strawman caricature that most people attack when they critique it).
Robert Altemeyer has some extensive
research on authoritarianism and was quite prescient when he predicted in 2008 that, even though Obama had won, the far right was poised to take over the political landscape. He got criticized at the time for that claim (mainly by liberals basking in the glow of Obama's election),
but he was absolutely right.
I have issue with the term used in this type of research, "
Right-Wing Authoritarianism" (RWA), because I feel too many people confuse "right-wing" in the way it's often meant in the research (likelihood to surrender to totalitarian leaders) with the political right-wing. I think it needs a new name and a bit more nuance in the research.
In my opinion, the problem with Altemyer's research, despite how accurate it seems to be, is that it focuses only on the political right-wing. It's as if he doesn't think that political left-wing authoritarianism exists.
If that is what he believes, he is wrong, and there's a growing body of research and real-world events which supports that notion. Here's Altemeyer's criteria for an extremist authoritarian group:
If you:
- replace "highly ethnocentric" in #1, with "highly diverse to the intentional exclusion of white males;"
- replace "fearful world" in #2 with "oppressive world," and;
- delete "non" before "heterosexual" and replace "women" with "men in #5;
...then everything in this list perfectly describes the far-left, SJW Regressives with a great recent example being the
clusterfuck of insanity that happened at Evergreen State University recently.
That's why I also feel the assertion that HT suffers from the appeal to moderation fallacy to be, itself, a fallacious argument (strawman) because it seems to view political ideologies as binary monoliths; that there has to be a side that's "right" and a side that's "wrong." This is a rather myopic view of political ideas and plays into the very tribalism which HT indirectly critiques. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that the left has the superior position on some specific topics and that the right has the superior position on others, and that they're both wrong on others still.
It's also completely fair and accurate to say that, even when considering the ideas that either side is "correct" about, that they can quickly take that position to a ridiculous, harmful, and authoritarian extreme (e.g., pushing for more diversity is good in some situations, but it's bad when taken to the extreme to
claim that white people and "whiteness" are evil and violent ).