In Defense of Horseshoe Theory
Dinesh D’Souza — Political Genius??
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Picture the one person whose worldview is the exact opposite of your own.
Who came to mind? Was it a Marx or a Lenin? Was it some activist girl with short blue hair and a spiked necklace? Or was it a Jordan Peterson or a James Lindsay?
By standard political reckonings we are closer to Peterson and Lindsay. You might see them as naïve, silly, certainly misled, but not malicious. The other side though—the far left—you might see as scarcely even human. They are absolutely malicious. Irrational. Stupid.
This might be kind of based, but it’s not quite accurate. The far left is in no way irrational. They operate according to perfect logic. They follow their priors to their necessary conclusions. The difference between us and the far left just are the priors. And that makes all the difference.
By contrast, a James Lindsay—who is ostensibly somewhere on the centre-right, and therefore closer to us than a Lenin—does not follow his priors to their necessary conclusions. He starts from the epistemic individualism of post-Christianity. He starts from an Axial framework of logos > thymos. He starts from the ahistoricism of the Enlightenment. In other words, he starts from the same priors as the blue-haired activist, but unlike her, he fails to draw the logical conclusions.
Lindsay, Peterson, and the rest of the “intellectual dark web” live in a kind of intellectual hall of mirrors. They are abysmal at analysis, and so their descriptions of the world don’t match up to reality. Lindsay believes that the intellectual roots of woke lie in Hegelianism, which he regards as a kind of Gnosticism.1 Dinesh D’Souza sees fascism as a left-wing worldview.2 Both of them see the radical right as having the same essence as the radical left. This is what we call horseshoe theory. It is the ultimate centrist cope, where the opposite poles of the left-right political typology miraculously curve around to meet, leaving them both opposed by the centre.
This seems absolutely retarded at first glance. But only at first glance. No, we are not going to defend Dinesh D’Souza as a brilliant political analyst. But there is a substantial grain of truth to horseshoe theory. If we make a crucial distinction between prescription and description, we can understand what truth there is in horseshoe theory, while maintaining the profound difference between the far right and far left. But first, we must lay some groundwork.3
Prescriptive utterances and descriptive utterances are categorically different. Prescriptive utterances are “ought” utterances—they either openly command (“clean your room”) or they dress up a command in the garb of a proposition (“it is right that you clean your room”). Descriptive utterances are “is” utterances—they are propositions, they report a state of affairs (“your room is unclean”). Descriptive utterances are evaluated in terms of true/false; prescriptive utterances are evaluated in terms of apt/inapt—they are apples and oranges.
With this as our foundation, horseshoe theory is not only perfectly sensible, but also even enlightening. Let us unpack it.
The far right and the far left often agree on descriptions. For example, both the far right and far left believe that a person gets where they are in life less through their own free will than through the genetic lottery and nepotism. Where we differ is in the “and that’s a good/bad thing”. We agree on the description, disagree on the prescription. This is why the centrist liberal sees us as the same—the centrist thinks that the description is the main thing.
Centrists have what we call propositional identities4—these are identities based on affirming a proposition, in other words a description. The propositional identity is an “I believe” identity. It is an identity based on affirming some belief as true. The most familiar such identity is “civic nationalism”, where your nationality is a function not of blood, history, or birth, but of belief. If you are an American, it means you believe in freedom, individualism, and equality before the law, regardless of your race or life history. Liberals, especially centrists, share identities with others only in so far as they share the same descriptions of the world.
The centrist thinks that politics is a battle over descriptions. The far right and far left often agree with each other descriptively (say in that “the West is patriarchal”), and because the centrist thinks politics is exhausted by description, he thinks that the far right and far left must be on the same team, with himself on the other team. And he is half right. We do disagree with him on the description. But he is half wrong in that the description isn’t really the important thing. Why isn’t it? To see why, we have to dig deeper into our foundation.