Horseshoe Theory is stupid.

It’s based on the flawed assumption that politics can or should be understood on a single axis. It can’t and shouldn’t be. That heuristic is wrong.

If viewed on a 2d axis, the “cohorts that appear similar” on the ends of the horseshoe are still on opposing ends of one of the axes, despite being near each other on another axis.

I see it as the gateway to people realizing that the left/right 1D line, and even the political compass, are ridiculous.

IMHO, political positioning should be described as a tensor, where each data point is the person's position on a specific policy.

Horseshoe theory has always read like a Pythagorean epicycle to me, an attempt to redeem a broken model. For a reductive political model, I prefer the 2 dimensional Collectivist-Individualist, Authoritarian-Libertarian axes. No need to literally contort the outdated Left-Right spectrum.

An added benefit is you get to avoid annoying semantic battles such as whether Nazis or Fascists are Right wing or Left wing.

Plus you get to add other axes as needed. My favorite, perhaps relevant today, is principled vs. expedient: do we apply principles like this "Rights" stuff impartially, even to people with whom we disagree, or do we just git 'r done?

To me, the horshoe theory is just a step in the right direction. It shows the limits of a straight 1D line to describe politics, and is a stepping-off point for deeper exploration.

Ideally, maybe we would describe a person's politics with something like a tensor, where each value is the person's support of a specific policy.

Hmm. I guess I feel that "The Horseshoe Theory" is worse than useless. It implies that as someone gets "too much" Right or Left, they inevitably become authoritarian, as if centrists cannot be authoritarian. It equates "weirdness" with "bad". I'd argue that we should skip straight to identifying "authoritarianism" as the problem, and the not having weird or even extreme leftist or rightist ideas.

This is a really interesting argument that I had not previously considered. It might take me a few days/weeks/months to fully process. Thank you.

Agreed, the matrix expresses this idea more exactly.

It should be a trident theory.

If you don't mind, could you expand on this a bit?

> I see it as the gateway to people realizing that the left/right 1D line, and even the political compass, are ridiculous.

When this theory is used in discourse, it is always a matter of suggesting that the left fringe and the right fringe are equally to be rejected. Stalin and Hitler, communism and fascism, class struggle and racial theory, Das Kapital and Hitler's Mein Kampf, dictatorship of the proletariat and Nazi dictatorship: the righteous liberal democrat must keep his distance from both extremes in equal measure. The golden path lies in the balanced middle. I am tired of criticizing this nonsense. It is an ideological lie.

The trident means that there is just as much ideology, corruption, political dysfunctionality and all kinds of drivers of suffering, misery and resentment in the supposed political center. But it is very well hidden because it wears a kind of ideological cloak: the horseshoe theory.

So to respond to your sentence I quoted above: the horseshoe theory IS the political compass that should be ridiculed.