Horseshoe Theory

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👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/AutoModerator 📅︎︎ Feb 23 2018 🗫︎ replies

The fishhook theory is more accurate.

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/picapica7 📅︎︎ Feb 23 2018 🗫︎ replies
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- Centrism's biggest fan. Domestication of the wild horse is thought to have taken place in Central Asia around 3500 B.C. As they became more commonplace, working animals were exposed to conditions that broke down or quickly wore through their hooves. And so we developed a solution, the horseshoe, a piece of metal we attached to the feet of horses. (burps) Also, it's somehow taken seriously as centrist political theory. (ambient electronic music) The horseshoe theory is political framework that proposes the far left and the far right, rather than occupy opposing ends of the political spectrum, get further away at first, but then bend back closer to each other, much like the ends of a horseshoe. This theory is obviously correct because America. How exactly do think we settled this country? You think we road pigs across the frontier? Nah. Pigs is food. That's why we use horses, which taste very bad when compared to pigs. Horseshoe theory is attributed to French writer Jean-Pierre Faye, whose name translates from French to English as status quo guy and serves pretty much as the full justification for centrism. Centrism, you know, rationality. Being smart and understanding that directly between two sides of an argument there is most certainly the truth. Somewhere in the middle is the truth. That's the truth. Everything that's outside the center is extreme and evil. (gurgles) Boy, this country's gotten so polarized. Everybody says agreeing with each other about how everything should be. (moans) I know that my personal truth lies somewhere in the middle. If I had to guess, I'd say that I think you probably understand pretty well that I think that stuff has been jammed into our heads our entire lives and it's not that valid. To talk about centrism, I want to bring up thought leaders. This is something that I think in the abstract bothers a lot of people, but most of us lack the language to explain what's really just so grating about the idea of a thought leader. More and more lately, you see people lamenting the fact that expertise is viewed with suspicion. How dare you question the experts? But in the same breath they'll criticize The New York Times for hiring a climate denier to write about climate change. Let's make a quick distinction. Thought leadership is not expertise. It's lifestyle marketing made to look like expertise. Expertise is specialized knowledge. It is not charisma. It also can't sell a product line or an agenda on its own. Expertise has been conflated with the neo-liberal concept of thought leadership. Thought leadership is TL;DR level quote-unquote "expertise" paired with the willingness to accept corporate sponsorship. We need to make facts fun in order for people to pay attention to them is a gateway to but we have to have native content written by thought leaders. Experts talk about their (whip whacking) specialized knowledge. Thought leaders make facts fun and accept money to push products and agendas. Thought leaders are the human version of an advertisement tailored to make you feel as though you are making the right choice. Thought leadership works to validate the thought leader as well as the people following them. I like to call this a validation gang because everybody likes to consider themselves a leader as opposed to a member of a collective, but they all need that validation within this supposed meritocracy, because that's how you get and keep a job, right? Being an expert and a thought leader is looked at as the same thing as an expert now? Yeah, you get it. When discourse, the creation and implementation of ideas have been marketized, the marketplace of ideas needs salespeople of ideas. Thought leaders are the salespeople of ideas. Now markets are all pretty much manipulated in some way, so let's take that a step further. Since the marketplace of ideas is awash with plutocrat cash, it can be very difficult to stand out. And in my own opinion, that's pretty much the point of being a thought leader, the standing out, the wish to be a leading voice within thought. In many ways, it's a savior complex, but it's also a business tactic. If you stand out, the rich will want you on their side, which of course there are benefits to. The rich have access to the media and the media is how you get attention, and I've said it before but I'll say it again, attention is currency in the marketplace of ideas. Attention. Attention is what I'd like to assert is the functional currency in the marketplace of ideas. Not practicality, not useful application, not wholesale validity, but how engaged people are and for how long. Simply having a unique outlook and a brand that goes with it has become increasingly profitable. The thought leader is more of a marketing gimmick than a philosopher, and that's why every thought leader is eventually funded in some way by a corporate source, whether it be sponsored native content that reads like an article but is actually an ad for something, or they're hired in as a consultant or get a job with a think tank that acts as an intermediate between a corporation and a politician. You know, a lot of profitable positions a single person can be in that they benefit from and look really cool and smart and great, get to go on talk shows and sell their books and feel really important, and I'm definitely not parodying them at all with the title Very Important Documentaries. No, that's not the whole idea or anything like that. This class of paid-for intellectual typically espouses a centrist viewpoint. Why? Well, people generally believe in freedom. Freedom is not any specific ideology. It is simply the rejection of control by another entity on oneself. So in a free society, how is it justified that massive corporations somehow are allowed to hoard wealth and resources in an effort to retain control over the populace? To do that, we could frame things like this. Too much freedom is bad, which is not wrong. If you were allowed to kill people because you wanted to, that would be bad. And corporate totalitarianism is also bad, which I don't even really think I have to explain that one. That makes sense all on its own. So these two things are our two choices, but neither of them is really good on its own, so maybe if we look somewhere in the middle we'll find the answer? Then we just wrap these both around because we think they're both bad, and voila, a horseshoe. Centrism is an outlook that supports the balance of a degree of social equality with a degree of social hierarchy. This is essentially an expression of ancient Greek philosophy that originated with Aristotle called the golden mean. Here's an example. Aristotle called courage a virtue, but if you had too much courage, you'd be a reckless jerk, and if you had too little, you would be a weeping, bumbling coward who lurks in the shadows for fear of being found and sustains themselves on the crumbs of society, for they have no backbone. But the big problem there is that it is an argument that does not prove its own assertions, a logical fallacy. This one specifically is known as the golden mean fallacy, or the argument to moderation. The truth doesn't have to be found as a compromise between two opposite positions. The opposite of Nazi is not Nazi, so the golden mean or the argument to moderation is kinda Nazi, I guess? And I don't really see how you could kinda Nazi, like, I don't get it. What, do you give the Jews a little bit of gas? Like, don't put the pedal all the way to the floor? I mean, that's bullshit in itself, but eventually the Nazi version of Sammy Hagar is gonna show up and be like, I can't drive 55. This kind of argument isn't typically looked at as a bad thing. In fact, it's pretty much how they try to get Americans to think. And don't you dare tell me that everything doesn't encourage you to find the middle. From your kindergarten teacher to the South Park guys, it's all about finding the right answer somewhere in the center. Everybody who's outside the center is an extremist. In order to figure out where they stand, centrists capitulate with the Overton window. The Overton window is essentially a descriptive spectrum of the range of ideas the public will accept. However far to the left or the right we've gotten and depending on how much space in between them, you find your center. And where you find your center, you find your centrists. (whistling) You know, those brilliant thought leaders who don't see in black and white, but instead in shades of gray. Being a centrist is the equivalent of saying I don't think anything needs to change. I'm good. I've got what I need. If we do stuff that goes off to the left or to the right, things are gonna change for me, and I don't like that. Thus the incentive to paint anyone out of the center as an extremist makes itself obvious. If intelligent, well-spoken thinkers are able to express their opinions that ultimately endanger my position, you know, reduce my ability to appear unique, remove my foot in the door from the corporate hierarchy, well, they may cut off my cash flow and I don't want that. I want things to stay the same. I am an expert right now. I am respected right now. I am looked to. I am asked questions. My opinion matters. It drives the world, in fact. I am perpetually correct, and the conditions that exist right now allow me to be that. There's a certain vulnerability to centrism, and I kind of think I understand it. See, centrists always feel like right now is their time, and nobody ever wants their time to be over. But it is. ♫ It's done ♫ The party is done ♫ It's over and done ♫ The panic is done ♫ The politics done ♫ Hypocrisy done ♫ The party is done - So you may noticed that I am not exactly centrism's biggest fan in the world, and I can give you a pretty simple explanation as to why. You see, centrists defend centrism with crap like this. Now I'm gonna go at it and say this is probably the worst one I've seen that is still somewhat mainstream acceptable, at least among centrists. In the center we see liberalism, which I would like to note is neither automatically socially progressive or socially regressive. Secularism, which doesn't really mean anything regarding beliefs. It's just kept out of the discourse. Classic feminism and equality. Now, all of these things are conflated with science and accuracy, I guess. The implicit stance taken by including accuracy in a region of the horseshoe is that the other regions of the horseshoe don't have accuracy. So the statement being made in the subtext is kind of obviously the correct thing to be is a centrist, and if you aren't a centrist, then accuracy, science, equality, and all these things aren't really a big concern of yours. So let's just head to the far right. The first thing I want to point out is that Islamism has somehow made it to the right of fascism. Here's the problem. Islam is a religion and I don't believe in it or agree with it, but if Islam acts anything like fascism, then it's fascism. It's not Islamism. Fascism is fascism. That's how that works. And I'm not going to say that entirely buy that Islam or Christianity are religions of peace themselves, but the vast majority of normal religious people tend to specifically know the peaceful teachings of the religion they follow and that's the reason they follow them. But let's also just say this. If anybody ever does use the word Islamism, it's basically guaranteed to be ignorant. So as we move to the left, we have fascism and nationalism, which are really two sides of the same coin. You can't do fascism without a scapegoat, and that scapegoat is immigrants 99.9% of the time. And if you want a democratic society but just for your race or nationality, you're a fascist. Male chauvinism somehow between nationalism and conservatism. Once you get to conservatism, there's no male chauvinism at all. That's the border for that. Stops there. To the left of conservatism is Catholicism, which is somehow further right than corporatism, but absolutely nowhere near Islamism. Climate change denial is also tucked away between two labels, right and far right, so you don't really notice it, but it's there. Quickly peering over to the exact opposite on the other side, climate change denial is the opposite of anti-vaccine sentiment, apparently. That's news, huh? Directly to the left of center is hedonism, which to me seems like a very strange thing to place at the very beginning of your journey towards the left, hedonism being the pursuit of pleasure, or at its most complex, an ethical theory that pleasure is the highest good and the thing that you should strive to attain while alive on this planet because, well, that's what matters. That's not really a political ideology. As if every step you take left is more and more pleasure-seeking. It's not about solving the problems of inequality inherent to our economic and social systems. It's about getting off. And I'm not pointing this out to discredit people who seek pleasure as a high ideal. If a society is truly free, obviously people should be allowed to do that. But the point here is to hand wave away all leftist ideology as just some folks looking for their jollies. Next is altruism, which is, you know, the belief that selfless concern is important in the world, not a political ideology. Environmentalism coming next, which is a category of political concern and not an ideology all to itself, and then at the absolute furthest from conservatism is socialism, the first ideology actually mentioned here, at least on the left. Feminism, which is up in the center as classic feminism, is, I mean, a left-wing ideology. But after we get past postmodernism, which is a philosophical approach or methodology, again, not political ideology, we get to our second actual left-wing ideology, third wave feminism, which classical feminism and third wave feminism are apparently different things to a centrist. Classical feminism is in the past and therefore unlikely to change anything, being it's already made the changes that it set out to do. Women can vote, for instance. That was a big part in classical feminism. The reason there is still feminism today, though, is because there are still things that need to be done regarding actual equality for women and also feminism has also been historically centered on, well, white women, cis white women. There's a reason why people say white feminism. It's the same reason why people say white liberal. In a system like capitalism that intentionally exacerbates the inequalities between various groups of people, you can be a nice, rational, friendly centrist, but because those scary extremists on the left and the right are always shaking up your world, it might be just a little bit too hard to bring yourself to fight for anyone else's rights. You've got yours, right? Good stuff. - Being friendly and being a friend, I think, are two different things. I think there are many whites who act friendly toward Negros. A fox acts friendly toward the lamb. The wolf doesn't act friendly, and therefore the wolf has more difficulty in getting the lamb chop. - So anyway, postmodernism, anti-vaccine sentiment, and third wave feminism are all basically the same thing, and then we have communism, which is more hedonistic, more altruistic, more environmentalistic, more anti-vaccinationistic, more postmodernismistic, more third wave feminismistic than all that stuff. But since it's the opposite of fascism and fascism is not the extreme, obviously Islamism needs to have its counterpart, and that is anarchism, which just makes no sense whatsoever as something that is somehow close to Islamism. Anarchism is real and political ideology, while Islamism, like I said, is not real, not political ideology, and it's just kind of a roundabout way of demonizing a specific religion, but nyeh. Somebody who believes in a political horseshoe and believes that the center is somehow the ideal, which are two things that make up a Venn diagram that is simply one circle, somebody sat in that area politically believes that only the middle is accurate. Only right now is accurate. Only the status quo is accurate. Everything else has to be inaccurate. That means pre-civil rights was inaccurate, but so is BLM. People seeking to change things are inaccurate, and therefore people fighting for their rights are inaccurate. This is how centrists, whether they are kind or nice to marginalized people, are at least accidentally aligned with bigotry, because bigotry hasn't been beaten and beating bigotry would require ideology that is out of the center, and so therefore it is inaccurate. And in the perceived meritocracy of the United States of America, being wrong is bad. But centrists, oh, they're accurate. Compromise, that's how we stopped the Nazis, right? (nervous laughing) Not really. And you might be thinking to yourself, wait, so they want the status quo, but they capitulate around an ever-changing Overton window. This is an inherent contradiction. Something's up here. You're right. The problem with doing everything you can to preserve the status quo is that it will always slide into regression. Whether consciously or subconsciously attempting to preserve the status quo, one is fighting progress. In doing so, it lays groundwork for those that fight progress a little bit harder. In order for those extra-smart centrists to be right about everything, the positions and approaches of the opposites at the end of the spectrum would have to have quite a bit of overlap to be considered similar overall. So let's talk about several categories of political concern and the positions and approaches that the far left and right take. Leftist ideals typically attempt to redistribute the wealth in order to create generalized welfare. Now Nazi Germany, a far-right totalitarian regime on the absolute end of any legitimate spectrum, had social programs as well, but these programs were built on the theft of property through military annexation as well as seizure of Jewish property in Germany and was meant exclusively for German-born Anglo-Saxons. Jews were routinely denied access to these programs because they were Jews, and the Nazis and Jews, you know. Leftist social programs are intended to be available for all people and are funded through progressive taxation or collective ownership. National Socialism, or Nazism, was not socialism. It was simply just ethnonationalist superiority distributing wealth. It's important to note that National Socialism is not socialism, it's fascism. They intentionally create underclasses, that is to say, people who do not have the same rights and privileges as other people. The whole point of every single leftist ideology, communism and its various approaches to get there, such as socialism and anarchism, exist specifically in resistance to the idea of class, and if communism was actually fully achieved, it also wouldn't have a state. On the issues of equality, far-right regimes typically regard the situation that we're already in as one that has gotten out of hand. People of far-right ideology want to regress in social issues, whereas economically progressive positions are designed to work with socially progressive ones. If all of the people are not explicitly included, then it automatically trends towards the right because it is a superiority situation as opposed to a legitimately egalitarian one. Now on healthcare is when we start to get into an interesting area. The left-wing position on healthcare is that all people should have healthcare, whereas the centrist position is some should have healthcare if they can pay for it, which is kinda eugenic-sy. And on the far right you have specifically approved as biologically superior people getting healthcare, which is, you know, very eugenics-sy. On the issue of environmentalism, let's bring the Nazis up again. They actually were somewhere environmentalist, but it's not good. Nazi environmentalism was rooted in the idea that the traditionalist, and keep in mind traditionalist is the key word, farm life was viewed as good because the modern life was, quote-unquote, "the results of Jews owning banks." So it's not like they were funneling money into solar panel development or something like that. They just used the earth as another way to demonize Jewish people. Leftist environmentalism is rooted in science, which is essentially the opposite of traditionalism, and finally, ideologically the far left and the far right could be literally no more different on the issue of labor. Fascism subjugates labor and Nazis eliminated labor unions and encouraged businesses who were quote-unquote "down for the cause" to become monopolies, cartels, and oligopolies, and they did this by removing regulations and even funding these companies as long as they were willing to, you know, do the Nazi. On the other side, left-wing ideologies such as communism, anarchism, socialism, and everything in between all have different ways and means of doing it, but the intent is to ensure that the worker owns the means of production and therefore their labor. I'm sure somebody out there is thinking, but the USSR. But China. But Venezuela. Well, it's quite possible to call yourself communist but really be totalitarian regime bent on exploiting labor for your own profit. What you call yourself doesn't really matter if you're not doing it. And to be totally frank, these regimes are not represented properly by basically anybody in the United States, so the stuff I just said doesn't even really matter. The point is entirely of perspective, and for a centrist, the perspective is constantly shifting. What is considered acceptable by the public is an ever-changing thing. At one point in time, this meant finding the center between blacks can vote and blacks can't vote, and obviously that puts the centrist siding on a platform where black people can kind of vote? That's a false middle. That's not a valid choice, I mean, unless you're terrible. And see, here's the thing. There might be some similarities between both the left and right, but that doesn't actually mean anything. Here's a crowd. Here's another crowd. Both groups of people in one place. Same thing obviously, right? Wrong. An issue can be taken on by both the left and the right, even systemic ideas, but the approach is always invariably different. If you employed full-blown communism for white people, for instance, it's not communism because it's the establishment of class. There is a class that gets the privilege of participating in that so-called communism. Everybody else, whether they be people of color or just people of a nationality that is not the nationality of the country, are an underclass and essentially that negates the idea that was put forward. If a socialist idea doesn't actually help everybody, it's not actually socialist. It might mechanically be vaguely similar to socialism in some respects, however, the exclusion of some people, the creation of an underclass, automatically implies totalitarianism, because those people are going to be exploited in service of the upper class. So in that respect, horseshoe theory gets kind of close? But close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. Antifascism is not the same thing as fascism, and as much as media outlets love publishing narratives that act as though each one of these incidents is one singular individual act, these events aren't just things that happen randomly, totally unrelated. If you go back, you can find repeated incidents of the right being violent towards the left, and as much as liberals may not like the tactics of antifascist action, it's direct action in an attempt to stop more of this. These incidents are connected. They are part of an overarching series of events that have escalated due to the right wing, not the left. The left is resisting this escalation. People really need to stop saying alt-left. Within the framework of centrism, it binarizes leftism as alternative ideology and therefore validates the alt-right. Trump realized this, and that's why he co-opted the term. It's really hard to argue with your own point. - What about the alt-left? They came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right. Do they have any semblance of guilt? You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent and nobody wants to say that. - People who are in fact for the idea of everybody having healthcare or radical changes in the criminal justice system or LGBT rights. Frankly, the left just really doesn't like the whole inequality thing, and that includes between genders or between classes, and the further left you go, the more that manifests. Calling anyone left of center the alt-left puts them on the same level at white nationalists, which, you know, helps white nationalists. And I'm not gonna say that there aren't shitty people on the left, nor am I going to say that anyone on the left hasn't proposed working with the alt-right. It's just that the majority of us know that's shitty, the vast majority. Yeah, there's some shitty leftists out there. Some. There are zero people who identify as alt-right that aren't shitty, and whether or not you believe in anarchy, placing it as the counterweight for an imaginary fascism-infused Islam political affiliation demonstrates that the person who made that horseshoe diagram doesn't know what they're talking about. And before you go, well, that's not every horseshoe diagram, sure, yeah. But it's a pretty popular one. A lot of people who claim liberalism and centrism have posted that specific diagram as a means to paint a political horseshoe as valid. In truth, if you want to actually paint similarities between policies and what their net effect ends up being, the center shares more in common with the right than the left, resulting in more of a fishhook. The fact is the center will side with the far right if it ensures that the far left fails. Their capitulation will always end up with them siding with the right rather than the left. For instance, both the right and the center love their free-market capitalism. Both the right and center think certain amounts of people should be excluded from healthcare. Both the right and the center are uncomfortable with the social progression of human rights. And both the right and the center hate the left. Why do you think in the 1990s the Democrats went tough on crime? For fun? They were capitulating to the center for votes, which, you know, allowed the right to pull the Overton window further to the right. This is the result of the ostensible left chasing the right. The second you call the center the left, the point in between the left and the right, the center, moves to the right. And even if this weren't true, the fact that the center has such a willingness to hear both sides, centrists will always at very least accidentally provide a means for the extreme right to rise. Centrism is at its worst a mask or a cover to feed right-wing ideology to people who consider themselves rational. But even at best, it's leaving the door open for people who want to consolidate power to put distance between themselves and those they consider lower in a hierarchy to rule. In leaving the door open for those types of people, you give them the ability to do exactly that. Not everybody actually wants to rule the world. Some people kind of want to just live. In fact, most people, the majority of people, like somewhere in the neighborhood of 99% of people, and there's this 1% of people that don't think that way, and yet for some reason are able to maintain power. Every time you ask those people, regardless of how they identify themselves with which political party or what values they espouse, for some reason they always hate the left. I wonder why that is? So is that polarization actually bad? If the extreme on one side is full equality and the extreme on the other is full totalitarianism, why would anyone pretend these are two sides of the same coin? Why is it so important to compromise with ideologies that result in the marginalization of people by class, identity, or some other vector? Why is it that the only Nazis that matter are the ones in the history books? ("Pony" by Ginuwine) ♫ I'm in the center ♫ Ideas in a market ♫ Someone who looks at both sides ♫ Without even picking one ♫ You gotta be a liberal ♫ Or watch me as I'll pivot ♫ No matter what you say, I'll start ♫ Compromise 'cause I'm just so rational ♫ If you're corny, let's do it ♫ Ride it, my pony ♫ My horseshoe's waiting ♫ Come and jump on it ♫ If you're corny, let's do it ♫ Ride it, my pony ♫ My horseshoe's waiting ♫ Come and jump on it ♫ If you're horny, let's do it ♫ Ride it, my pony
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Keywords: horseshoe theory, peter coffin horseshoe, centrism peter coffin, the horseshoe theory, peter coffin centrism, horse shoe theory, horseshoe theory of the political spectrum, centrism horseshoe, centrism horshoe, horseshoe theory is wrong, horseshoe theory short film, Peter Coffin, leftist, white supremacists, liberalism, antifa, moderates, radical centrism explanation, centrism, socialist, anti-fascism, socialism, skepticism, horseshoe theory debunked, progressive YouTubers, neoliberalism
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Length: 33min 10sec (1990 seconds)
Published: Wed Sep 06 2017
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