Horseshoe conservatism is a meme because it applies
Clumsy labels don't always help to make a convincing case, so I'll make it using the ample historical examples in place.
Dear Ben Boyce,
You may not remember me at this point but I interviewed you back in 2017 regarding the events of the Evergreen State College’s student uprising. Since then you’ve gone on to have some amazing conversations across the breadth of the political spectrum, but I haven’t paid attention. I think that given your background, it is a little surprising to see that you have taken a stance on the current turmoil within the political right that denies a steep radicalisation process is taking place, or at least purports that it isn’t dangerous. Admittedly I think James Lindsay’s use of the term “woke right” doesn’t really capture the nature of this phenomenon. But he’s not wrong that it is happening, and your contention that horseshoe theory is just a silly meme does not account for a long history of such cases.
For starters, Marxism and National Socialism were both outgrowths of the German enlightenment. Germany in the mid-1800s was a still fragmented realm where the individual’s rights were dependent on their landowning status, church affiliation, and trade. “Germany” as a nation was still just a loose confederation of feudal states. This led to the failed Revolution of 1848 which rather than restore the previous order caused many like Karl Marx to seek increasingly more extreme solutions. Obviously Marx’s name has become tied to Marxian economics and the different variations of communism that came out of it. But the fact is that fascists and National Socialists are a mutation of the same ideas and came as a reaction to the crumbling religious and social order in central Europe as feudalism was giving way to the Industrial Revolution and the common German peasant and worker was being left behind.
Horseshoe theory isn’t a hard and fast rule: There for sure are ardently antifascist people on the left, and there are also sworn anticommunists on the right. What is undeniable is that both ends of the spectrum have revolutionary tendencies that can evolve in their stances to eventually become more like their mirror image on the other side than the ones closer to the center. Here are some examples from different countries and periods of time
Benito Mussolini was originally a socialist journalist who wrote for a newspaper called Avanti! (Onward!) and was deeply opposed to Italian participation in WWI to the point of being imprisoned, but eventually he supported the war and enlisted in it. Mussolini’s fascism was a compromised form of socialism that concentrated power and capital in the state and preserved traditional institutions like the monarchy. Even post-war Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti recognised the origins of fascism within revolutionary socialism.
Roger Garaudy, a member of the French Resistance against German occupation during WWII was a communist politician for most of his life before being expelled from the French Communist Party in 1970. He later converted to Islam and became a very prominent Holocaust revisionist.
The Nazi Party (NSDAP) evolved from the German Workers’ Party (DAP), a quasi-socialist political grouping in post-WWI Germany that was anti-capitalist and anti-communist at the same time. An important question is, if the Nazis were against the Jews, capitalism, and communism, what were they for? Thanks to early party figures like Rufolf Jung, the idea was formulated of volksgemeinschaft, a new “community of the people” (Germans). In this way they embraced race socialism and conflict in the same way that earlier socialists embraced class socialism.
During the Weimar Republic period many former communists and social democrats would join up with the NSDAP, earning them the expression “beefsteaks” for being brown (the colour of the Nazi SA stormptrooper street fighter tunics) on the outside and red on the inside.
In the 1970’s West Germany underwent a radical countercultural upheaval characterised by terror attacks mainly from the political left. One prominent member of the underground communist Red Army Faction, lawyer and activist Horst Mahler, would begin to abandon his Marxist views in the 1980s and became a prominent Holocaust revisionist and activist for the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
The perennial American presidential candidate Lyndon Larouche, Jr. began his career as a young Trotskyist organizer for the Socialist Workers Party before forming his own Marxist group National Council of Labor Committees in the 1970s. After attempting to muscle out other communist parties, LaRouche concluded that a tactical alliance with Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups was necessary to prevent a fascist oligarchy from taking over through then-Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller who he claimed was pulling the strings behind Gerald R. Ford’s White House. From there LaRouche’s movements would become increasingly authoritarian and less class oriented.
While those are historical examples from Europe that may seem irrelevant today, I would content that in our era more people are hurdling the gap from one pole of the horseshoe to the other than ever. Innovations in information technology and social attitudes are combining with dramatic upheavals to cause new realignments to happen faster than ever. Consider the following prominent internet personalities who all went from being left-wing or apolitical to becoming today very prominent on this new romanticist faction of the right:
Karlyn Borysenko was a left-wing knitting enthusiast who became “red-pilled” as a result of politics in her hobby community in 2020 after visiting a Donald Trump rally. As of recently she has become a full-blown supporter of the Groyper movement and believes that Israel will attempt to assassinate Donald Trump if he recognises a Palestinian state.
Comedian and actor Russell Brand was considered an anti-corporate leftist up until 2023 when he began to profess more conservative views in the wake of COVID19. Nowadays he is supporting fellow celebrity Kanye West after he released his single “Heil Hitler” and claiming that West’s critics simply want him dead and the song is a defiant answer to them.
Candace Owens came to prominence as a suddenly converted conservative black woman called Red Pill Black who was challenging the left-wing orthodoxy in her community in 2017-18. Owens would go on to work for mainstream conservative outlets like PragerU, the campus activism group Turning Points USA, and most recently and infamously The Daily Wire. Owens was heavily involved in Kanye West’s increasingly radical political statements, including taping a 2022 interview with the rapper in which they discussed Jewish control of the media which was released in 2024. Owens’ association with West and her other increasingly divergent opinions regarding Israel and Jewish power in America led to her 2024 severance from the Daily Wire.
These are just a small selection of people who went from one extreme to another, and I’m sure that their reasons for doing so differ significantly, but is it not interesting that so many are taking this journey at the same time?
Coherence vs. Confusion
OK, so maybe at this point (or way before) you’re asking “so what?” The truth is that I am already resigned to the fact that a lot of the trends in public opinion are headed in a strange direction. Not long ago conservatives were fighting a media that used false or misleading information to claim that the President was a Russian spy, with few of the people who said that facing accountability. How did this wrong get rectified? The media outlets that peddled this story lost much of their audiences. It was market justice.
But what are these horseshoe conservatives doing today now that so much of the landscape has been ceded by the collapsing traditional press? Unfortunately some of them are tilting at windmills. I must admit that some of the signs were there for me to see, but I was too busy being entertained by people that Lindsay is correctly criticising as being unmoored from their core principles.
People like Tucker Carlson, who I’ll use as the archetype for now of this new phenomenon. I thought it was hilarious in 2023 that he interviewed Larry Sinclair, a man who gained prominence for claiming to have had sex with Barack Obama years before he became president. And yet, while Sinclair was an engaging story teller, his account was absent of any detail that could be verified. I’ve never been a fan of President Obama, and I’m aware that there is documented evidence from biographer David Garrow that he had confessed in letters to a former girlfriend to having homosexual desires in the 1980s, but that doesn’t mean I think every claim regarding his alleged double life is true.
On the other hand, I find it very interesting that Carlson interviewed Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who through his Kingdom Holding Company investments has a minority stake in X (formerly known as Twitter) at KHC’s headquarters in Riyadh. In his interview Carlson asked questions about Prince Alwaleed’s views on wokeness, LGBT sexuality, Elon Musk and Twitter, the decrepit state of western Europe, the Nordstream pipeline, Israel, Ukraine, sobriety and a myriad of other topics. Auspiciously he didn’t ask about the prince’s arrest in 2017 on corruption charges in Saudi Arabia and release in 2018 after paying some form of restitution. Nor did he ask about allegations from convicted Al Qaeda attempted hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui that royals including Prince Alwaleed were involved in funding the group. Or the fact that in 2016 the release of the previously undisclosed 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report highlighted extensive links between Saudi officials and even members of the royal family and Al Qaeda operatives including participants in 9/11.
In short, while his break with old conservative conventions gave Tucker Carlson the freedom to speak frankly about topics that perhaps were taboo when he was working for Fox News, he is not opting not to address topics with a Saudi prince that should be obviously of much greater interest than his opinion on men playing women’s sports.
Finally Ben, I want to conclude by making the distinction between pointing out that horseshoe theory exists as opposed to telling you how to feel about it. I’ve changed my own beliefs on a number of topics, and have seen my own opinions and predictions proven wrong. This is not a situation where I think scolding, labeling or deriding or deriding people for not being experts is the answer. These trends are happening whether we like them or not, but I urge you to consider carefully what type of outcomes they are creating.