>It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
For my friends - everything, for my enemies - the law.
For my friends - everything, for my enemies - the law.
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.
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?
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.
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.
IMHO, political positioning should be described as a tensor, where each data point is the person's position on a specific policy.
only partisan blinders would cause one to equate trumps actions with anything from our past.
mark my words, maga is about dismantling the american system and establishing a totalitarian state. obey.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...
Republicans can play all sorts of games because their mistresses will always be able to get an abortion on the DL without consequence, while "single black mom? 25 to life for murder!"