What really happened to all the leftists who took a sharp right turn in recent years?
We set out to investigate this question when launching Conspirituality. Our investigation has predominantly focused on wellness influencers, but the phenomenon exceeds far beyond our niche.
Every time I bring up this topic, a few commenters will shoot back: they were never really left! I understand the impulse, but these commenters usually mean “those people were never my brand of left.” That is, leftism as ideological and moral purity test.
I’m more sympathetic to people who claim that left and right are effectively meaningless terms. Not completely accurate, as political beliefs live on a spectrum. Since that spectrum shifts, and is broad, binaries are difficult to pin down.
This is why activist Loretta Ross’s “circles of influence” is appealing: work with people you’re mostly aligned with; occasionally work with people you’re not exactly aligned with; defeat those you’re not at all aligned with.
The following video breaks down the categories in more detail.
I’m not going to define left, but the following progressive values are important to me, and I consider them common beliefs for those of us left of center.
Respect for people regardless of ethnicity or gender
The desire for a more equitable financial system that benefits everyone, including the expansion of social services and increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations
Enhancing particular social services, such as nationalizing health care and the mobility industries (air; rail)
A respect for science, even when it doesn’t comport with your understanding of the world
Female body autonomy
Left and right have always been fluid markers of individual experiences within societies. They’re clunky, but they also provide a foundation for how we function as a group.
In modern America (and much of the world), the trend has moved from left to right.
Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet noticed this movement as well. In one of the best pieces on the topic I’ve read, they discuss the rightward drift from liberalism to conservatism—or, in many cases, MAGA, another term along the spectrum.
These left-to-right sliders (or at least left-ish-to-right) — themselves migrants across the political divide — find themselves in strange constellation with those they might once have disdained. Pop feminist icon Naomi Wolf now conferences with hard-right student organizer Charlie Kirk over the prospect of “capital punishment” for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. YouTuber Jimmy Dore, another once-left comedian who lost hold of the joke, now marvels over his meeting of the minds with Tucker Carlson: “We should do a show together!” Call it The Horseshoe Hour.
Horseshoe theory was coined by French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye in 1996, though the idea dates back to at least World War II. Basically, go far enough left and you’re bending toward the right, and vice-versa. It’s a crude and widely debated heuristic.
My belief in the horseshoe’s validity is in terms of sentiment, not content, which doesn’t comport with the original definition of the term. From my observations, the far left and far right are similarly unwavering in the belief that their views are correct. Move toward center and nuance becomes if not embraced, at least entertained.
The theory fails in real world practice, however. There’s a huge disparity between requesting pronouns and the desire to replace democracy with authoritarianism. The “both sides” argument falls apart when we conflate left and right issues in this manner.
A horseshoe implies both sides bending, which Joyce and Sharlet reject.
Except “horseshoe theory,” which imagines a political spectrum bending to meet at its extremes, doesn’t describe this drift. It goes in one direction.
The right isn’t making many left turns. But it’s also not exactly unidirectional. So if horseshoes aren’t cutting it, what is?
Diagonalism is one response.
Allow to me to quote their work in full, as it’s an important concept. I’m also thrilled that the authors pulled from our work on the topic.
Diagonalism, argue Slobodian and Callison, functions like a post-Covid version of “digitally mediated” movements such as Brexit. It rejects conventional labels of left and right, even as it borrows elements from both, sharing “a conviction that all power is conspiracy.” It’s often marked by “a dedication to disruptive decentralization, a desire for distributed knowledge and thus distributed power, and a susceptibility to right-wing radicalization.”
The people who comprise diagonalist movements come in various forms: movement hustlers gamifying politics; left-to-right ideologues who claim they didn’t leave the Left, the Left left them; and far-right esoterics. It has drawn wellness enthusiasts as well as neo-Nazis, and has praised QAnon. Unlike a horseshoe, the diagonalist path draws from not just the Left but also the center and the greater hinterlands, where everyday people hadn’t previously thought much about politics at all.
But even for those with deeper political commitments, Callison told the podcast Conspirituality, “these left-to-right travelers tend to do something sort of sleight of hand, where they begin to put civil freedom above social justice. What should remain for them is a belief in the need for redistributive equality, or some kind of end state where economic inequality has been ameliorated somehow. But that seems to fade deep into the background, instead replaced by a kind of obsession with matters of speech and platforming.”
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