The origins of horseshoe politics

Plus my charity dreams, some oyster salesman, and the use and misuse of political capital

According to horseshoe theory, the far-left and far-right, rather than being at opposite ends of a linear political spectrum, closely resemble each other. (Photo by Mint Images via Getty Images)

At WelcomeFest earlier this week, I was pleased to moderate a panel with Representatives Adam Gray and Tom Suozzi — the only two House Democrats to have flipped Trump districts in 2024 — where they unveiled the Promise to America, which is a kind of moderate Democrat manifesto.

The idea here is to try to transcend dog-whistle moderation and the tendency of strong electoral performers to want to just be independent thinkers focused on their districts and eschew playing for a team. Part of the issue is that while electoral pragmatism is important, pragmatism alone doesn’t really provide you with a framework for governing. It also doesn’t help you find like-minded people and build pipelines and networks that extend across multiple states, multiple kinds of roles, and endure. The basic idea is that they want people who broadly agree with the principles outlined to sign the Promise and ideally build a large team of officeholders and candidates and ordinary citizens who like these ideas.

J Wong: Everyone here is familiar with the horse shoe theory of how opposite sides of the political spectrum bend toward each other, but does anyone have a good explanation for why that is?

The horseshoe operates on a few different levels.

• One is temperamental. Most people who work in politics have a kind of mainstream disposition. They probably have a few opinions that are way outside the consensus, but those opinions aren’t strongly held or aren’t about things that they feel passionately about. Their general approach to life is to try to make incremental progress on relatively mainstream issues. Extremists aren’t like that — they have an oppositional attitude toward authority and end up having that in common with each other.

• Another is negative polarization. There are two kinds of people who really, deeply, and profoundly hate Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries: Republicans, and people on the far-left. This ends up being something that they have in common with each other. Pair a far-leftist up with someone from the far-right who hates mainstream Republican Party leaders and they end up having enemies in common, which is a good way to start making friends.

• A third is ideological. There is a “liberal center” to American politics that believes, fundamentally, in a positive-sum cooperative world. Then there are illiberal zero-sum tendencies floating around that tend to sort themselves on the basis of whether they blame foreigners for everything or whether they blame rich people for everything, but they have that zero-sumness in common. And of course many things — like trade — implicate both foreigners and rich people.

Something I would note is that I think this is much more of a media phenomenon than a characteristic of the real world electorate. It’s pretty normal for a voter to switch from D to R or vice versa in a presidential election, citing some particular aspect of the candidates, while remaining loyal to their original party down-ballot. Then usually after a cycle or two those down-ballot loyalties start switching, especially when incumbents retire. Which is to say people transition from being partisans to swing voters to partisans on the other side over a period that often lasts years or even decades, rather than swinging violently from extreme to extreme.

The difference is that normal people aren’t crafting whole identities around their politics in the way that high-volume posters do, so normal people are able to just comfortably feel conflicted.

Sasha Gusev: Does the president come into office with a limited budget of “political capital” that he must carefully spend down or is it more like he must place careful bets on policies that might “pay out” and allow him to bet again, or some third thing?

It’s probably constructive for politicians and advocates to think primarily in terms of a limited budget of political capital that gets spent down. The main reason I would urge this is that wishful thinking is extremely tempting. When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, I think they were really hoping it would be a bet that paid off and reaped them a reward in public opinion. But even though this sort of worked, the law was a big millstone around the necks of congressional candidates in November 2010 and was not paying any discernible dividends in the 2012, 2014, or 2016 cycles. The timeframe on which it did work is that when Republicans tried to repeal the A.C.A. in 2017, that action was very unpopular.

Conversely, I always like to remind people that wrong-party governors like Andy Beshear, Phil Scott, and Laura Kelly tend to be very popular.

This is important to point out because, again, political activists and advocates are always trying to persuade people that the public is demanding massive policy change. In fact, politicians who are forced to pursue very moderate and incremental policy agendas tend to be well-liked. The Minnesota Democratic Party got a lot done during its short-lived trifecta in 2023 and 2024 and then promptly lost its majorities. It’s almost certainly been bad for Abigail Spanberger’s political standing that Virginia Democrats did so well in the 2025 elections. Having newly empowered Democratic majorities forces her to choose between overreaching by signing everything the legislature wants or (what she’s responsibly done instead) making enemies on the left by vetoing things.

I don’t think the moral of this story is that politicians should never do anything. But you ought to assume that making policy change, especially on a party-line vote, is going to be costly. The goal should be to try to do things like the A.C.A. that address genuinely important issues and stand the test of time. Which is just to say that there should be a reasonably high bar before you undertake some controversial course of action, rather than trying to lower that bar by finding some bipartisan cover. There are always a lot of people who want to persuade you of the opposite: that the public will reward a frenetic pace of action, so you should set a very low bar. The example people usually cite for this is something like F.D.R. in 1933, which is fair enough. But I think there’s a difference between saying you should take decisive action to manage a short-term crisis and saying that voters are generically inclined to reward large-scale policy change.

This is all part of the reason I think it’s so crazy that you have a lot of progressives citing Donald Trump’s first year in office as a model. What Trump did in his first year was under-react to the specific crisis at hand — inflation — while pissing lots of people off with dramatic actions. A particularly egregious thing about Trump is that he has a real tendency to spend down political capital on stuff like trying to name the Kennedy Center after himself or building a ballroom, ideas driven by greed or egomania that have nothing to do with any kind of coherent conservative policy agenda.

Sam: What should we make out of Trump not facing pressure from various Republican factions to not actually do more policy - either through regulations/rollbacks or legislation? It seems pretty clear that Trump’s mainly focused on enriching himself, and the people who would otherwise be able to push an agenda (cabinet secretaries, congressional leaders, etc.) don’t seem to want to do much beyond owning the libs (Mullin’s “no international flights to sanctuary cities” is sort of the apotheosis of this). He got OBBA done, and made a half-hearted attempt at stepped-up immigration enforcement that clearly was more about optics than actually making lasting changes, and everyone with a stake in the Republican Party is basically fine with this?

I find conservatives’ overall relationship to the political process to be a little bit puzzling.

It’s not that they all march in lockstep without internal dissent or disagreement. But they seem very averse to engaging in specific debates about exactly what Republicans should be doing. There’s nobody arguing for tactical moderation even in situations like Spencer Pratt’s run for Los Angeles mayor where it seems obviously necessary if you actually want him to win. Nobody seems particularly concerned that the abortion rate has gone up since Dobbs. When I wrote my “it’s time to freak out about the national debt” piece, I saw various people on the right respond to it by arguing with me about things Obama did or things that I said in 2013 — but nobody is doing the take “it is bad for America that Trump sunk a bunch of political capital into trying to name the Kennedy Center after himself rather than into trying to restrain Medicare spending.”

Obviously there would be a political price to tackling entitlements. But Trump does things that are politically costly all the time, they just tend to be egomaniacal.

But I wouldn’t frame this as conservatives being “basically fine” with the situation — lots of conservatives have lots of significant grievances with the status quo. It’s more that it doesn’t seem to occur to conservatives to treat the decision-making and priority-setting of the Republican Party as a fit topic for conversation. Instead, the worldview generally seems to be that only the left has agency and the right just sort of exists.

And I don’t think this is just about Trump. You hear a lot of big-picture conservative narratives about the past 50 years of American life that act as if the Reagan Revolution never happened when it seems to me that Ronald Reagan was in fact the most influential president of my lifetime. That doesn’t mean everything he did was good (obviously) or that he shaped every aspect of American public policy. But he was such a significant figure that even things he didn’t do are worth remarking on. How come the misguided 1970s tilt against nuclear energy wasn’t reversed in the 1980s? How come an administration dedicated to the proposition that “a rising tide lifts all boats” was so narrowly focused on taxes rather than the regulatory strictures that seem to really hold growth back?

Progressives are constantly poring over the Clinton and Obama records, second-guessing things and trying to find lost opportunities. Conservatives don’t seem very interested in what happens when they wield power and whether they are making choices that they are happy with.

Oliver: The abolition of SAT requirements at Colleges has been a total disaster, with many students needing to receive remedial middle school maths. Almost everyone who knows anything about education predicted this would happen. Should the administrators who approved such a policy be fired?

Probably so. I’m glad schools are back-tracking on this everywhere, but I don’t think any of them genuinely learned anything that wasn’t already clearly true in advance.

Joseph America 2028: What should we do about the proliferation of emotional support animals in public spaces? We seem to have moved from reasonable accommodations for service animals to a world where people bring emotional support dogs into restaurants and grocery stores, emotional support parrots onto planes, and, apparently, emotional support snakes — which I would argue create emotional distress for everyone else. Is there a policy fix here that preserves real disability accommodations while also re-establishing the norm that most adults should be able to spend a few hours away from their beloved pets, secure in the knowledge that the animal will still be waiting for them when they get home?

My position on people breaking the rules to take pets where they don’t belong is clear.

I will also say that I personally don’t feel like I actually observe all that much abusive behavior. I do observe a non-zero amount of it and that’s bad and I think that as a society we should say that clearly. But it’s not my impression that the shops and restaurants in my genuinely very dog-rich neighborhood are in fact drowning in bogus emotional-support animals.

Mark_J_Ryan: Graham Platner?

The Waukeag Neck Oyster Company guy? He was serving up oysters last summer on Thursday afternoons at the Brooklin General Store, but I don’t really understand why he’d come up in Slow Boring comments.

City of Trees: You are put in complete control of a very large foundation, with an endowment of at least $1 billion. It’s a safe guess to make that GiveDirectly would receive a sizeable donation, but what share of distributions would they get, and what else would you give money to?

In my charitable giving, I have tended to support both GiveDirectly (cash transfers) and GiveWell (mostly global public health stuff that they plausibly believe has higher cost-benefit than cash), and I really admire the work of Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), which is a larger foundation that has a long relationship with GiveWell and makes major grants to the programs they recommend.

But Coefficient also has these other funds and programs tackling things that I think are important, like catastrophic risk mitigation, A.I. governance, and growth and abundance. They already have a pretty big team in place and have thought a lot about these issues, so if I came into a billion dollars I think I’d mostly want to collaborate with them and lend extra support to what they are doing.

Of course in the “ineffective altruism” space, I’d also like to operate a nonprofit movie theater that shows cool old movies and brings in guest speakers and other programming.

Will: Re: Tuesday’s Triumph of Capital post, I have also been frustrated by the discourse around “wealth taxes” for the similar reasons. I have also been surprised that I haven’t seen policy suggestions of treating the loans many ultrawealthy live off in in the “buy, borrow, die” strategy as income.

Schematically, if someone’s assets are roughly $0 cash & $5B stock, I get they may not want to sell the stock to buy houses and yachts because they want to maintain control of a company they founded or they don’t want to miss out on expected long-term appreciation of the stock and would rather borrow against the stock to fund their lifestyle. But if you borrow millions of dollars collateralized by stock to fund your day-to-day life, that seems like it could reasonably be treated as taxable income.

As you touched on in the post, a basic tension is that people are mad about capital accumulation by a tiny elite cohort, but at a macro level encouraging rising capital stock & savings is good. But grocery stores and car dealerships don’t accept capital, they accept cash, so the members of that cohort have to find ways of converting their capital to cash to buy things. Our current tax policy gives them loopholes to do that without paying tax on the cash. Is there an economically & politically effective/practical way to thread this needle so that we continue to encourage capital growth but *when* a capital-wealthy individual wants to get cash from that capital without actually liquidating it they get taxed on the cash they got?

I support a crackdown on this kind of borrowing-as-a-tax-loophole, but I also think we need to temper our expectations around this to some extent. Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow, for their part, say you could raise about $100 billion over a 10-year time horizon doing this. That amount isn’t nothing, but it’s modest relative to the scale of Democrats’ spending aspirations. They also say a crackdown wouldn’t fundamentally alter the tendency of the super-rich to keep accumulating wealth. Ruben Gallego has a bill on this, though, and it’s a good idea.

Adam S: If you were to create a tier list of worst bugs, who are you putting your S tier? Mosquitos, sure, but there must be other S tier contenders

The New World screwworm!

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