Political extremism, two faces of the same problem, and the people standing on the edge
The Gig Man’s Life | Opinion
There is an old political theory called horseshoe theory. The basic concept is that the further you travel toward the political left or the political right, the closer those extremes eventually become. Instead of a straight political spectrum, the theory imagines a horseshoe, with the two ends bending toward one another.
It’s an interesting concept. It’s also one that has generated plenty of arguments about whether it accurately describes political behavior.
But I’ve been thinking about something different.
What if the political spectrum isn’t a horseshoe at all? What if it’s a coin?
Not two political extremes traveling around some imaginary curve until they eventually meet.
Not two completely separate groups that have absolutely nothing in common.
One coin. Two faces. And an edge between them.
Because when I look at political extremism, regardless of whether it’s coming from the left or the right, I keep noticing something interesting.
The political positions may be completely different. The desired outcomes may be completely different. The people involved may genuinely believe they’re fighting for completely different visions of society.
Yet the tactics they use to defend those beliefs can be remarkably similar.
And that’s where my theory begins.
Two Faces, Same Coin
Think about an ordinary coin.
One side has a face. The other side has a different design. They may represent entirely different things, but they’re still part of the same physical object.
Flip it over, and the appearance changes.
The material doesn’t.
That’s how I look at political extremism.
On one face, you may have someone convinced that capitalism is inherently evil, that socialism or communism provides the only legitimate solution, and that anyone opposing that position must be acting out of greed, ignorance, or malicious intent.
Flip that coin over.
Now you might have someone convinced that socialism or communism is inherently evil, that capitalism represents the only legitimate economic system, and that anyone opposing that position must be acting out of envy, ignorance, or malicious intent.
The beliefs are different. The arguments are different.
But look at the underlying behavior.
Both have decided that their position is unquestionably correct. Both can dismiss opposing evidence as propaganda. Both may reduce their political opponents to caricatures, rather than recognizing them as people who have reached different conclusions.
And both can insist that questioning their position makes you part of the problem.
Different political faces. Similar methods of protecting an absolute belief.
That doesn’t mean every socialist, capitalist, conservative, or progressive behaves this way. Nor does it mean advocating major political change makes someone an extremist.
The distinction I’m interested in is what happens when a political belief becomes so absolute that the individual no longer accepts the possibility of being wrong.
The Coin Flip
Here’s another way to look at it.
Take a coin, assign one face to the far left and the other to the far right, and flip it.
As a metaphor, you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting either face.
Now imagine listening to somebody making an extremist political argument without knowing which political movement they belong to.
They tell you that the opposition is destroying society. They insist that anyone questioning their position is either deliberately helping the enemy or too ignorant to recognize the truth. They explain that the media, educational institutions, and powerful organizations are deliberately misleading the public.
Which side are they on?
Without hearing the specific policies or ideological objectives they’re defending, you might not be able to tell.
Because those rhetorical techniques are not exclusive to either side.
The fifty-fifty coin toss isn’t a statistical claim that extremists are equally distributed across the political spectrum. It’s a way of illustrating that the tactic alone may not identify the ideology behind it.
The face of the coin tells you what they believe. The material of the coin tells you how they approach disagreement.
And I would argue that the second question deserves a lot more attention than it receives.
What Does the Research Actually Say?
There is some scientific support for the idea that political extremes can share psychological tendencies.
A study by Jan-Willem van Prooijen and André Krouwel, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2017, found greater dogmatic intolerance among both left-wing and right-wing extremists than among moderates in the populations they studied.
In other words, political extremity was associated with a greater tendency to dismiss conflicting ideological beliefs.
But that doesn’t establish that everyone at the extremes has the same personality.
A 2025 review in the Annual Review of Psychology found a more complicated picture: people across the political spectrum share more psychological characteristics than sometimes assumed, but they also differ in meaningful ways, including their values and the causes they prioritize.
That’s important.
I’m not suggesting that we’ve discovered some universal psychological profile that applies equally to every extremist.
I’m suggesting we should pay closer attention to observable behaviors that can occur regardless of political affiliation.
And rather than insisting that opposing political extremes must eventually become the same thing, my coin analogy asks whether they sometimes operate through similar patterns from the beginning.
What About the Edge?
This is the part I think the horseshoe analogy misses.
A coin doesn’t have just two faces.
It has an edge.
And that’s where I would place the people who are willing to examine both sides without automatically accepting either one.
Not necessarily somebody who agrees with half of everything the left says and half of everything the right says.
Not somebody who refuses to take a position.
And certainly not somebody who believes the correct answer must always be precisely halfway between two arguments.
That’s not critical thinking. That’s just finding the average.
The edge represents something different.
It’s the willingness to consider an argument on its merits, even if it comes from somebody whose political philosophy you generally oppose.
It’s being able to tell somebody you agree with that they’re wrong.
It’s recognizing that a good idea doesn’t suddenly become a bad idea because somebody from the opposing political party suggested it.
And it’s understanding that you can have very strong convictions without turning those convictions into an excuse to dismiss everybody else.
The edge of the coin isn’t where political opinions disappear. It’s where political opinions remain open to examination.
Of course, simply calling yourself a moderate doesn’t guarantee any of those qualities. Somebody in the political middle can be just as poorly informed, stubborn, or dismissive as somebody at either extreme.
The edge is something you have to maintain through your behavior.
When Discussion Becomes an Argument
One of the things I’ve talked about repeatedly is the difference between having a discussion and having an argument.
And I’m reminded of that old Monty Python sketch about the argument clinic.
The joke is that simply contradicting somebody isn’t actually constructing an argument.
Yet look at how much of our political conversation works today.
Somebody makes a statement.
Instead of asking what evidence supports that statement, somebody else immediately identifies the speaker’s political affiliation.
Then comes the dismissal.
You’re a socialist.
You’re MAGA.
You’re a communist.
You’re a fascist.
You’re just repeating propaganda.
And suddenly, nobody has to address the original statement anymore.
The label has replaced the discussion.
Now, there are legitimate reasons to examine the ideological background of an argument. Political movements have histories, assumptions, and objectives that matter.
But identifying a political affiliation is not the same as demonstrating that an argument is false.
And when the label becomes a substitute for evidence, we’re no longer having a productive discussion.
We’re defending a position.
It doesn’t matter which face of the coin is showing.
The process is the same.
The Propaganda Problem
This brings me back to something that originally got me thinking about this theory.
I was listening to two political commentators discussing horseshoe theory.
One argued that the theory was effectively right-wing propaganda designed to undermine the far left.
The other argued that dismissing the theory was itself a form of propaganda designed to protect the far left from criticism.
Now, stop and consider what’s happening.
Both speakers accused the other political position of attempting to manipulate the public.
Both presented themselves as helping people recognize deception.
Both offered an explanation of why the opposing argument should be treated with suspicion.
And both made assumptions about the motives behind that argument.
That’s interesting, isn’t it?
One is telling you that an idea exists to manipulate people.
The other is telling you that rejecting the idea exists to manipulate people.
And neither accusation of motive, by itself, demonstrates whether horseshoe theory is scientifically valid.
That’s a separate question requiring evidence.
This is exactly what I mean by two faces of the same coin.
They can be arguing over completely different political conclusions while using a similar approach to discredit one another.
To be clear, identifying those similarities doesn’t prove that both arguments are equally supported, equally misleading, or equally consequential.
But it does give us an opportunity to examine the argument rather than simply accepting whichever commentator happens to represent our preferred political position.
The Danger of Absolute Certainty
What concerns me most about political extremism isn’t merely that somebody has a strong opinion.
I have strong opinions. Most people do.
The problem begins when someone treats disagreement as evidence of a moral or intellectual defect.
When questioning a particular economic policy supposedly proves that you don’t care about poor people.
When questioning government spending supposedly proves that you don’t care about the country.
When disagreeing about social policy supposedly demonstrates that you’re fundamentally incapable of empathy.
Or when disagreeing with a political movement supposedly makes you an enemy who deserves to be silenced.
Those assumptions can turn political discussions into loyalty tests.
And loyalty tests don’t encourage people to think critically. They encourage people to demonstrate that they belong.
Once a person’s political identity becomes more important than the accuracy of their arguments, correcting an error can feel like betraying their own group.
That’s a dangerous situation for any society that depends on disagreement, compromise, and public accountability.
The danger isn’t that everyone will develop the same political beliefs.
It’s that they may stop questioning the beliefs they already have.
Being on the Edge Doesn’t Mean Being Neutral
There’s another distinction worth making.
Standing on the edge of the coin doesn’t mean that every political argument deserves equal consideration.
Some claims are supported by strong evidence. Others aren’t.
Some government policies produce measurable results. Others fail.
Some actions protect civil liberties. Others undermine them.
Acknowledging that different groups sometimes use similar political tactics doesn’t erase those differences.
If the evidence points clearly toward one conclusion, you shouldn’t pretend the evidence is evenly divided merely to look politically balanced.
And if somebody proposes an authoritarian policy, the fact that their opponents sometimes behave badly doesn’t somehow cancel out that proposal.
The point is to apply consistent standards.
If censorship is wrong when used against your political movement, what makes it acceptable when used against your opponents?
If evidence matters when you’re criticizing somebody else’s political position, why should it suddenly stop mattering when somebody questions your own?
If you believe people deserve respect, does that principle stop applying when they disagree with you?
Those are questions we should all be prepared to answer.
And the answers shouldn’t depend entirely on which face of the coin happens to be pointing upward.
Stop Flipping the Coin
Here’s where I think my theory differs most from the horseshoe.
Horseshoe theory suggests that the political extremes bend toward one another.
My coin analogy doesn’t require them to travel anywhere.
They’re already part of the same political environment, capable of relying on some of the same psychological and rhetorical mechanisms while pursuing very different objectives.
The coin may land with one face upward today and the other face upward tomorrow.
The arguments change. The political priorities change. The identities of the people defending those positions change.
But absolutism, demonization, selective evidence, and the refusal to tolerate disagreement can persist regardless of which ideology is being represented.
And those are the behaviors I’m interested in recognizing.
The people standing on the edge aren’t necessarily the people without convictions.
They may be the people who understand that convictions must still be examined, questioned, and supported by evidence.
They can lean left on one issue, right on another, and disagree with both sides on a third.
They don’t have to accept a complete ideological package just because they support one part of it.
And perhaps most importantly, they can recognize when someone they normally agree with is using the same questionable tactics they condemn in their opponents.
So no, I don’t think political extremism necessarily looks like a horseshoe.
I think it’s a coin.
Two faces, capable of showing us very different political philosophies while sometimes exposing the same underlying habits of intolerance and certainty.
And between those faces is an edge that requires something political extremism often struggles to accommodate:
The possibility that you might be wrong.
Perhaps the real challenge isn’t choosing which side of the coin we want to land on.
Perhaps it’s learning how to stand on the edge without losing our balance.
The Gig Man’s Life — Because the gig isn’t just how we make a living. It’s how we live, think, question, and navigate the world around us.
Research referenced
- Van Prooijen, J. W., & Krouwel, A. P. M. (2017). Extreme Political Beliefs Predict Dogmatic Intolerance. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
- Kteily, N. S., & Brandt, M. J. (2025). Ideology: Psychological Similarities and Differences Across the Ideological Spectrum Reexamined. Annual Review of Psychology.
- Finkel, E. J., et al. (2020). Political Sectarianism in America. Science.