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The Fake Left
The reactionary Right aren’t the only ones trying to silence other voices and disempower other people
Excerpt from my book, Left Wing, Right Wing, People, and Power: The Core Dynamics of Political Action
The long and arduous process of struggling for greater power and freedom is frustrating. The reality that traditional social power structures often create injustices and oppression is angry making. It’s easy, too easy, to give in to emotions of frustration, anger, and desire for vengeance. When people on the Left stray away from focusing on empowering people and instead focus on tearing others down, they move away from being left-wing into the oppositional politics of the fake Left.
Often, the use of the terms “left wing” and “right wing” signal opposition to the other side. This opposition is sensible to a point because there is a real conflict over the circulation of power. Quite often, however, feelings of antagonism toward the other side become so strong that the focus on opposition overshadows the positions of one’s own side. Overwhelmed with animosity for the other side, people lose touch with the positive values that they supposedly support. These people are not so much left-wing or right-wing as they are anti-Right or anti-Left, respectively. These two groups make up most of what people call the “far Left” and the “far Right.” These extremist groups are self-defined by negative rather than positive positions.
Horseshoe Theory
First, I need to address a common theory about the far Left and the far Right. The idea of the horseshoe theory is that the political spectrum curves back on itself such that the far Left and the far Right of the spectrum converge into the same. The claim is that the far Left and the far Right have far more in common with each other than with the political center.
The theory originated with Jean-Pierre Faye in 2002 as an attempt to explain how Stalin and Hitler could have agreed to invade and then divide Poland in 1939.[1] Faye created a false dilemma in uncritically adopting the fiction that Stalin…
