Horseshoe Lines

09/21/2026

There’s this political thing called the horseshoe, which maps the political spectrum from the centre out to the left and right, with the two extremes eventually joining up at authoritarian dictatorship when they get to practical communism or fascism.

Most people in wealthy democracies have food, housing, healthcare, education and access to things that would have been unimaginable a few generations ago. They mostly take this material prosperity for granted because that’s what people do.

If there is sufficient material security, politics is no longer dominated by basic material provisions. This doesn’t necessarily mean that those problems have been completely solved.

Once a society reaches a certain level of wealth, the horseshoe starts to flatten into a line.

There’s no left or right in my version of this line. There’s authoritarian dictatorship at one end and authoritarian democracy at the other.

The authoritarian dictatorship tends to rule in the interests of the people in charge. It does this through rule by law, backed up where necessary by force or terror.

The authoritarian democracy claims to rule in everyone’s interests. It does this through the rule of law. But it can still become authoritarian because there are so many laws telling you what you can and can’t do that it starts to feel authoritarian from the perspective of personal freedom.

Somewhere in the middle there’s a sweet spot. Enough personal freedom to mostly get on with your life, combined with a sensible version of the rule of law that stops governments, companies and other people from walking all over you.

And that requires a legal system that ordinary people can actually use. If you need to be wealthy to enforce or defend your rights, then it’s not at the sweet spot.

So the sweet spot is not just rule of law. It’s rule of law that doesn’t favour the wealthy, combined with as much personal freedom as you can reasonably have without impinging on the same for others. Tricky that one and no one gets it right.

If the current centrist parties on the horseshoe are confused by the rise of what they call the far right, all they need to do is map themselves onto my line.