Right Wing, Left Wing, Both Nuts

Over at The Monkey Cage, John Sides takes a look at the similarities between Right wing and Left wing radicals. Digging up a study from 1985, he notes that radicals on both sides of the aisle “are really motivated by the same underlying beliefs and cognitive styles.”

As the 1985 paper by Herbert McClosky and Dennis Chong puts it:

[W]hile the two camps embrace different programmatic beliefs, both are deeply estranged from certain features of American society and highly critical of what they perceive as the spiritual and moral degeneration of American institutions. Both view American society as dominated by conspiratorial forces that are working to defeat their respective ideological aims.

The degree of their alienation is intensified by the zealous and unyielding manner in which they hold their beliefs. Both camps possess an inflexible psychological and political style characterized by the tendency to view social and political affairs in crude, unambiguous and stereotypical terms. They see political life as a conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a struggle between good and evil played out on a battleground where compromise amounts to capitulation and the goal is total victory.

The far left and the far right also resemble each other in the way they pursue their political goals. Both are disposed to censor their opponents, to deal harshly with enemies, to sacrifice the well-being even of the innocent in order to serve a ‘higher purpose’, and to use cruel tactics if necessary to ‘persuade’ society of the wisdom of their objectives. Both tend to support (or oppose) civil liberties in a highly partisan and self-serving fashion, supporting freedom for themselves and for the groups and causes they favor while seeking to withhold it from enemies and advocates of causes they dislike.

This is why, for instance, for every birther you have a 9/11 truther. Extremism and conspiracy-theory-ism, after all, are in many ways their own ideology.