What are the dynamics when political parties switch poles? The horsehoe theory of politics suggests at the extremes the far left and far right are functionally indistinguishable. In cultural terms, this highlights the need for delineating garb and customs. For example, can you functionally distinguish a Wokeist who wants segrated drinking fountains from a Jim Crow racist who wants the same? Only via invisible intent, and then only because of who that intention is designed to help. They both serve their in-group. It is really only the in-groups that differ.
BACKGROUND
Here is a quote from Rony Guldmann's excellent unpublished book "Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia "
In a book that delighted liberals, Frank argued that his fellow Kansans had been duped into voting against their own economic interests—that is, into voting Republican—by cynical politicians of the Right. These operatives have succeeded in transmuting economic frustrations into cultural resentment against a fictional “liberal elite,” inciting an irrational cultural class war against these elites to displace the rational economic class war against the powerful business interests that these Kansans should fight and once did fight. Whereas the working Kansans of yesteryear were fiery progressives resisting their exploitation by plutocrats,1 Kansas had recently become a place where workers are more conservative than their bosses,2 driven on by a crusade that suspends material interests in favor of vague, unappeasable cultural grievances.3 The “in many ways... preeminent question of our time,” Frank observed, was how so many voters could get their basic interests so wrong, how so many could forget that “it is the Democrats that are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized.” This was once “part of the ABCs of adulthood.”4 Yet conservatives have now distracted voters from those ABCs by replacing a hard-nosed economic conception of class with an airy cultural one. Class oppression is now understood to be the result, not of the unprecedented concentration of economic power in the hands of business elites, but of the unprecedented concentration of cultural power in a haughty intelligentsia. It is a perennial struggle between the unpretentious, authentic majority and an egg- headed yet all-powerful elite contemptuous of this majority’s tastes and values.5 Kansans’ real economic powerless vis-à-vis real plutocratic overlords has been recast and distorted as a vague sense of cultural disenfranchisement by liberalism, which conservatives condemn as an alien, menacing sensibility that any authentic American rejects instinctively.
By thus reconfiguring the meaning of class and class conflict, conservatives have arrogated to themselves the mantle of the outsider and underdog. Frank observed:
From the mild-mannered David Brooks to the ever-wrathful Ann Coulter, attacks on the personal tastes and pretensions of this [the liberal] stratum of society are the stock-in-trade of conservative writers. They, the conservatives, are the real outsiders, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social “betters” to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.6
His main thesis is that by moving into the hegemony the Left has taken upon it the dynamics of the historic Right - oppression, marginalization, in-group favouritism, etc. This is what the Right critiques. The Right has moved to become the Left - the marginalized outroup fighting for worker's rights and populist interests.
They aren’t just venting personal grievances, as they see it, but highlighting the existence of a new cultural dispensation that has supplanted the old rules of public life, where the modus operandi is now the slander and intimidation of conservatives. If liberals inveigh against the oppressiveness and hypocrisy of conservatives, then they must be prepared to have their own oppressiveness and hypocrisy unmasked as well. If liberals insist on diversity, tolerance, and equal respect, then conservatives insist that they be afforded the genuine articles rather than the Orwellian inversions that liberalism in fact offers.
As a really good thinker Guldmann's ideas are obviously more nuanced that a convenient and simplistic Left-Right swap. He supposes it is elements in the Left which are led into becoming Right-like, and it is elements of the Right that are led into becoming Left-like. He alludes to the fact that it is a Darwinian landscape trap that moves groups in the direction of the vanguard. For example, by accepting the mantle of marginalized oppressee's, the Right can then critique the Left as hypocritical. This hits the very foundation of Left meta-narratives. The Left simply excommunicates the Right from civil society via sin based logic. The Right's meta-narrative of individual freedom is therefore challenged - how can you be free is you choose total societal excommunication? How can you govern when you chose societal splintering and support anarachical directions.
WHY?
The evolutionary question raised is why is there a Left-Right phase change. I'll assume here that Guldmann is right-enough. Anecdotal data and hard data in the US suggests this has happened during the Trump era. The rise of woke authoritarian political religions across the West also suggest this. The Roman political shift under Constantine suggests this, as does some of the data around the 17th century war of religions. I'd suggest the American Revolution also suggests the same.
Marx
The easiest answer is Marxist. In an energized system a change in power can rapidly percolate through supporting institutions. It is a power revolution. You see this in places like modern Florida or Colorado where a very minor tilt toward one party can very quickly lead to total domination by that party over a long period of time. Overly mature systems have had their regular checks and balances figured out, so once dynamic tension is gone, and there are no strong social cohesion mores, then the system can flip very quickly. Physically this would be similar to phase change propogations in supercooled liquids. This requires each particle to be functionally proximate to an adjacent particle, and for the degree of likely interaction to be well above the activation energy needed for any individual change. Common culture enables "proximity". Environmental conditions and history determine activation energy.
But this reasoning operates at the "symptom" level. It gives you a bit of insight into phase change dynamics, but no insight into why humans evolved exaggerated social phase change dynamics, nor no insight into how social-moral-politics fits into our Darwin-Machined landscape.
Pacing & Leading
Another theoretical explanation comes from Aran Norezayan's old work on religion and governance. His theory was that religion and (secular) governance paced and led each other in relation to human polity size evolution. Basically religion would enable certain gene-cultural traits which increased the stabilization time of larger polity sizes. Then governance would catch up to polity size operation, eventually leading polity size growth potentials. Then religion would incorporate some of these governance solutions and vice versa.
The current rise of religious level politics (woke and right) supports this theory. Politics, especially at the moment Left politics, has stumbled into religious level solutions. Hence the fall back into sin and blasphemy accusations to disempower political rivals. Anthropological evidence around chiefdom sized polities also supports tension between governance/war leaders and religious/cultural leaders. It is supposed that the God-King solution which enabled Empire sized polities was an evolutionary solution to the limitations of dual leadership tensions.
For this dual role theory to explain horseshoe theory politics phase changes, I suspect we need to loosen up traditional religion definitions. Guldmann, like many leading edge thought leaders, suggest political Wokeism is pure secular religion (see James Lindsay for more evidence)
Chapter 9 narrows the focus to the problem of religious neutrality and investigates conservatives’ conviction that what liberalism advertises as its religious neutrality disguises the machinations of a secular counter-religion. Conservatives believe that what passes for religious neutrality is no high ideal, but the ideological tool of secularist hegemony, and hence liberal domination. Here as elsewhere, conservative claims of cultural oppression invite liberal incredulity. Here as elsewhere, that incredulity is dissolved by the Counter-Enlightenment narrative I defend. Liberals will dismiss worries about the encroachments of a religion of secularism or “secular humanism” as cynical and disingenuous. But they can do so only because their Enlightenment self-understanding overlooks the ways in which vestiges of a religious past have been incorporated into our putatively secular norms and ideals, whose religious function is to exalt their defenders as persons purified of the superstition, paganism, and idolatry of religious conservatives.
In so exalting themselves, liberals surreptitiously promote a new variant of the very religiosity they purport to repudiate. I argue that the relationship between religious conservatives and secular liberals is most profoundly conceived as a contemporary recapitulation of the relationship between conquered pagans and conquering Christians endeavoring to uproot these pagans’ idolatry. What liberals call religious neutrality is an intellectualized, sublimated, and secularized iteration of this ancient ambition, which now operates within unacknowledged layers of social meaning rather than through formal creeds. This plausible deniability is why conservative anxieties about the encroachments of an aggressive, evangelizing secular humanism sound paranoid and conspiratorial. But like all conservative claims of cultural oppression, these apprehensions become intelligible once placed in their broader historical and philosophical context, which always reveals the larger truth of what strikes liberals as conservative obtuseness. And this is that our disagreements about the meaning of religious neutrality are the secularization of what first arose as religious disagreements concerning the relative transcendence or immanence of the divine. The religious neutrality problem is the sedimentation of the theological past in the jurisprudential present, the surreptitious replaying of a conflict between different kinds of religious believers as a conflict about what qualifies as neutrality between believer and non-believer. It is this historical legacy, and not conservative obstinacy, that explains why this conflict has proven so divisive and intractable.
So, what seems to have happened is that the revolutionary Leftism of the 60's and earlier may have figured out how to leverage religious dynamics to effect the total revolution of the state, education, and social morality. Hence the reason why Leftism's main argument against conservatism is based on moral excommunication and social marginalization. In evolutionary terms, one has to wonder if the Left has flipped the religious lead. Conservatives had, for many years, led society based upon Judeo-Christianity. But that organizing principle could only go so far in a diverse pluralistic world. The Left stumbled into a higher polity solution - a new world religion based on secular ideology, but with the adaptive trappings and fervor or zealous religion. Its universalizing solution was not limited to chapels and formal congregations. It was an ideology, like the French Revolution, but with lessons learned from 20th century communistic failures.
The Left's usurpation of religion now leaves the Right with its older, now poorly adapted, classic religious structure and all its factitious divides. It is no wonder thought leaders like Jordan Peterson are trying to unite Abrahamic faiths together in order to mount a successful defence against religio-political Wokeism.
If the pacing and leading theory is correct, one should anticipate the Right figuring out governing structures to enable the unification of Christianity and Islam and Secular moral quasi-religion. But, if one uses history as a guideline, such a solution should take a long time to percolate through the culture until conditions are energized enough for it to swap leads with Woke political-religious governance. Conservative's oppression narrative isn't a good sell across the population as a whole. Their governance solutions are also old hegemonic hat. Democratic election systems are hacked, so people might as well pick the side that is going to support their morals and crush dissent. The tendency or adaptive benefit of assimilation at a (potential) higher polity level seems to be the driver here.
Authoritarian assimilation is warranted if you have a new moralized governing solution that creates larger group size by pushing out overly ripe dissenters. Transformational logic keys in on the adaptive potential of the new religous-governing solution and enables societal purges to not broadly trigger adaptive-system/group collapse. In other words, you can purge your population and not everyone will think this implies the loss of nation state social cohesion. I think this is the existential fear conservatives feel. What conservatives seem to be trying to do is to signal, to the group large, that this purge dynamic is likely to turn on itself. This is what Soviet era communism and Maoism did to its population. And, what German and Italian fascism did to its population.
SUMMING UP THE BIOLOGY
This train of thought leads one to the conclusion political pole shift, as per the horseshoe theory of politics, is evolutionary selected for its ability to produce a larger unit of selection (polity). The larger unit emerges from insights gained by the government/organizational or religious/moral side that is out of power. This side picks up insights from the other side, and in doing so becomes somewhat similar to the other side. This enables the old hegemon to deeply critique the new revolutionaries as hypocritical. This brings to the fore signals of adaptive group moderation. Is this new group going to Gulag people like Russia or gas them like Germany? How slippery is this slope? The usurping revolutionaries get to define the size of the in-group out-group divide based upon what they think they can get away with, or more technically, what properly balances fitness accrued via purification and fitness lost via purges and elicited levels of disgust/minority protection sentiment. Human history shows, we don't tend to worry that much about minorities, as long as there is a good meta-narrative about why they are less human than human. The left is doing a good job on this front. But, it can't last. That is why the new universalizing meta-narrative will have to stumble into a convincing solution for when to stop. In north america, the Right largely did that with first nations relations. But that solution emerged from the other camp. It wasn't until it was adopted by both camps that the phase change was energized enough to happen.
This seems to be the dynamics of the horseshoe theory of poltical change. Once both sides accept oppression brakes, the old hegemon is too archaic to stay in power, and the new revolutionaries have to much ascendent momentum not to get in power. But popular acquisence to the adaptiveness of revolutionary purges is needed. Hence the superficial reason both sides show their cards about how they are the "other". Guldmann describes this as the aspects within the Left becoming Right, and vice versa. People get clues about how each side will act when infused with the spirit of those they are toppling. That spirit is constrained by an evolutionary landscape which is selected for by environmental conditions which rarely change. This if the revolutionaries don't offer much differrent than the old hegemons, the pain and risk of revolution is signalled to be not worth it. But, if the meta-narrative offers a novel solution out of old environmental constraints, then the brakes come off. The system loosed adaptive tension (throttling) and a full and rapid phase change ensures.
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