Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Sahra Wagenknecht are crossing political lines—are they chasing headlines or revealing deeper political divides?
What do Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the German politician Sahra Wagenknecht have in common? They all appear to have migrated across the political spectrum. Gabbard and Kennedy are both former Democrats who now vocally support Donald Trump, and Wagenknecht has gone from the far left of Germany’s Left Party to strident nationalism. Earlier this year, she founded a new party modestly named after herself. After faring well in elections in three East German states this fall, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance seems likely to enter the Bundestag in the 2025 federal election.
Do these political migrations reflect a mere opportunistic betrayal of principles, or is something more complicated going on? An obvious explanation is psychological: moves across the political spectrum earn the precious currency of attention. People accustomed to a high profile in the media sometimes need a dramatic gesture to get themselves back in the news. But the limits of such a reductionist explanation are obvious: most – if not all – politicians are after the limelight, but very few switch parties and positions.
A more interesting explanation draws on twentieth-century history. When communists and fascists seemed to join forces in opposing liberalism, the world was introduced to “les extrêmes se touchent” (the extremes meet), or what has come to be known as the horseshoe theory of political extremism. Peculiar red-brown mixtures were prominent during the Weimar Republic, when political entrepreneurs combined pro-worker positions and radical nationalism to advocate a Querfront – an alliance cutting across the political spectrum. That said, proponents of “Prussian socialism” or Gregor Strasser’s leftist version of Nazism always remained in the minority (Strasser himself was murdered by Hitler’s henchmen in 1934).
The horseshoe theory relies on the assumption that anti-liberalism must lead, sooner or later, to adopting positions shared by one’s official political adversaries. But this might be true only at a very abstract level. Socialists and a certain type of conservative can both find fault with capitalism, but the nature of their critiques will differ. The conservative might lament the destruction of traditional ways of life, whereas the socialist will complain about workers’ lack of freedom. Likewise, policy prescriptions can look similar at an abstract level – both conservatives and socialists might advocate smaller cooperative communities – but their details will differ dramatically.
The horseshoe theory also is easily abused by liberals, because it allows for a double punch against criticisms from the left. These can be labelled as not only extremist, but even the stuff of Nazism. Few polemical moves are more effective.
In any case, Wagenknecht’s political journey is the only one that seems to be based on a comprehensive anti-liberalism. Kennedy and Gabbard’s moves, by contrast, appear to be animated by the idea that one issue is of such overriding importance that it justifies switching camps.
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For his part, Kennedy is obsessed with vaccines, which he insists are unsafe, even though all such claims have been comprehensively debunked. For Gabbard, the issue is America’s “forever wars.” She apparently has concluded that Trump would be a peacemaker-in-chief; and Kennedy embraced Trump as a potential healer-in-chief, because he supposedly wants more policies addressing “chronic disease” (he also reportedly sought a meeting with Kamala Harris’s campaign, which showed no interest in his overture).
Coat-switching politicians face an obvious question: Why did you ever ally with people who fail to see the overriding importance of your pet issue, or who drew fundamentally different conclusions about it? Not everyone will respond with a conspiracy theory, but claiming that your former political allies have all been corrupted certainly is the easiest answer. Not surprisingly, Kennedy is notorious for spewing dangerous conspiracy theories, and Gabbard has spent years concocting stories about Hillary Clinton, whom she portrays as an evil warmonger.
So, this is how the shift from the “far out” to the far right can happen. It starts with an issue that is much more important than all others, but which your allies do not regard with the same urgency. When you no longer have their ear, you turn to whomever will have you. But the only party that will have you is the one that has its own reasons for wanting to make your former team look corrupt.
Wagenknecht’s story is more complicated. A talented rhetorician and regular guest on TV programs, she is effective in repeating dubious claims about Russia’s war against Ukraine. But, unlike Kennedy and Gabbard, she is a real political strategist. Her party is designed to fill what she sees as an unoccupied political space – nationalism combined with socialism – in Germany’s multiparty landscape, and she has seized on wedge issues to split other parties apart.
For example, Wagenknecht sees the war in Ukraine as a way to divide both Social Democrats and Christian Democrats. After this year’s elections in eastern Germany, Christian Democrats agreed to coalition talks with her alliance, in order to keep the far-right Alternative für Deutschland out of power in those states. But now, Wagenknecht insists that any coalition agreement contain language about the war that she knows CDU leaders cannot support (never mind that state governments do not conduct foreign policy).
Prominent figures in her own party are willing to compromise, but Wagenknecht, who seems to want an iron grip on her “Alliance,” seeks to discredit any such position. Like Lenin, she appears willing to split her own party rather than lose control and tolerate deviations from ideological purity.
Of course, the political system in a democracy should be open. There is nothing wrong with political innovators drawing new lines of conflict; that is what enables political realignments. But there is a problem when such innovators rely on conspiracy theories and seek to delegitimise their adversaries and the political system in general.
Quinn Slobodian and Will Callison refer to the latter phenomenon as “diagonalism,” writing: “At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.” Slobodian and Callison first identified “thinking diagonally” – a translation of the German concept of Querdenken – during the pandemic, when prominent anti-vaxxers fomented protests against public health policies that often united far-left New Age types and hard-right agitators.
Now, diagonalism appears to be spreading in a world of parallel media universes. There, one finds plenty of pent-up political discontent about singular, overriding issues – whatever they may be.
Jan-Werner Müller is Professor of Politics at Princeton University.