The Horseshoe Theory: Where JD Vance meets Bernie Sanders

Watching JD Vance giving his acceptance speech as Donald Trump’s VP pick at the recent Republican National Convention, I was reminded of a horseshoe theory of political convergence at the extremes.

The theory, which is said to be attributed to the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye, describes how instead of a straight line between the Left and Right, the political spectrum looks more like a circle or a horseshoe, where the far left and the far right would resemble or mirror each other at the two ends, with the political center at the top.

Trying to speak on behalf of small-town America, Vance attacked President Joe Biden for supporting NAFTA for sending countless good jobs to Mexico and for giving China a sweetheart trade deal, namely membership in the WTO, which destroyed more American middle-class manufacturing jobs.

As a presidential candidate in 2020, Bernie Sanders also attacked Joe Biden for voting for NAFTA in 1993 and normalizing trade with China in 2000, charging that the two deals forced American workers to compete against people making pennies an hour, resulting in the loss of 160,000 jobs in Michigan.

The horseshoe theory was considered simplistic by serious political scientists, some of whom even called it nonsense, but it can be illustrative and fun. Vance on the far right and Sanders on the far left do share similar populist sentiments on America’s trade policies as well as their claim of fighting for the American worker against corporate America.

In the same acceptance speech, Vance said that America needed a leader who was not in the pocket of big business but answered to the working man, who wouldn’t sell out to multinational corporations but would stand up for American companies and American industry, and that the second Trump administration would not cater to Wall Street’s interests.

While introducing a bill that would impose a 95% windfall tax on the excessive profits of large corporations charging Americans outrageous prices while using inflation as an excuse, Sen. Sanders said in June, “Enough is enough. We cannot continue to allow large corporations to make obscene profits by price gouging Americans in every sector of our economy.”

Similarly, Bernie Sanders also agreed with Donald Trump about the detriment of the U.S. trade deficit with China and that tariffs were an effective tool for the problem. When he was in the White House, Trump imposed $550-billion tariffs on goods from China. Asked whether he would continue to use tariffs as President, candidate Sanders in 2019 answered “Yeah of course.” President Biden did exactly that: keeping Trump’s tariffs on China and adding his own, targeting electric vehicles, solar cells, medical equipment, etc.

Talk about the resemblance of opposites, the horseshoe theory gives another example. Donald Trump, an American anti-establishment populist and ethnic nationalist leader, has a lot in common with Xi Jinping, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist chief of China’s Communist Party — a penchant for absolute and perpetual power.

Xi Jinping maneuvered China’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress into changing the country’s constitution to allow him to stay in power indefinitely after two consecutive five-year terms. Trump dreams the same, with his social media posts showing campaign signs “Trump 2024, 2028, 2032, 2036, 2040, 2044, 2048…”  If elected again, Trump would also be armed with the new Supreme Court ruling that the President enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution when exercising the core powers of the presidency.