Horseshoe Politics and the ‘Hidden Hand’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

“People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about,” Thomas Frank wrote in What’s the Matter with Kansas?

 

Rarely has an idea been simultaneously so right and so wrong.

 

Progressives loved this thesis when Frank put it forward, because what Frank meant by it was that Republican voters were idiots who didn’t understand or vote on economic issues the way Frank thought they should. According to him, American politics was one long exercise in bait-and-switch. Voters are fed a steady diet of culture war issues, but get sops to fat cats. As Frank writes, “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation.”

 

Now, in the Trump era, my hostility to this thesis has softened somewhat. It’s hard to read this passage, 21 years after publication, and not see the glint of a point shining amid the bile “... the people at the top know what they have to do to stay there, and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”

 

After all, we have a president who turned the GOP into a pro-choice party and periodically ends his tweets “Praise be to Allah!” He won saying that “she’s for they/them” while Trump is for you, and then proceeded to put his name on everything he could and dedicate the government to punishing his enemies and building monuments to himself.

 

But I still disagree with Frank because his understanding of “interests” was cartoonishly tendentious and arrogant. The question-begging was off the charts. He took for granted that he understood the interests of voters better than they did, he defined “interests” as narrowly economic, and he assumed that his preferred policies were uncontestably correct and effective.

 

Take his scorn for the pro-life argument. Who is to say that some pro-life voters didn’t actually believe what they professed to believe? Why is that not a valid reason to vote for a candidate? Surely, if we still had slavery in America, he wouldn’t gainsay someone who voted for an abolitionist, even though that abolitionist candidate opposed universal healthcare or a hike in the minimum wage. In a democracy, people decide what their interests are. Defining interests as support for a welfare state that more “generously” transfers wealth to the voter is fine. But saying that’s the only definition of legitimate interest is b.s.

 

But if you take that part out of it, I have to say I have a newfound respect for Frank’s claim. Voters do get their interests wrong. A lot.

 

I can make this point about Trump voters all day long. The Hispanic voters who believed he was just going to deport rapists and murderers, the farmers who thought he would be good for agriculture, the exporters and manufacturers screwed by tariffs, the hawks and the doves, and the friends and enemies of Israel have all been handed high fecal-content sandwiches at various points, and the larder is not close to bare.

 

But let’s look at the anti-Israel craze running through the Democratic Party. Basically, the prevailing demand is that Democratic politicians must say Israel is committing genocide and must commit to withdrawing support for Israel. Some resist, but the pressure is everywhere.

 

Now, I think it’s simply a lie that Israel is committing genocide. But let’s say that it is. How is making opposition to Israel the signature litmus test of the Democratic Party in the self-interest of voters? How does it lower rent in Brooklyn? How does it expand healthcare in Detroit? Answer: It simply doesn’t.

 

The answer to this from the anti-Israel crowd is much like my point about abortion voters. People get to decide what their interests are. For the left, and for much of the right, Israel is now a culture war issue. And left-wingers are just as capable of voting on culture war issues as the benighted right-wing voters Frank mocked.

 

Sure, some will hide behind a tiny fig leaf and say that aid to Israel could be spent on priorities at home. The fact that the numbers involved are a rounding error on a rounding error in terms of the money they want to spend doesn’t matter to them. You could probably fund Medicare for All for 15 minutes with all of the aid to Israel over the last decade combined. Their fig leaf covers their animosity like a postage stamp on Godzilla’s knee—it doesn’t conceal the true scope of the monstrosity at all.

 

But, as J.D. Vance might say, let’s forget about Israel.

 

I spend too much time thinking about horseshoe theory, or at least many readers tell me as much. I’m not the first to note that antisemitism is often the tip of the spear of horseshoe theory. I think that’s true. But why?

 

One easy answer that certainly explains a lot of it is simply bigotry. When a British visitor to the White House wanted advice on how to get in good with Woodrow Wilson, “Colonel” Edward House advised his friend on how to get a sympathetic hearing: “Never begin by arguing. Discover a common hate, exploit it, get the President warmed up and then start on your business.” I can think of several presidents this would work with.

 

Shared hatreds bring people together. Peter Viereck called this phenomenon “trans-tolerance.” When anti-Communism was a unifying cause, anti-Communists would forgive almost any other factor to broaden their coalition.

 

But I think this is only a partial explanation. Antisemitism boils down to a conspiracy theory. And pretty much all conspiracy theories work from the assumption that hidden forces and interests are manipulating events for their benefit. Most forms of Marxism work on this kind of assumption. But so do most forms of populism. The same tendency that ascribed lightning and volcanic eruptions to angry or mischievous gods fuels the assumption that our material circumstances were intended by the Powers That Be.

 

Since long before the name “capitalism” was affixed to notions of the free market, this has been the heart and soul of complaints about capitalism. I refer you to a famous observation by Balzac, if you can forgive the potty mouth: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” This summarizes the thinking of centuries of anti-capitalist thought. It’s based on some variation of the assumption that there is a finite amount of wealth in society and therefore when one person gets richer, someone else gets poorer. For those committed to this idea, the protestations and denials of the capitalists are lies in service to their conspiracy against the public good.

 

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that all defenses of capitalism are to one extent or another based on refuting this mythology. Adam Ferguson, the “father of sociology” who inspired Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, observed:

 

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

 

Ferguson’s “establishments” became known as institutions, which in economics are simply rules. From this insight, Adam Smith developed the idea of the “invisible hand” and Hayek the “spontaneous order.”

 

The problem is that we are wired to believe that social arrangements are intentionally designed. As Michael Polanyi observed, “Wherever we see a well ordered arrangement … we instinctively assume that someone has intentionally placed them in that way.” This tendency leads to what Karl Popper called the “conspiracy theory of society.” This is “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.”

 

In short, it’s a cui bono theory. If Group X benefits from something, Group X must have intended it.

 

And we, as a species, like cui bono theories. Robert Nozick called them “hidden hand” theories, and they’re the opposite of “invisible hand” theories, because the whole point of Smith’s invisible hand is that there is no hand; beneficial cooperation operates “as if” guided by an invisible hand.

 

This sort of thinking explains a lot of the horseshoe. The antisemites of the left and right share the same conspiracy theory about how the economy—or Congress—works. But it’s not just the antisemites. Identitarians of the left and right believe that society is a zero-sum competition over scarce political resources. They disagree on which groups should win the competition, but they share the same worldview about how “the system” works—or should work. Donald Trump has declared that oil companies are “price gouging” because he thinks gas prices should be lower. It’s the exact same logic as Elizabeth Warren’s: look at inconvenient facts and assume sinister intentions.

 

This is the gateway drug to big government and what the Catholic Church calls “statolatry”—idolatrous worship of the state. If all the private institutions and private interests are greedy and selfish, then only the state—which looks after the interests of all the people—can be trusted to advance the people’s interests. Take the profit motive out of industry, and the “exploitation” vanishes, according to this fairy tale (tell North Koreans there is no exploitation in their factories and mines). If you think everything in our society is intended by someone, best to give power to the state so it can act in everyone’s interests.

 

We should get back to the problem of voters getting their interests wrong. Their error is not necessarily that they have the wrong interests. Most people vote on the economy in one way or another, and that’s entirely defensible. It’s wholly legitimate to want lower rents or more affordable groceries. So it’s not so much that they get their interests wrong, it’s that they’re wrong about how their interests are best advanced.

 

Rent control doesn’t work. Price controls don’t work. But if you think the economy is a static pie and that someone’s fortune is the intentional cause of your misfortune, then “make the billionaires pay for it!” politics not only makes sense but is morally compelling. Bill de Blasio, the ridiculous and failed former mayor of New York City, campaigned for mayor, and later president, on the slogan, “There’s plenty of money in this world. There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands!”

 

It would take me a thousand “news”letters to catalog all of the misery and bloodshed that can be laid at the feet of this idea.

 

Never mind that this idea would be morally wrong even if it were true. But it’s a lie. The “robber barons” of the 19^th century were accused of every manner of evil based on this Balzacian thinking. Now, not every so-called robber baron was an angel, but the truth is that the robber barons weren’t, as a class, robbers—they were givers. Cotton magnate, businessman, and public intellectual Edward Atkinson explained it well. “Through competition among capitalists,” he wrote in Addresses Upon the Labor Question, “capital itself is every year more effective in production, and tends ever to increasing abundance. Under its working the commodities that have been the luxuries of one generation become the comforts of the next and the necessities of the third. ... The plane of what constitutes a comfortable subsistence is constantly rising, and as the years go by greater and greater numbers attain this plane.”

 

Talking to some workers in 1886, Atkinson tried to explain how everyone gained from a free market. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Atkinson observed, made a profit of 14 cents from every barrel of flour shipped over his railroads. His efficiency in transportation lowered the price of flour for consumers. Atkinson asked, “Did Vanderbilt keep any of you down?”

 

If you’re the kind of voter who answers, “Yes,” it’s not that you have your interests wrong, you’re just wrong about how your interests are best served.