If established power is on a hilltop using tactics suitable for an uphill position, all the other li’l guerillas crawling around on the outside of those city walls are gonna come across as having some similarities in how they approach that fortress, even when their goals are absolutely the opposite. That doesn’t mean they’re “the same” in any meaningful way. They’re still opposites.
The so-called horseshoe theory is pish-posh; the theory says that while politics is a left-right “line”, that line must bent like a horseshoe because from where they’re standing, in the liberal center, those on the far right and far left sure look a lot like each other. In social studies in high school our teacher straight up taught us that model as if it were facts; drawing it up on the blackboard.
I’m not too fond of that model, because the left wing is about the cleavage point between workers and owners, whereas the right wing wants to disrupt that core conflict and replace it with pluralism vs populism, with “let’s stick together, owners and workers, at least we’re of the same tribe”. That can never be the same.
Yeah, OK, the left can’t rest on that and needs to constantly check itself lest right-wing monsters we become, so that’s the slight value of the horseshoe model right there, but for the most part that model is a dangerous misconception that bolsters the worst kinds of politics and drowns out the best. We’ve seen a right wing completely flip-flopp all of its values, from “minimal government” free-market-fantasies to a maximally intrusive socially repressive norm-enforcing stomping boot without moving an inch from the secret real goal of rich-gets-richer.
That’s why I prefer the hilltop model. Of course, reality is a huge tangly vector space of a thousand specific li’l issues and dimensions and talking points, so this is just one way to look at it.