David Neiwert - July 7, 2005

One of the peculiarities of the way extremism works is that you'll often find bizarre confluences of the far right and far left, as in the cases of David Icke, Lorena Fulani and Lyndon Larouche.

A lot of people attribute this, mistakenly I think, to a kind of simplistic model in which the political spectrum becomes circular, and the far left come close to resembling the far right. That ignores an important reality: that the interests and motivations of left and right are definably distinct, even at the extremes. A better model might be a globe, in which the polar extremes do indeed resemble each other -- but nonetheless they remain a world apart. So in reality, these confluences are noteworthy just because they defy that underlying dynamic.