Horseshoe Effect In his 2006 book, Where Did the Party Go?, the American political scientist Jeff Taylor wrote: "It may be more useful to think of the Left and the Right as two components of populism, with elitism residing in the Center. The political spectrum may be linear, but it is not a straight line. It is shaped like a horseshoe." In the same year, the term was used in discussing a resurgent hostility toward Jews and a new antisemitism from both the far-left and the far-right. In an essay from 2008, Josef Joffe, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, an American far-right think tank, wrote: "Will globalization survive the gloom? The creeping revolt against globalization actually preceded the Crash of '08. Everywhere in the West, populism began to show its angry face at mid-decade. The two most dramatic instances were Germany and Austria, where populist parties scored big with a message of isolationism, protectionism and redistribution. In Germany, it was left-wing populism ('Die Linke'); in Austria it was a bunch of right-wing parties that garnered almost 30% in the 2008 election. Left and right together illustrated once more the 'horseshoe' theory of modern politics: As the iron is bent backward, the two extremes almost touch."
