The False Equivalency Trap: Why “Both Sides” Is Not the Same Thing
The idea that “both sides have become extreme” has become one of the most persistent myths in American public life. It offers comfort. It lets people believe the political crisis is simply a matter of temperature, not direction, a matter of tone rather than tactics. It allows a person to sound wise and steady — someone who sees “the bigger picture” — while avoiding the discomfort of naming where the real danger lies. But neutrality is not the same thing as accuracy, and the belief in symmetrical extremism collapses the moment we examine what is actually happening in American politics.
In the last forty years, political scientists have tracked measurable ideological movement across both major parties. The data does not show two sides drifting apart at equal speed. It shows one side moving dramatically rightward, away from the postwar democratic consensus, while the other side’s center of gravity remains comparatively stable within the bounds of pluralistic governance. This pattern is known as asymmetric polarization. It is not a slogan or an accusation; it is a structural change in how political power is pursued and justified.
But the most important difference is not ideological — it is behavioral. Extremism is not about how strongly one believes something. It is defined by the willingness to break democratic norms in order to achieve political goals. Extremism is the belief that political opponents are not legitimate participants in a shared society but enemies who must be removed from it. By that definition, the evidence is unequivocal. There is no left-wing equivalent to the sustained, organized efforts from the right to undermine elections, delegitimize the press, purge civil servants, and encourage political violence as a tool of governance.
The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and virtually every counterterrorism analysis of the past decade identify far-right domestic extremism as the leading source of political violence in the United States. There are no left-wing mobs hunting election officials in their homes. There are no progressive paramilitary movements organizing for the explicit possibility of overthrowing an election whose results they dislike. There is no coordinated left-wing effort to dismantle the legitimacy of democratic institutions themselves. Even the much-discussed excesses of cultural politics on the left — speech policing, academic overreach, rhetorical absolutism — operate primarily in social or symbolic spaces. They are not backed by the machinery of state power. They do not seek to replace the political system with a hierarchical, exclusionary one. They do not challenge the foundational principle that everyone in a society has the right to participate in shaping it.
Meanwhile, the modern American right has embraced a worldview in which political power is valid only when held by their faction, where elections are legitimate only when they produce the desired winner, and where violence is an acceptable, even heroic, response to political disappointment. This is not a matter of opinion. It is visible in the January 6th insurrection, in state legislatures rewriting election authority, in mass attempts to criminalize dissent, in the open declaration that pluralism itself is a threat to “the nation.” Only one major political movement in the United States is preparing its followers for the idea that losing an election is intolerable and illegitimate.
The “both sides” narrative persists because acknowledging asymmetry is psychologically inconvenient. It forces individuals to confront their own proximity to danger — to accept that the threat is not abstract and not distant. It removes the luxury of detachment. Saying “everyone is extreme” is not an analysis; it is a coping mechanism. It turns a crisis of democratic governance into an aesthetic preference about tone. It spares the speaker from having to choose, and therefore allows them to avoid responsibility.
But reality does not bend to the feelings of the observer. One side is not simply angrier or louder. One side has rejected the basic terms of democratic coexistence. The crisis is not that Americans disagree. The crisis is that one faction has decided disagreement itself is illegitimate.
To call that “both sides” is not neutrality. It is surrender disguised as sophistication.
History has never been kind to those who mistake balance for courage. In moments of democratic unravelling, refusing to take a side is simply another way of choosing one. The question, now as always, is whether we recognize what is happening in time to admit that the center is not a place we stand — it is a place we defend.
Anthony F. Pipa, Rachel Perić
