One of the least productive habits in contemporary politics is the assumption that criticizing one political party automatically means supporting its principal opponent. In Spain, criticism of the PSOE is frequently interpreted as evidence that one must therefore support the Partido Popular or Vox. The same binary reasoning increasingly appears elsewhere: if one criticizes the progressive left, one must be “far right”; if one criticizes Donald Trump, one must belong to the left.

This is not serious political analysis. If there are more than two possible alternatives, rejecting option A does not logically require accepting option B. More importantly, political economy should evaluate institutions and policies by their consequences rather than by the party labels attached to them.

Events during the past week provide several reasons to reflect on why this distinction matters.

Charlie Kirk, One Year Later: Disagreement Is Not Hatred

September 10, 2026 marked the first anniversary of the killing of Charlie Kirk, who was shot at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025 while participating in a public political event.

I wrote after his death last year that there were many areas in which a libertarian or classical liberal could disagree with Kirk. He was a conservative Christian, not a libertarian. His positions on marriage, sexuality, and the proper role of government did not always correspond to mine, although I am also a Christian.

But disagreement requires precision.

Kirk clearly expressed conservative Christian objections to homosexuality and opposed same-sex marriage and a number of policies associated with the LGBTQ movement. Those positions can and should be debated. Yet he also explicitly defended an important sphere of adult personal liberty. During one public discussion about LGBTQ issues, he stated that an adult was “free to live how you want, dress how you want, marry who you want.”

That distinction matters.

A person can morally or religiously disagree with another person’s choices while nevertheless believing that peaceful adults should possess substantial freedom to live their own lives. Classical liberalism itself depends upon our capacity to understand this distinction. Tolerance does not require moral agreement.

For precisely this reason, I am uncomfortable when complex political figures are reduced to labels such as “hater,” “fascist,” or “homophobe” without examining what they actually said and believed. Kirk certainly made controversial statements, some of which deserve criticism. But criticism should address those statements directly.

The alternative is a dangerous process: disagreement becomes a label; the label becomes a moral condemnation; and eventually the person behind the label is no longer regarded as someone with whom we should debate.

Political violence represents the catastrophic endpoint of this logic. No political disagreement can justify assassination.

September 11 and the Responsibility to Describe Extremism Precisely

The 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks offers another example of why context and precision matter.

A short video circulated showing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smiling while victims’ names were being read at the Ground Zero ceremony. Watching only those seconds, I also found the image uncomfortable and inappropriate for such a solemn occasion.

But intellectual honesty requires looking beyond a few seconds of video.

Subsequent reporting indicated that the camera had apparently captured a brief greeting between them. Mamdani attended the commemorations, described September 11 as a horrific terrorist attack, established an annual Day of Remembrance and Service in New York City, and participated in several memorial events honoring victims and first responders.

We therefore should not transform an ambiguous four-second image into evidence of contempt for 9/11 victims. Doing so would reproduce exactly the political behavior that conservatives rightly criticize when it is directed against them.

There is nevertheless another issue worth discussing.

In the official remarks I have examined, Mamdani repeatedly and correctly describes September 11 as terrorism, but does not explicitly discuss the radical Islamist ideology of al-Qaeda. I believe historical memory benefits from greater precision. The attacks were committed by al-Qaeda terrorists motivated by an extremist Islamist ideology.

Saying this is not an accusation against Muslims.

Indeed, the distinction is essential. Islam is a world religion followed by an extraordinarily diverse population. Islamist terrorism is a particular form of political and religious extremism. Just as Christians should not collectively be held responsible for violent Christian fundamentalists, Muslims should not be collectively blamed for al-Qaeda.

A free society must be capable of doing two things simultaneously: identifying violent ideologies accurately and refusing to attribute collective guilt to peaceful people who happen to share a religious identity.

The same intellectual discipline should apply to political extremism.

Spain and the Limits of the Left–Right Filter

This brings me back to Spain.

A recent NC Report poll published by La Razón projected the Partido Popular at approximately 147–149 seats and Vox at 62–64. Together, the two parties could therefore obtain between 209 and 213 seats.

These numbers are politically significant. But my interest is not in celebrating one political bloc defeating another. The more interesting question is what Spain should do with political power once it has been obtained.

From a classical-liberal perspective, constitutional reform should not primarily be about allowing a different political majority to exercise more power. It should be about placing stronger limits on what any government can do.

A constitution should protect individual liberty, private property, equality before the law, and institutional checks on discretionary political power. The objective is not to construct a powerful right-wing state to replace a powerful left-wing state.

It is to construct institutions under which neither side can easily abuse political power.

This is where Hayek remains extraordinarily relevant.

The knowledge problem does not disappear when the government happens to be controlled by politicians we prefer. Central authorities still lack the dispersed knowledge required to organize complex societies. Incentive problems do not disappear either. Politicians, bureaucracies, firms and interest groups continue responding to institutional incentives regardless of whether those institutions are administered by the left or the right.

Socialism, Interventionism and the Knowledge Problem

My criticism of socialism therefore does not depend upon whether a socialist politician is personally good or bad.

The deeper problem is institutional.

From Mises’s critique of socialist calculation to Hayek’s analysis of dispersed knowledge, the Austrian tradition explains why centralized economic direction faces fundamental informational limitations. Market prices coordinate knowledge that no central authority possesses in its entirety.

Modern social democracy is obviously not identical to Soviet communism, and it would be analytically careless to pretend otherwise. Contemporary European social-democratic parties generally accept private property, markets and electoral democracy.

Nevertheless, many policies associated with the modern interventionist state still deserve scrutiny where they replace decentralized decisions with political allocation, distort price signals, create dependency, protect established interests, or encourage rent-seeking.

The same criticism must apply to conservative parties.

European parties of the right have also supported subsidies, protectionism, industrial policy, excessive regulation and other forms of state intervention. A policy does not become economically liberal merely because a right-wing government implements it.

Some governments and political actors—including important examples in Madrid—have been relatively more supportive of lower taxation, entrepreneurship and economic freedom. These differences matter. But “more market-oriented than the alternative” is not synonymous with a consistently free-market political economy.

The Real Alternative Is Competition versus Privilege

The political distinction that interests me most is therefore not simply left versus right.

It is competition versus privilege.

A genuine market economy rests upon private property, entrepreneurship, freedom of entry, voluntary exchange, competition, and predictable rules applicable to everyone.

Cronyism operates differently. Companies and organized interests seek subsidies, protected markets, regulatory advantages, public contracts and political connections. Economic success then depends increasingly on access to political authority rather than on creating value for consumers.

And contrary to a common caricature, economic freedom matters particularly for people who are not already privileged.

A young person needs access to employment. An immigrant who genuinely wants to contribute needs opportunities to work and create a business. A family needs an adequate supply of housing. A small entrepreneur needs the freedom to challenge established companies. A worker needs to be able to save without seeing purchasing power continually eroded.

People who already possess wealth and political connections can often survive a badly designed economic system.

Those starting with little have much more to lose.

We Need Less Demonization, Not a Different Tribe

The lesson I take from this week is therefore not that everyone should move from the political left to the political right.

It is that we desperately need to recover the capacity to distinguish people from ideas, disagreement from hatred, religion from extremism, and markets from political privilege.

The radical left deserves criticism when it replaces economic reasoning with ideological planning, treats political opponents as morally illegitimate, or attempts to suppress legitimate disagreement.

But the radical right deserves exactly the same scrutiny when it demonizes Muslims, circulates misleading interpretations of ambiguous videos, embraces protectionism, or seeks to use state power against its own ideological opponents.

Otherwise we have learned nothing.

Hayek’s great contribution was not to tell us which political tribe should control society. It was to explain why no political tribe possesses enough knowledge to control it successfully.

That is why the classical-liberal response to polarization should not be to find better rulers. It should be to construct better institutions: institutions that limit political power, protect property and individual liberty, allow peaceful disagreement, and leave people free to cooperate even when they hold profoundly different beliefs.

We should criticize socialism. We should criticize cronyism. We should criticize religious fundamentalism when it becomes coercive or violent. We should criticize political misinformation and ideological intolerance.

But we should resist transforming criticism into dehumanization.

Political labels are easy. Political economy is harder.

And in an increasingly polarized society, choosing the harder path may be one of the most important things scholars, teachers and citizens can do.

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How to Cite this Article (APA 7th edition)

Wang, H. H. (2026, September 13). Extremism, Interventionism, and Political Polarization. https://williamhongsongwang.com/2026/09/13/extremism-interventionism-and-political-polarization/