Diagonalism

What diagonalism means

Diagonalism is the blurring of left and right into a single anti-establishment current, in which people who would once have been political opposites find common ground - usually a shared enemy, or a shared distrust - and drift, over time, towards the far right. The word was coined in 2021 by the political scientist William Callison and the historian Quinn Slobodian, who needed a name for a pattern the old labels could no longer hold: movements that reject the categories of left and right while quietly arcing rightward.

Their definition is precise. Diagonalists tend to distrust parliamentary politics, to mix spiritual or holistic beliefs with a fierce language of individual liberty, and, at the sharp end, to share one binding conviction: that all power is conspiracy. That last idea is the load-bearing one. Once you believe every institution is a front for hidden control, the difference between left and right stops mattering, because both look like masks worn by the same secret enemy.

The name itself is a clue. It comes from the German Querdenken - roughly, “thinking across” or “thinking sideways” - the label adopted by Germany’s COVID-era anti-lockdown movement. Callison and Slobodian borrowed it because the people they were studying did not move along the usual left-right line at all. They moved diagonally, cutting across it.

Where diagonalism comes from

Diagonalism feels like a product of the internet age, and in its current form it is. But the underlying shape is old.

Querfront: the original cross-front

The historical ancestor is the Querfront, or “cross-front” - a term from Germany between the two world wars, when “red” communist movements and “brown” fascist movements occasionally found common cause against the liberal democratic centre they both despised. The lesson of the Querfront is uncomfortable but important: shared hatred of the establishment can unite people who agree on almost nothing else. Diagonalism is the Querfront rebuilt for the era of the smartphone.

Querdenken and a January in 2021

The modern version crystallised during the pandemic. In Germany, the Querdenken movement brought together anti-lockdown libertarians, anti-vaccine campaigners, New Age spiritualists and, at the edges, open far-right agitators, all marching under the single banner of freedom. Callison and Slobodian published their essay, “Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol”, in early 2021, days after the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. The two events rhymed: in both, a strange coalition had formed around the conviction that the official story was a lie and the real power lay hidden.

How Naomi Klein took it mainstream

Most people who now use the word “diagonalism” met it through Naomi Klein. Her 2023 book Doppelganger took the academic term and gave it a story. The book begins with the small absurdity that Klein is constantly mistaken online for Naomi Wolf - a feminist author who, over the pandemic, became a fixture of right-wing conspiracy media and a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

Klein follows her “double” into what she calls the Mirror World: a funhouse reflection of reality where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with hard-right propagandists, often in the name of protecting children. Her sharpest observation is that the wellness world was unusually prone to this drift because its paranoid individualism already rhymed with far-right conspiracy culture long before the two openly merged. And her quiet conclusion turns the whole thing back on the reader: the real purpose of a mirror is self-reflection, and to understand the other you first have to know yourself.

How diagonalism works

The hidden grammar that links wellness and conspiracy

The puzzle at the centre of diagonalism is why a yoga teacher and a far-right agitator end up sharing a feed. The answer is that they were never as far apart as their aesthetics suggested. Underneath, they share a grammar.

Both start from a deep distrust of institutions and experts - the doctor, the journalist, the government, the scientist. Both prize the sovereign self: the belief that your own intuition, your own research and your own body are more reliable guides than any official authority. This is where motivated reasoning does its quiet work, because “do your own research” rarely means following the evidence wherever it leads. More often it means searching until you find what you already suspected, a process confirmation bias makes feel like discovery.

Both also share a faith in a coming awakening - the sense that a great shift is near, and that those who can see clearly will be vindicated. This sets up a powerful version of in-group/out-group bias: a world cleanly split between the awakened and the asleep, the sovereign and the sheep. And both rest on a kind of naive realism - the conviction that you, unlike the deceived masses, perceive reality exactly as it is.

Phrases like “do your own research”, “wake up” and “trust the plan” act as thought-terminating cliches. They sound like invitations to think, but they close thinking down, ending the conversation rather than opening it.

Why the internet pours fuel on it

Diagonalism is native to the internet, and not by accident. Callison and Slobodian describe diagonal movements as social movements of rabbit holes, built on platforms designed to hold attention at any cost.

The mechanism is familiar from elsewhere on Moresapien. Recommendation systems reward whatever keeps you scrolling, and outrage and revelation hold attention better than calm. Repetition across a sealed network triggers the illusory truth effect: hear a claim often enough, from enough seemingly different sources, and it begins to feel obviously true. The systems then route a worried parent from a post about clean eating to a post about vaccine ingredients to a post about a global cabal, each step feeling like a small, reasonable extension of the last. The backfire effect does the rest, because the more these beliefs are mocked or fact-checked from outside, the more they can harden into proof that the establishment is frightened.

Nobody designs the pipeline on purpose. The structure does the work, the same way manufactured consent produces uniform coverage without anyone issuing an order. Pushed hard enough and long enough, a once-fringe worldview can settle into the background cultural hegemony of an online community, where it no longer feels like a belief at all, just how things obviously are.

Conspirituality: the wellness wing of diagonalism

If diagonalism is the whole terrain, conspirituality is the part of it where wellness lives, and it has its own name and history, predating the pandemic by a decade. The term was coined by the researchers Charlotte Ward and David Voas in a 2011 academic paper. They were describing a fusion of two worldviews that look like opposites: the optimistic, self-focused world of New Age spirituality, and the dark, politics-focused world of conspiracy theory.

Their definition rests on two convictions held at once: that a secret group is covertly controlling the social and political order, and that humanity is on the edge of a great shift in consciousness that will set things right. The first half is paranoid; the second half is hopeful. Conspirituality is what you get when the two are welded together - a belief that the world is run by hidden evil, and that personal awakening is the way to defeat it.

There is a reason this took root in wellness culture in particular. The hyper-individualism of the modern wellness world - the self as a project to be optimised, cleansed and protected - is the self as marketed under capitalist realism, where every problem becomes a personal one with a personal solution. A worldview already built around purity, hidden toxins and self-sovereignty does not have far to travel before “hidden toxins in your food” becomes “hidden hands behind the government”.

Pastel QAnon and the aesthetics of a soft conspiracy

The most visible recent form of conspirituality has its own name too. The researcher Marc-André Argentino coined “pastel QAnon” to describe the way wellness influencers, many of them women on Instagram, repackaged the hard, dark content of the QAnon conspiracy in soft, pretty, reassuring branding. The same claims about elite child-trafficking that read as menacing on a forum read as caring when set in calm pastel templates and framed as saving the children.

This is a darker cousin of conceptual gentrification, the repackaging of an idea to make it easier to swallow. Here the repackaging is not about stripping out challenge but about stripping out the obvious menace, so a conspiracy theory can travel into spaces that would have rejected its uglier version. The soft aesthetic also helped it slip past content moderation, since a system tuned to catch hate struggled with a conspiracy delivered in the visual language of a wellness brand. And the “save the children” framing tied it to a long lineage of moral panic, in which a real and emotive fear is harnessed to carry something else along with it.

The crunchy to alt-right pipeline

The colloquial name for one corridor of all this is the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline”, with “crunchy” being the affectionate word for granola, natural-living, alternative-health culture. It describes the journey of someone who starts with essential oils, home birth and a suspicion of processed food, and ends, sometimes within a year or two, sharing hard-right political content.

It is worth being precise about how these names fit together, because they are not rivals. The crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline is the lived, popular description of one route. Conspirituality is the broader wellness-and-conspiracy fusion that the route runs through. Diagonalism is the widest frame of all, the political pattern of left and right dissolving into an anti-establishment current that arcs rightward. One nests inside the next.

Diagonalism is not horseshoe theory

The idea diagonalism is most often confused with is horseshoe theory: the claim that the far left and far right, if you bend the political spectrum into a horseshoe, almost touch at the bottom. It is a tempting comparison, but the people who study diagonalism argue it misses the point.

Horseshoe theory says the extremes resemble each other. Diagonalism says something more specific and more dynamic: that people genuinely migrate across the old spectrum, and that the migration is not symmetrical. It does not flow equally in both directions. It arcs reliably towards the far right, with the wellness and spiritual left supplying recruits far more often than the reverse. Diagonalism is not a snapshot of two fixed poles looking alike. It is a description of movement, of a current with a direction.

That rightward pull has its own logic. The far right is better organised to receive these recruits, and it offers what a diffuse wellness scene cannot: a clear enemy, a sense of belonging, and a story in which the awakened few are the heroes. It connects, too, with elite radicalisation, because the platforms and figures with the most reach can quietly point the whole current in their preferred direction.

Diagonalism in the real world

The clearest images of diagonalism are the ones that look like jokes until you sit with them. Yoga sessions at an anti-government trucker convoy. A former adviser to Democratic presidents turning up regularly on a hard-right podcast. A wellness account that posts about seed oils on Monday and a shadowy global cabal on Friday. Each is a small picture of the same diagonal cut across the old political map.

The pattern is not confined to one country or one moment. It showed up in Germany’s Querdenken marches, in the anti-lockdown movements across Europe and North America, and in the conspiracy currents that ran through January 6th. It also helps explain how once-fringe ideas climb into the mainstream, shifting the Overton window until positions that were unthinkable a few years ago become simply part of the conversation. Several years on, analysts note that diagonalism has not faded but spread, surfacing wherever a parallel media world lets a single overriding grievance gather a crowd that ignores the usual political lines.

What diagonalism is not

Because the subject is conspiracy movements, it is easy to read diagonalism the wrong way, so a few boundaries matter.

It is not a claim that wellness, spirituality or natural living lead to extremism. The vast majority of people who do yoga, take supplements or distrust big pharma never go anywhere near the far right. Diagonalism describes a current that catches some people, not a destiny written into a lifestyle.

It is not a theory of secret coordination. No one runs the pipeline. It is an emergent pattern produced by shared psychology and platform design, in the way water finds the same channels downhill - which is why it would be a strange irony to read a master plan into a concept that exists to explain conspiracy thinking.

And it is not a weapon for one political side. The historical Querfront was built from both red and brown, and the modern version draws on the green and spiritual left as much as the libertarian right. Diagonalism names a shape, not a team.

The last thing worth holding is the quiet irony at its centre. Diagonalism runs on people who are certain they have seen through the illusion that fools everyone else. That certainty is exactly the feeling that makes a person easiest to lead. The antidote is not cleverness or contempt; it is the older discipline of knowing yourself - noticing the pull of the awakening story, and the flattery of being among the few who see, before it has a chance to carry you off.