3 December 2025
by Sergei Medvedev
Source: Radio Svoboda
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of the ‘leftist’, the left-wing politician and activist. It is he, the leftist, who foisted on us the myth of global warming, who is forcing us to separate our trash and wash our yogurt jars. He has raised taxes on petrol and introduced the fashion for crazy electric cars that require you to drive around town in search of chargers. Leftists have sent us shrill feminists and forced us to twist our tongues around words like ‘authorx’, ‘poetx’, and ‘ministerx’—and they have instituted police procedures in the family, so that you can no longer threaten your wife with your fist or cuff your child. They’d stitch you up right away. Leftists opened the gates to migrants, transforming Paris and London into Arab and African reservations where a white person is afraid to walk down the street and forcing us to get down on our knees before the blacks and repent for centuries of slavery—while in reply they set fire to cars, loot stores, and overturn monuments to whites. Leftists are promoting gays and transgender people on TV and forcing us to watch men kiss each other and walk around in swimsuits in gay parades. Leftists have taken over Western universities, making everyone study postcolonial and gender theories, filling young people’s heads with nihilism and anarchism, and teaching everyone to smoke grass and wear nose rings.
Last but not least, it is they, the leftists, who have raised the present wave of antisemitism, are hanging Palestinian flags and ‘from the river to the sea’ slogans in windows, and are organizing a diplomatic and cultural boycott of Israel. This last is especially symbolic. A hundred years ago, the threat to humanity was represented in the form of a caricature hook-nosed Jewish bolshevik trying to lay his hairy hand on traditional Christian values, and today the same role of global evil has been assigned to the antisemite in the Arab kaffiyeh. The larger-than-life figure of the leftist fitted out ‘Arab style’ looms over the world, provoking a shit-storm on social media and fears in the ordinary citizen, forcing him to seek shelter under the maternal wing of nation and religion or with the paternal figure of the strong ruler.
A couple of weeks ago I unintentionally devised a social experiment. In the stories section of my Facebook (photos that stay up for 24 hours), I posted an entertaining picture from American social media: a photo of the newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, and the caption: ‘The new mayor has ordered city schools to teach children Arabic numerals’. I waited for subscribers to smile, but along with many likes, I received hundreds of outraged emojis and comments like ‘monster’, ‘terrorist’, and ‘how many Arabs live in New York total?’ Hatred for the leftist socialist, Muslim, and quasi-antisemite overshadowed the fact that we have all been using Arabic numerals for nearly a thousand years. Mamdani gets hated as sincerely and whole-heartedly as Greta Thunberg did 10 years ago.
This is all familiar and understandable, except for one thing. There are no ‘leftists’ as a political group, program, or ideology. That is a phantom born in the aroused conspirological imagination, like the ‘international LGBT movement’ or the ‘extremist child-free movement’ Roskomnadzor talks about. This is not about the leftist idea but about the progressive agenda of the last half-century, which was leavened by the 1960s civil rights movements (the sexual revolution, the fight against racial discrimination, the protest against the Vietnam War, and all that sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll) and in the new era has become identity politics and culture wars. Its subject is the rights of small, unrepresented, and oppressed groups and forms of life—women, children, animals and nature in general, victims of colonialism, people of nonnormative sexual orientation—and its target is the institutions and hierarchies of the ruling patriarchy. In the last half-century, this agenda has gained strength and become essentially mainstream in the West. It has been followed not only or mostly by leftists (who have rarely been represented in power) but by social democrats and centrists, and for decades the green agenda has almost entirely had the support of the entire political spectrum (for example, in Germany or Scandinavia). Over the course of 50 years it has seriously shaken the patriarchal order and its fulcrum: the white cis-gendered male.
This social revolution resembled the one that took place a hundred years ago. Then, the emancipation of the masses—the labor movement, suffrage, and feminism—also coincided with scientific and technological advances, from the theory of relativity to cinematography and aviation. And as in the last century, the revolution found its own bolsheviks and commissars: the woke movement took its principles of social reform and shifted them to the mode of political activism and cancel culture. Don’t be misled. Wokism was a local, if not downright marginal, sectarian movement that spread on the campuses of liberal universities, especially in the United States, in the academic and humanitarian milieu, and among the creative elite and activist civic groups. However, its supporters, distinguished by their aggressiveness and intolerance, turned it into irredentism, an implacable civic religion that rejects the principles of tolerance and inclusiveness on which this movement was originally built, took over the channels of public communication, and, as they say, co-opted the agenda. As a result, it was wokism as a caricature of social revolution (the way bolshevism was a caricature of socialism) that came to embody for the ordinary citizen the full horror of the new era: ‘demonic Greta’, ‘the bearded woman’, and the ‘gender-neutral toilet’.
However, woke has nothing in common with the leftist movement. Wokism and cancel culture are not the ideology of centuries past but an Internet phenomenon. As ChatGPT, with which I had a conversation on this topic, so elegantly put it, wokism is an ‘algorithmic form of morality: swift harassment, binary thinking, and symbolic executions. It is born not of Marx but of social media’. Indeed, the leftist tradition speaks of labor, redistribution, and property, whereas cancel culture talks about status, language, and symbolic control. Wokism is a bourgeois fashion in the Internet era, and it is for this reason that it was so easily picked up by corporations: it does away with reputations, not capital. If this were really a ‘left-wing coup’, we would have seen nationalization, trade unions, and taxes on corporations and not harassment for a failed joke. Woke is not a left-wing idea but a moral surrogate for politics in the Internet era.
But the mass consciousness has no interest in these fine distinctions. As it was a hundred years ago, everything new, incomprehensible, and frightening is ascribed to ‘bolshevism’. Fear of left-wingers is archetypical, inasmuch as they are attacking the ordinary person’s sacred cows: property, family, and hierarchy. And in this sense the myth of a ‘new bolshevism’ is simple and convenient. It feeds off the fear from the past and projects it on everything new. Society’s real problem is dealing with the world’s mounting complexity, with the crisis of familiar institutions, hierarchies, and classifications. An autistic girl, instead of doing her lessons, broadcasts about humanity’s future and schools adult politicians in how to live. A bearded singer of unclear sexual orientation wins the Eurovision contest. A Hindu born in Punjab becomes prime minister of Great Britain, a native Pakistani mayor of London, and a Muslim born in Uganda mayor of New York. Children of the former colonies are seizing commanding posts in once white mother countries, the capitals of the modern world. In the last decade, open gays and lesbians have come to head up Belgium, Luxembourg, Iceland, Latvia, Catholic Ireland, and Orthodox Serbia. The new world is advancing on all fronts, regardless of its representatives’ political, ethnic, or religious affiliation, and the appalled ordinary consciousness as usual looks for an enemy on its left flank and finds it in the constructed figure of the ‘leftist’. The left-wing threat is a phantom, a simulacrum, and the fear of the invented ‘leftist’ is a form of collective hysteria.
The connection between so-called left-wingers and antisemitism is a separate question. Greta rushes to Palestine’s aid with her Gaza Freedom flotilla, Mamdani attends pro-Palestinian rallies in New York, calling what is going on in Gaza genocide, in the traditionally left-wing academic and cultural circles of America and Europe calls are mounting for a boycott of Israel, and ties are breaking between Jewish scholars and artists (as poet, writer, and translator Maxim Shrayer recently wrote in this column). It seems to me, though, that this is a simplistic and overly convenient explanation: an attempt to designate the grotesque ‘leftist’ responsible for all the evil going on in the world, an explanation all the more bizarre when you consider the major role of Jews in the left-wing movement and ideology and their place in the intellectual and cultural elite of the last 150 years. Antisemitism’s roots are much deeper. They are more strongly connected not with the universalism of the left but with the nationalism and conservatism of the right. Antisemitism as an ideology (and not simply as a criticism of Israel for its operation in Gaza) is much more widespread on the far right end of the political spectrum. As the Atlantic notes, with the coming of Donald Trump, there has been an antisemitic revolution in the camp of American rightists represented by such influencers as Nick Fuentes and Candice Owens, with their millions of subscribers, and Tucker Carlson, the star of right-wing media, regularly offers the air to supporters of the conspirological theory of the ‘great displacement’ (supposedly the Jews plotted to flood America with migrants in order to crowd out the white race).
The genuine roots of antisemitism are not among ‘leftists’ but in populism, which has stirred up people against the ‘deep state’, ‘corrupt elites’, and ‘banker capitalism’. The mass consciousness traditionally links all these phenomena with Jews. Antisemitism always arises in the world at moments of historical change: at the dawn of the Modern (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), in the era of social revolutions (late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries), or today, during a crisis of modernity and the collapse of empires and major narratives, and always the agitated consciousness looks for the guilty party, the Other, finding him in the figure of the perpetual outsider, the Jew.
In this sense, the scenarios of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are scarily similar. Having encountered technological and social revolutions at the turn of the century, the transparency of borders, new means of communication and culture wars, and the identity crisis, the mass consciousness has constructed a global threat that is more inflated than real: the bolshevik revolutionaries in the twentieth century and the ‘leftists’ in the twenty-first. In the twenties and thirties of both centuries, voters, trying to save themselves from this phantom threat on the left, have rushed into the arms of national populists, conservatives, and traditionalists. In the twentieth century, this was reborn in a succession of fascist regimes; in the twenty-first, in different varieties of right-wing populism and conservative revanche: Trumpism in the United States and Brexit in Great Britain; Orbanism in Hungary and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe; the AfD in Germany and the Le Pen party in France; Erdogan’s neo-Osmanism in Turkey; and Netanyahu’s right-wing religious coalition in Israel… In the last century, all this ended in the catastrophe of the Second World War, and in this century, given similar allergies to the left, there is every chance of falling into the trap of populism and fascism, with all that implies.
Translated by Marian Schwartz
