Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution
Third-World Resentment
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Mamdani is the manifestation of a new ideology that is spreading in the United States: Third-Worldism.
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Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution
Summarize
Third-World Resentment
Zineb Riboua
caption...
“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”
― Marcel Proust
Mamdani’s Third-Worldism
Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a socialist or an Islamist sympathizer. The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third-Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.
I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.
Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.
In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.
Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language
It is worth examining the language that shaped Zohran Mamdani’s worldview, a language that first crystallized in the late 1950s during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre transformed anti-colonial resistance into a moral epic, portraying liberation not only as political emancipation but as the rebirth of the human spirit itself.
In the Francophone world, the tradition survived through networks of writers, students, and militants who kept the spirit of decolonization alive after independence. The ethos of the Algerian struggle carried into the May 1968 uprisings in France, when young people turned their anger at De Gaulle’s authority into a broader revolt against capitalism and Europe’s moral exhaustion. Many in Paris saw themselves as heirs to anti-imperial liberation, replacing distant colonial wars with domestic cultural rebellion. From that point on, the language of decolonization merged with the language of personal emancipation and identity, dissolving the boundary between private grievance and global injustice. It was the end of the beginning, the moment the revolutionary gave way to the citizen activist.
Which is why what Mamdani represents is not a new movement but the return of an older sensibility that America itself once resisted and outlasted. His stances on housing, policing, and Palestine channel global anti-imperial heritage into American realities. The landlord morphs into the colonizer, the tenant into the colonized. The NYPD becomes the occupier. New York’s boroughs serve as metaphorical battlegrounds in the decolonization process. It transcends socialism, unmoored from class or ownership, and eludes Islamism, unbound by theocratic aims. Here, Islam serves as an emblem of subjugation with universal resonance, a faith recast as resistance and moral cohesion against Western dominance.
This idea of spiritual resistance belongs to the same moral tradition that once inspired pro-revolutionary thinkers. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), perfectly captured the intellectual mood that birthed this tradition:
“The Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. We know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that enslaved peoples are still to be found there, together with some who have achieved a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who have obtained complete freedom but who live under the constant menace of imperialist aggression. These differences are born of colonial history, in other words of oppression.”
This passage reveals how Western intellectuals projected a redemptive, almost spiritual quality onto the struggles of the colonized. For Sartre, the Third World was not just a geopolitical zone. It was the new subject of history, the moral substitute for the exhausted European left. The future of politics. That moralization of politics, where suffering becomes the ultimate source of legitimacy, is precisely what survives in Mamdani’s rhetoric.
The Algerian Revolution, not the Iranian one, is the real origin of this sensibility. The Iranian Revolution unsettled the Western left because it spoke in religious terms, while the Algerian struggle was secular and universal, allowing French and Western radicals to identify with it. Fanon’s idea of violence and Sartre’s defense of it turned Algeria into a moral event that promised redemption for both colonized and colonizer. It deserves closer study because it remains the clearest expression of Third-Worldist politics, uniting anti-imperial struggle with the quest for moral renewal. Today, it is often overlooked, overshadowed by the Iranian Revolution and by newer decolonial theories that ignore its intellectual depth.
Mamdani keeps that dynamic alive in a new setting.
The Jew, the Israeli, and Mamdani’s Third Worldism
But what I find notable is that Zohran Mamdani found his audience at a moment when that voice had returned to prominence. The aftermath of October 7 and the surge of anti-Zionist activism on university campuses created the perfect moral terrain for his message. Across American institutions, decolonization has shifted from academic theory to political instinct, giving young activists an ethical framework for interpreting conflict. Mamdani speaks that language fluently.
He channels the same emotional power that once animated anti-imperial movements, but now within the American political system. In this moral landscape, Israel holds a special place. It stands as the final embodiment of Western domination, a state seen as the successor to the colonial powers that once resisted by the Third World.
During the Algerian War of Independence, that same struggle against Europe often blurred into hostility toward Jewish communities. When independence came in 1962, violence against Jews in Algeria accelerated their mass exodus to France. The revolution’s rhetoric of liberation carried an undercurrent of exclusion that cast the Jew as Europe’s privileged double. Many Algerian Jews were poor and socially marginalized, but they were depicted as embodiments of colonial privilege and moral complicity, seen as sharing in the power that oppressed them.
This pattern extended across the post-colonial world. From the 1960s onward, Third-Worldist movements increasingly framed their politics through anti-Zionism, portraying Israel as the last fortress of Western imperialism and Palestinian resistance as the moral center of a global struggle. Mamdani draws directly from this legacy.
In his politics, Israel becomes the final expression of colonial Europe, and the Jew is recast not as a victim but as a symbol of enduring Western power. Opposition to Israel thus functions as a continuation of decolonization, a moral conflict that transforms the old fight against empire into a permanent contest between innocence and guilt.
Summarize
Third-World Resentment
Zineb Riboua
caption...
“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”
― Marcel Proust
Mamdani’s Third-Worldism
Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a socialist or an Islamist sympathizer. The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third-Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.
I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.
Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.
In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.
Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language
It is worth examining the language that shaped Zohran Mamdani’s worldview, a language that first crystallized in the late 1950s during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre transformed anti-colonial resistance into a moral epic, portraying liberation not only as political emancipation but as the rebirth of the human spirit itself.
In the Francophone world, the tradition survived through networks of writers, students, and militants who kept the spirit of decolonization alive after independence. The ethos of the Algerian struggle carried into the May 1968 uprisings in France, when young people turned their anger at De Gaulle’s authority into a broader revolt against capitalism and Europe’s moral exhaustion. Many in Paris saw themselves as heirs to anti-imperial liberation, replacing distant colonial wars with domestic cultural rebellion. From that point on, the language of decolonization merged with the language of personal emancipation and identity, dissolving the boundary between private grievance and global injustice. It was the end of the beginning, the moment the revolutionary gave way to the citizen activist.
Which is why what Mamdani represents is not a new movement but the return of an older sensibility that America itself once resisted and outlasted. His stances on housing, policing, and Palestine channel global anti-imperial heritage into American realities. The landlord morphs into the colonizer, the tenant into the colonized. The NYPD becomes the occupier. New York’s boroughs serve as metaphorical battlegrounds in the decolonization process. It transcends socialism, unmoored from class or ownership, and eludes Islamism, unbound by theocratic aims. Here, Islam serves as an emblem of subjugation with universal resonance, a faith recast as resistance and moral cohesion against Western dominance.
This idea of spiritual resistance belongs to the same moral tradition that once inspired pro-revolutionary thinkers. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), perfectly captured the intellectual mood that birthed this tradition:
“The Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. We know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that enslaved peoples are still to be found there, together with some who have achieved a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who have obtained complete freedom but who live under the constant menace of imperialist aggression. These differences are born of colonial history, in other words of oppression.”
This passage reveals how Western intellectuals projected a redemptive, almost spiritual quality onto the struggles of the colonized. For Sartre, the Third World was not just a geopolitical zone. It was the new subject of history, the moral substitute for the exhausted European left. The future of politics. That moralization of politics, where suffering becomes the ultimate source of legitimacy, is precisely what survives in Mamdani’s rhetoric.
The Algerian Revolution, not the Iranian one, is the real origin of this sensibility. The Iranian Revolution unsettled the Western left because it spoke in religious terms, while the Algerian struggle was secular and universal, allowing French and Western radicals to identify with it. Fanon’s idea of violence and Sartre’s defense of it turned Algeria into a moral event that promised redemption for both colonized and colonizer. It deserves closer study because it remains the clearest expression of Third-Worldist politics, uniting anti-imperial struggle with the quest for moral renewal. Today, it is often overlooked, overshadowed by the Iranian Revolution and by newer decolonial theories that ignore its intellectual depth.
Mamdani keeps that dynamic alive in a new setting.
The Jew, the Israeli, and Mamdani’s Third Worldism
But what I find notable is that Zohran Mamdani found his audience at a moment when that voice had returned to prominence. The aftermath of October 7 and the surge of anti-Zionist activism on university campuses created the perfect moral terrain for his message. Across American institutions, decolonization has shifted from academic theory to political instinct, giving young activists an ethical framework for interpreting conflict. Mamdani speaks that language fluently.
He channels the same emotional power that once animated anti-imperial movements, but now within the American political system. In this moral landscape, Israel holds a special place. It stands as the final embodiment of Western domination, a state seen as the successor to the colonial powers that once resisted by the Third World.
During the Algerian War of Independence, that same struggle against Europe often blurred into hostility toward Jewish communities. When independence came in 1962, violence against Jews in Algeria accelerated their mass exodus to France. The revolution’s rhetoric of liberation carried an undercurrent of exclusion that cast the Jew as Europe’s privileged double. Many Algerian Jews were poor and socially marginalized, but they were depicted as embodiments of colonial privilege and moral complicity, seen as sharing in the power that oppressed them.
This pattern extended across the post-colonial world. From the 1960s onward, Third-Worldist movements increasingly framed their politics through anti-Zionism, portraying Israel as the last fortress of Western imperialism and Palestinian resistance as the moral center of a global struggle. Mamdani draws directly from this legacy.
In his politics, Israel becomes the final expression of colonial Europe, and the Jew is recast not as a victim but as a symbol of enduring Western power. Opposition to Israel thus functions as a continuation of decolonization, a moral conflict that transforms the old fight against empire into a permanent contest between innocence and guilt.
Zohran Mamdani, Islam as Language, American Third-Worldism
Summarize
As I see It - Part 2
Zineb Riboua
“The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals
American Third-Worldism
There are many ways to chart the evolution of ideologies. Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement remains one of the sharpest accounts of how legal and political revolutions create new moral hierarchies. I do not contest his thesis, but I sense something deeper taking shape alongside it.
Perhaps this resonates more with me because I work in foreign policy, but I am always interested when domestic politics are refracted through international issues. Mamdani’s rhetoric on Israel, Islamophobia, 9/11, and minimizing Hamas’ atrocities does not emerge from the American civil-rights tradition, progressive politics, or constitutional thought. It stems from a decolonial vision of the world.
Three foundations sustain Third-Worldism and the political style it produces in the United States.
- The first is the belief that imperialism is not an episode in Western history but its permanent feature. As Samir Amin argued in Unequal Development and Eurocentrism, capitalism depends on maintaining the periphery in a state of dependency. Anti-imperialism, therefore, becomes by definition anti-Americanism since the United States is cast as the final form of empire, the axis through which global exploitation flows.
- The second is that the bourgeois persists. Third-Worldism inherits the Marxist critique of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist class, but extends it to a civilizational and, often, geopolitical scale. The bourgeoisie becomes synonymous with the West, and capitalism becomes closely associated with Western modernity. Within that frame, the Jew is placed at the symbolic center of the system, identified with finance and cosmopolitan life. This produces a subtler form of antisemitism, and anti-Zionism becomes the ethical language through which anti-capitalism is expressed.
- The third is the redefinition of the proletariat. For Marx, the proletariat consisted of industrial workers. For the Third-Worldists, there is a global hierarchy, global struggle, global cause, and therefore the proletariat becomes the collective of the world’s oppressed peoples.
The Future of Third-Worldism
Several forces explain why Third-Worldism is resurging today. I want to highlight three of them:
- The first is the institutionalization of its language within universities. I am not opposed to decolonial studies per se. Understanding decolonization is crucial to comprehending global history. Civilizations rise and fall, people migrate, mix, and transform one another, and every culture bears the imprint of conquest, triumph, and exchange. In that abstract sense, the study of decolonization is a study of human history itself. However, what passes for decolonial thought in the modern academy often departs from this universal and honest inquiry. It has evolved from a study of historical processes into a moral enterprise.
Students are encouraged not to analyze but to condemn, approaching history as a courtroom where the past must answer for the present. - The second is the exhaustion of domestic progressive politics. The racial and sexual paradigms that once energized the Democratic coalition have reached saturation. Wokeism, built on individual identity, has failed to deliver material change. Third-Worldism offers a new kind of enthusiasm and energy through its collective, global, and seemingly economic aspects. It shifts the terrain from the personal to the planetary, reintroducing class and empire in a language that feels both righteous and modern.
- The third is the expansion of anti-Israelism under a broader ideological canopy. Within the decolonial imagination, Israel is not viewed as a nation among others but as the visible machinery of American power, the frontier through which U.S. hegemony operates. This view inherits a distinctly Marxist logic that interprets nations and conflicts as reflections of economic structures. Zionism, in this sense, represented a bourgeois accommodation to the capitalist order. Within this logic, Israel can achieve peace only when American power collapses, and America can only purify itself if it gives up on its ally in the Middle East, since Israel is portrayed as the instrument of that power rather than an independent state.
China and Russia use the language of anti-imperialism, Global-South solidarity, and “multipolarity” to legitimize their ambitions. Moscow presents its wars as struggles against Western domination, while Beijing portrays its rise as a peaceful alternative to U.S. hegemony. Through their media, diplomatic networks, and development programs, both powers now disseminate this narrative across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, lending the ideology the support of state sponsorship and a global reach. There is nothing more effective in an asymmetric struggle than convincing the population of another country that it no longer deserves its own success. That is the essence of contemporary ideological warfare. The danger is that this message is gaining traction within the United States itself, carried by intellectuals and activists who echo its language. Figures like Alexander Dugin devoted their lives to this project.
More importantly, anti-Americanism, once the banner of the ultra-radicals, now passes as moral talk under the guise of “decolonization”. Older leftist movements broke apart over class and identity, but Third-Worldism binds them together through enmity. It subtly gathers cultural bitterness and moral righteousness into a single story with a single villain: the United States. It’s a winning talking point for groups that have exhausted all rhetorical options.
On Islam
I found a poll about Mamdani fascinating, as it revealed that he was unpopular among Protestants (36%), Catholics (28%), and Jews (16%), but favored by Muslims (50%) and voters with no religion (71%). One would expect Mamdani to command far greater support among Muslim voters.
Many today label every political expression of Islam as “Islamist,” but that is a mistake. Islam’s fusion of theology and politics gives it an activist edge, but its meaning is always contingent on who invokes it and to what end.
Under a decolonial lens, Islam assumes a different, explicitly ideological function. It is no longer treated as a faith rooted in ritual and law (sharia), but rather as a symbol of protest. In the decolonial framework, Islam is the religion of the oppressed, a universal language through which the marginalized can articulate resistance to empire and hierarchy.
Marx, in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, wrote that “religious misery is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other hand, the protest against real misery.” Religion, in his view, both reveals the suffering of man and gives that suffering a voice. Mamdani’s version of Islam follows this logic almost perfectly. Faith is a social instrument, a language of protest against injustice rather than a structure of divine truth. Islam, for him, does not reveal God, it reveals oppression.
The irony is that this worldview subverts Islam itself. It is almost amusing to see Gulf Arabs, whose societies still link religion to prosperity, honor, hierarchy, and self-assertion, mocking Mamdani on social media. Their reaction is revealing. They instinctively recognize that what he promotes is a sort of victimhood mentality that is incompatible with a religion that promoted merchants and warriors. Perhaps the Muslims in New York with this sensibility did not vote for Mamdani precisely because of this, and why they voted for Trump 2025.
In a way, what Mamdani does with Islam is similar to what Soviet ideologues once attempted to pursue. They tried to recast Islam as an anti-imperialist ally, a revolutionary theology compatible with socialism and valuable to the state. My point here is not to draw a crude parallel but to explain the ideological function that religion assumes in a modern, urban, and cosmopolitan setting. This helps explain why Mamdani, despite his background, fails to command overwhelming Muslim support.
Third-Worldist Declinism
Summarize
Crisis of American Foreign Policy Thinking
Zineb Riboua
Barnes Collection Online — Giorgio de Chirico: Horses of Tragedy (I cavalli della tragedia)
Horses of Tragedy, Giorgio De Chirico
“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
For much of the 20th century, Communist ideology offered a unified theory of global politics. It claimed that history belonged to the poor and the colonized, and it gave Western intellectuals a semi-clear but very comfortable moral lens through which to interpret the world, that “we” are in a perpetual cycle of the oppressed against the oppressor, the South against the North, the worker against the capitalist. When the Soviet Union vanished, the political system that sustained these ideas collapsed, but the worldview it shaped and formed did not disappear.
Indeed, the vocabulary of anti-Westernism survived and is today still thriving, its core assumptions included a deep suspicion of power, a rejection of wealth as a marker of legitimacy, and the belief that Western dominance is fundamentally unjust. These ideas no longer required Marxist theory or a revolutionary state as they found new expression through other movements, which one might call “Third-Worldism,” which became the framework that kept them alive.
François Furet, the French historian who studied the rise and fall of revolutionary ideologies, argued that Communism’s true legacy was not its economics or political structures but its mentalité (mindset), its hold over how people interpreted history, power, and justice. In fact, some of the Soviet Union mentalité remained intact.
Former revolutionaries and their intellectual heirs replaced doctrine with instinct. They continued to interpret global affairs through a rigid framework that divided the world into oppressors and oppressed, instead of analyzing power as the result of competition, governance, or strategic calculation, they treated Western dominance as inherently illegitimate.
Indeed, Third-Worldist thinkers abandoned the revolutionary project; some reframed it, but most retained its dualisms. They shifted from supporting insurgencies to adopting a permanent stance of ideological resistance. They recast the international system as fundamentally unjust and argued that the United States had no legitimate claim to global leadership. Ironically, the United States defeated Leninism on the battlefield of the Cold War, only to absorb elements of its Trotskyist legacy into its own intellectual culture.
The global revolution that Trotsky once envisioned reappeared in a different register: as a permanent critique of American power, international order, and the legitimacy of liberal institutions themselves. Third-Worldists neither critique nor have they ever critiqued American policy in terms of effectiveness, coherence, or interest. They rejected its role entirely. But the critique is a mirage, as the goal is to neutralize the U.S. from any position of authority. The United States, in this view, should not adjust its leadership; it should totally renounce it.
This framework spread because it matched broader cultural and intellectual trends. Many in elite institutions began to measure legitimacy not through institutions, constitutional order, or strategic responsibility, but through perceived power differentials. Power itself became suspect. If a state was strong, it was presumed to be coercive. In this sense, the United States replaced the capitalist class as the central agent of historical injustice.
This convergence has produced what can be called Third-Worldist Declinism. It is not a fully developed ideology but a political disposition structured by suspicion of power and a rejection of American legitimacy in global affairs. For a time, this kind of thinking stayed on the fringes. But as America experienced strategic setbacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, it gained credibility. As rising powers like China and Russia challenged the U.S., the instinct to blame Washington first got stronger. And as parts of the American elite grew more disillusioned with their own country, this worldview moved into the mainstream.
Third-Worldist Declinism: Pretends to mourn history but exists to erase it. Speaks the language of moral exhaustion while calculating the redistribution of power. Offers no solutions, only the satisfaction of seeing authority vanish. Denounces leadership not for its failures but for its existence. Submits nothing to debate except the demand that the United States no longer wins.
What defines this moment is not the presence of criticism toward American foreign policy; it remains essential in any functioning democracy. What is striking is how often that criticism abandons strategic analysis and turns toward renunciation. Instead of driving reform, it promotes apology. Instead of demanding better statecraft, it calls for disengagement. It automatically frames history as a tribunal in which the United States is presumed guilty.
Contrary to common belief, this shift does not reflect a return to realism. Realism assumes the world is dangerous and that power needs to be managed. Third-Worldist Declinism rejects power entirely, especially the United States’.
But that’s not how the world works. China doesn’t apologize for its rise. Russia doesn’t second-guess its invasions. Iran doesn’t ask permission to reshape the region. These states don’t carry the emotional weight of post-colonial guilt. They believe in their missions. They believe in power.
The Ex-Liberal
Summarize
Leftist ideals, Conservative methods
Zineb Riboua
File:Yevgeny Onegin by Repin.jpg - Wikipedia
This 1899 illustration by Ilya Repin (1844–1930) portrays the famous duel between Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Lensky
The intellectual ... must try never to forget the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of one’s own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere.
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals
In the United States, conservatism is undergoing a profound transformation. While Trump was a significant factor, an overlooked yet fundamental shift is taking place—the steady migration of disillusioned liberals to the Right. This realignment is not merely expanding the conservative movement; it is reshaping its ideological foundations.
This exodus, largely triggered by frustration over COVID-19 policies and progressive cultural upheavals in 2020, is redefining conservatism from within. Many of these former liberals reject wokeness, government overreach, and the influence of elite institutions, but they do not necessarily reject the underlying ideals that shaped their political worldview. Instead, they bring with them new priorities, rhetoric, and ideological tensions, challenging traditional conservative assumptions.
Two of the most notable changes introduced by former liberals are a redefinition of how conservatism perceives power and foreign policy.
I – Power and Institutions:
Ex-liberals, shaped by a political culture steeped in structural analysis, bring with them a fundamentally different way of interpreting power. Whereas traditional conservatism has long emphasized personal responsibility, cultural heritage, and the organic evolution of institutions, this new faction continues to view political and social conflicts as products of entrenched systems rather than individual choices or national interests.
This distinction also reflects a deeper divide in how the Left and Right approach institutions. Historically, conservatives have viewed institutions as essential pillars of stability, evolving to preserve order, culture, and national identity. However, the Right has also supported dismantling institutions when they are seen as corrupt, unaccountable, or actively working against national interests. Unlike the Left, which often seeks to dismantle institutions to eliminate hierarchies and achieve greater social equity, conservatives have pursued institutional destruction as a means of restoring what they see as a lost or corrupted order. Whether through decentralization, defunding, or outright abolition, the Right’s approach to dismantlement has typically been about returning power to local communities, the private sector, or traditional cultural frameworks (Church, etc).
With an influx of ex-liberals into the Right, these conflicting views are colliding. Many have replaced class struggle with a battle against the technocratic elite, global institutions, and the security state—preserving a structural critique but shifting its focus. Unlike traditional conservatives, who see institutions through a nationalist or cultural lens, ex-liberals apply leftist systemic frameworks, viewing them as tools of a transnational capitalist elite rather than discrete national entities.
II- Foreign Policy
While Republicans have historically been skeptical of global institutions and upheld an isolationist tradition, the rationale behind these views has been vastly different—significantly so—compared to the Left.
For much of American history, conservative foreign policy has balanced the restraintism of John Quincy Adams—who warned against seeking "monsters to destroy" abroad—with the muscular nationalism of Andrew Jackson, which embraced decisive military force when American interests were at stake. The Republican Party has long navigated this tension, sometimes advocating for restraint while still maintaining a willingness to project power when necessary.
For ex-liberals, however, this balancing act can be frustrating. While they are not traditional isolationists, their opposition to American intervention often arises from a profound skepticism about the very nature of American power. Unlike traditional conservatives, who may oppose a specific war but still support the necessity of U.S. military strength, some ex-liberals bring ideological commitments that lead them to question the legitimacy of American power as a whole. This often drives them to embrace narratives that align with anti-colonial or third-worldist critiques—perspectives that starkly contrast with the nationalist assumptions held by many on the Right.
From the America First movement of the 1930s to Pat Buchanan’s opposition to U.S. interventionism in the 1990s, conservative isolationism has typically framed itself as a defense of American sovereignty and strategic restraint—not as an indictment of the U.S. itself. The America First Committee, while advocating for a neutral stance, emphasized that “The United States must build an impregnable defense for America. No foreign power, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America.” The argument was not that America was an “evil empire,” but rather that an unchecked administrative state, swayed by entrenched interests, often misled the public about what truly served national security.
Buchanan, for instance, opposed NATO expansion after the Cold War, not out of hostility toward the U.S. but out of concern that it would entangle America in unnecessary foreign conflicts with little strategic benefit. Similarly, Ron Paul’s non-interventionist stance in the 2000s was driven by deep skepticism of government overreach and the influence of the military-industrial complex, rather than a fundamental rejection of U.S. leadership.
The once-clear distinction between distrust of the administrative state and distrust of the nation itself is becoming increasingly blurred, complicating the ideological boundaries that have long defined the Right’s foreign policy outlook.
President Donald Trump’s suggestions to annex Canada or purchase Greenland have already exposed tensions within the evolving conservative coalition. While traditional conservatives may oppose these ideas, they still recognize them as a legitimate extension of American dominance in line with a Jacksonian vision of power. In contrast, ex-liberals who have moved to the Right out of frustration rather than a complete ideological shift often view such proposals as baseless.
Is This a Lasting Realignment?
Honestly, I don’t know. Despite its momentum, this ideological shift won’t maintain its current pace. The conditions driving it—COVID-era government overreach, cultural radicalization on the Left, and rising distrust in institutions—are not easily replicated. Political realignments like this are rare, and as the Republican Party absorbs these new voices, internal tensions are inevitable.
The Decolonial Delusion
Summarize
When victimism becomes a worldview
Zineb Riboua
The Double Secret, by René Magritte, 1927.
The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
As Oswald Spengler wrote, cultures can find themselves trapped in forms that do not belong to them. He called this condition “pseudomorphosis,” when an emerging cultural soul is forced to develop within the external structures of a dominant civilization. Spengler believed this happened to the Magian (Arab-Islamic) world after the Battle of Actium, when the eastward momentum of a rising cultural order was halted by Roman power. The result was not synthesis, but arrest: the deeper impulses of the new culture were shaped, and also misshaped, by a civilizational shell not of its own making.
A version of that dynamic can be seen today, not through empire but through ideology. The intellectual and political classes of the contemporary Middle East increasingly speak in a language developed elsewhere, for different experiences, different crises, and different wounds.
This language is decolonial ideology. What began as a framework for analyzing colonial legacies has ossified into a secular theology. In Western universities, NGOs, and activist spaces, it no longer questions power as it replaces thought with posture. History is flattened into morality and politics reduced to grievance. The world is split into binary roles: oppressor or oppressed, villain or victim. Context is discarded, complexity unwelcome, and identity elevated above all.
“Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.”
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
Decolonial ideology claims to be a framework for justice, but in practice, it offers something else: escape. It turns blame into worldview, grievance into identity, and self-examination into betrayal. It thrives in environments marked by dysfunction because it offers a ready-made explanation that demands nothing but a moral script and a permanent enemy.
Its intellectual roots lie in Marxist-Leninist thinking. Like Marx, it views history as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed. Like Lenin, it appoints a self-righteous vanguard to speak on behalf of the voiceless. But instead of class struggle, it deals in cultural grievance; instead of factories, it fixates on identity. Transplanted into the Middle East, the formula breaks down almost immediately.
First, it mistakes foreign fingerprints for the whole crime scene. The region’s core dysfunctions—nepotism, tribalism, and institutional stagnation—are not colonial remnants. They are locally manufactured and zealously preserved. Second, it imposes an ill-fitting colonial narrative on societies whose problems are largely self-inflicted. Third, it paralyzes reform: turning self-critique into betrayal and blame into political capital.
Another striking contradiction in the Arab world is the following: societies that once exalted strength, pride, and honor now embrace a worldview built on fragility and grievance. A political culture shaped by stoicism and status has adopted a language that valorizes woundedness. The mismatch is glaring but almost never acknowledged.
That disconnect is amplified, not challenged, by the diaspora. In fact, the appeal of decolonial ideology is often strongest among diaspora communities in the West. Second- and third-generation Arabs and North Africans, caught between inherited identity and modern liberal norms, often adopt decolonialism as a moral anchor. It offers instant purpose, social legitimacy, and a ready-made narrative of justice. But what they defend is rarely a living society, indeed it’s a projection: an imagined homeland, purified of contradiction. From the safety of Paris or Toronto, they denounce repression they do not endure and romanticize regimes their families once fled. In doing so, they help export an ideology that excuses the very dysfunctions they claim to oppose.
And as this ideology travels, it mutates. The further it gets from reality, the more symbolic and dangerous it becomes. One of its most corrosive forms is the antisemitism now embedded in its rhetoric. In much of the Middle East, Israel is no longer treated as a state, but as a symbol, an abstract embodiment of colonial evil. The Jewish state becomes a screen for projection: the target of every grievance, humiliation, and failure. All of this becomes a conspiracy disguised as virtue. And it’s not incidental. It’s ultimately and utterly structural. A worldview built on oppression requires a permanent oppressor. If the West is too abstract, Israel, and by extension, the Jew, becomes the next convenient stand-in.
That same worldview also demands conformity and punishes those who reject it. The contradiction deepens when we look at Arab states that have explicitly refused to adopt the language of permanent grievance especially in the Gulf. Countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain have prioritized strategic autonomy, modernization, and institutional development over victimhood narratives. They decline to play the role of the eternally oppressed and for this, they are treated with suspicion. Not for failure, but for refusing to fail in the prescribed way. Their success breaks the narrative.
At the same time, other regimes have learned to weaponize that very narrative. At the geopolitical level, the stakes grow sharper. Decolonial rhetoric has become a strategic tool for states that thrive on misdirection. The Islamic Republic of Iran cloaks its brutality in the language of resistance, using anti-imperial slogans to justify domestic repression and regional interference. Russia and China use the same playbook, dressing expansionist ambitions in post-colonial rhetoric to deflect criticism and discredit rivals. Decolonialism has become the ideology of regimes that need enemies more than they need reform.
What begins as moral theater in the West becomes political cover elsewhere and intellectual dependency at home. That such a worldview has taken root in the Arab world is not merely surprising, it signals a deeper intellectual retreat. A region with a long tradition of legal reasoning, political thought, and cultural production now borrows its moral vocabulary from movements that would rather see it remain a victim than become a participant in its own recovery.
This dependency comes at a cost. When critique is imported unexamined, it erodes self-awareness. Societies begin to imitate resistance rather than confront their own realities. They chant, they posture but they do not ask questions. And in this performance, they remain suspended.
The Bataclan Massacre, the Post-1968 Left, and the Unwelcome Victim
How Anti-Imperialism Became a Justification for Terror
www.zinebriboua.com
The Bataclan Massacre, the Post-1968 Left, and the Unwelcome Victim
Summarize
How Anti-Imperialism Became a Justification for Terror
Zineb Riboua
Bataclan Survivor Shocked to Find Surgeon Selling NFT of Her X-Rayed Bullet Wound - Business Insider
“They say that Death embellishes its victims and exaggerates their virtues, but in general it is actually life that wronged them.”
Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days
The Unwelcome Victim
I was a student at the time. The Bataclan massacre—which killed 132 people—came only 10 months after the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Like everyone else, I was shocked and speechless. But my disbelief had less to do with what had happened than with what I heard in the aftermath.
In class, among professors, and across that familiar ecosystem of activists, media performers, and ideological hobbyists, a disturbing refrain emerged:
“The French deserved it.”
“This is the price of France’s crimes.”
It was grotesque, an acrobatic form of moral inversion. As families mourned their dead, the professionals of outrage were already at work, producing theories to absolve the killers and indict the country. Some insisted that France had “created” the Islamic State, others admitted the claim was false but insisted it didn’t matter because the attack was, in their view, deserved.
I remember sitting quietly during these discussions, watching one classmate in particular. He stood up and declared he felt “little remorse” for the victims. But, what struck me most was that he wasn’t alone. In his mind, and in the minds of many, the victims were no longer victims at all. They had become symbols, “necessary sacrifices,” proof that a terrorist organization openly calling for horror and the destruction of Europe and the West could strike its enemies with righteous force.
What the world no longer remembers, and what many never noticed at all, perhaps because these debates largely took place within the Francophone sphere, is the atmosphere that surrounded those attacks. The justifications, the rationalizations, the strange confidence of people who had nothing at stake and who nonetheless allowed themselves to speak as if they were the moral judges of the dead.
There was an audacity that still unsettles me. The audacity to look a mourning father in the eye and tell him that he was not the victim. To explain that his son or daughter was nothing more than an unfortunate casualty of history, a small figure swept away by a struggle that, according to this decolonial ideology, demanded its offerings. Some went even further. They suggested he might find a kind of consolation, that he might even welcome the idea that these so-called miscreants had been killed, or that music was forbidden anyway.
These remarks were not marginal. They moved through classrooms, student associations, activist circles, and media spaces that presented themselves as guardians of seriousness. They revealed something disturbing, a readiness to invert victimhood so completely that grief itself became suspect, something to be explained away, corrected, redirected toward the sanctioned narrative.
The Post-1968 Left
What I think matters is that these ideas did not emerge in a vacuum.
They were cultivated over decades, nourished by a long intellectual tradition that gave them prestige. The reversal of victim and oppressor, the instinct to interpret violence “from below” as almost sacred, took shape long before the Bataclan. Its decisive moment was the intellectual upheaval of May 1968 in Paris.
What happened in 1968 in France was the moment when an entire intellectual class decided that France itself, and more broadly the West, was the source of all the world’s injustices. May ‘68 began with student unrest, but it became something much larger. Universities were occupied, factories shut down, and over a million workers went on strike, every institution appeared suddenly fragile, every form of authority ripe for overturning.
The French intellectuals of that era did not stay on the margins observing events. They entered the movement and allowed the movement to redefine their mission. They walked into the streets, wrote in the newspapers, spoke in the occupied amphitheaters, and declared that France was living through its great reckoning. They believed they were witnessing the final unmasking of bourgeois hypocrisy, the long-awaited judgment on France’s colonial past, and its complicity with capitalism.
May 1968: A Month of Revolution Pushed France Into the Modern World - The New York Times
Writers and philosophers who had built their reputations on critique suddenly found themselves intoxicated by the spectacle of revolt. Simone de Beauvoir spoke of the movement as a renewal of life. Jacques Derrida, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Alain Geismar, and others transformed the atmosphere by insisting that France must confront its guilt.
Régis Debray, freshly released from a Bolivian prison, added a romantic vision of the guerrillero. The figure of Che Guevara was everywhere, as a martyr of anti-imperial justice. Philippe Sollers and the Tel Quel group embraced Maoism with a fervor that bordered on devotion. In their minds, China was the new horizon of moral clarity, a revolutionary purity that stood in contrast to the decadence of the West.
Mai 68
Che Guevara and Fidel Castro posters were plastered across the walls of the Sorbonne in Paris during the student protests of May ’68.
The intellectuals of the time rewrote the narrative of the twentieth century. Every ill in the world could be traced back to imperialism, capitalism, or the legacy of Western domination. The idea took root that violence and horror carried out by the oppressed possessed a kind of privileged truth. It could be tragic, even brutal, however, it was believed to reveal the world more honestly than any institution, argument, or moral norm. Over time, this conviction seeped into universities and shaped entire generations of students, who were encouraged to see rebellion, and at its extreme, terrorism directed against the West, as the most authentic expression of political reality.
This is why the reaction to the Bataclan did not emerge from nowhere. When some voices claimed that France had brought violence upon itself, they were echoing a long inheritance. Victims of terrorism were no longer seen as human beings but as symbols within an old romantic vision of revolt. The perpetrators were recast as the oppressed, and the victims as the guilty. The reflex that once treated every uprising abroad as anti-imperialist justice now treats violence inside France as history delivering its verdict.
Making the Jihadi a Victim
Islam, for many intellectuals, eventually entered this structure not as a religion but as a sign, a symbol, a flag. It became the symbol of the excluded and the humiliated, the permanent “post-colonial subject.”
Even when the actors were jihadist movements with imperial ambitions of their own, the narrative remained the same. The violence was quietly redirected into the memory of Algeria, or the ghosts of Indochina, or the idea that colonial history continues in new forms. The Islamic State proclaimed a universal caliphate, killed Muslims and non-Muslims alike, destroyed entire communities, and openly declared its intention to murder Western civilians. But in certain French circles, the event was filtered through the old opposition between oppression and resistance. And beneath that filter lay a second layer: anything resembling a patriotic reaction or any instinct to defend France was immediately coded as suspect.
This is what created the confusion after the Bataclan. The clarity of the massacre was total. Young people were killed in a concert hall. A crime so direct it should have left no room for interpretation, but the reflex to do so survived. Some looked at the dead and did not see individuals, they saw representatives of a civilization they believed guilty. They saw symbols of a historical imbalance.
To say that France had suffered, to affirm the innocence of the victims, to defend the nation in that moment, would have required affirming something like patriotism. And patriotism, in the mental universe of the post-68 Left, is nearly impossible to express without suspicion. The result was a sort of Kafkaesque paralysis.
This confusion comes directly from the inheritance of 1968. The Left that emerged from that period trained itself to read every conflict as the aftershock of colonialism. Once Islam became associated with the descendants of former colonial powers, the old categories merged. The jihadist became the post-colonial rebel. The terrorist act became a form of revenge against history. The victim became the embodiment of France, and France became the embodiment of its crimes. And because patriotism had been morally delegitimized, defending the victims as French became unacceptable, suspicious, weird, unsettling.
More importantly, a segment of the French intelligentsia recast Islam as political symbolism rather than a religious world. Jihadist violence was interpreted as a political expression, not cruelty. This came not from engagement with Islamic history but from the need to preserve an ideological narrative of oppression and resistance. In the process, Islam was reduced to a surface for post-1968 projections. This same distortion led many to misread the Islamic State. ISIS was not the voice of the marginalized but an imperial project seeking to overthrow Middle Eastern states, yet this reality was obscured by the insistence on placing it within an old anti-imperialist story.
Once this shift occurred, even a massacre like the Bataclan could be folded back into the older narrative. The victims faded because they did not fit the script. Any impulse to defend the country, to mourn collectively, or to describe the attack plainly risked being dismissed as nationalism. Reality bent to protect the framework, and in that distortion the final inversion appeared: the killers were treated as bearers of history, and the dead as bearers of France. Public grief itself became uncomfortable, and in that discomfort, the victims were abandoned twice.
The United States is not France, but it is beginning to develop a similar reflex. These ideas never appear out of thin air, and their presence is not inherently harmful. I still read Foucault, and I still enjoy Derrida’s writings on painting and art. Engaging difficult and unsettling thinkers is part of a healthy intellectual life. A democracy depends on argument and disagreement. The problem arises when interpretation begins to blur essential distinctions and is treated as an ultimate truth (even though they insist that there is no objective truth, only their own), particularly in moments of danger.
Jihadist movements are still active, foreign adversaries test American resolve, and political violence is no longer an abstraction. In such a landscape, hesitation about affirming national cohesion carries real consequences. Patriotism becomes something to be softened or hidden, as if expressing a shared civic identity risks being mistaken for partisanship. That hesitation obscures judgment at precisely the moment judgment is needed, whether jihadist groups or foreign proxies target Americans.
France struggled to speak with one voice after a terror attack because the idea of national solidarity had long been treated with suspicion. The United States is not there, but something similar is forming. The challenge is not the existence of dissent or criticism, both of which are essential, but the growing reluctance to affirm the bare civic ground on which a society recognizes danger. In an era of multiplying threats, that reluctance is not merely a cultural debate, it is fundamentally a strategic vulnerability.
Posting a piece that opens with an Oswald Spengler quote should be a bushable offense. FoH with this bullshyt. 
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