I recall an Oxford Union talk, in 2020, with the guest American Nobel laureate in Economics, professor Paul Krugman. He of a weekly New York Times column. He, a beloved man of the liberal-progressive Left. Oft-quoted in the uber-liberal academic blog "Crooked Timber".
Krugman talks of "Zombie ideas". Which, he claims, are very severe on the Right, in the Republican party. But not in the Democratic Party: "...all important Zombies are on the Right because that's where the money is."
The Zombie idea on the Right that most got on his goat is "the trickle down theory", described in his talk as "cutting taxes for the wealthy". Which Krugman claimed had been debunked over and over, yet kept reappearing, he said, like a shambling Zombie.
The trickle down theory, aka "tax cuts for the rich", and whether or not it's a "Zombie idea" is for another time. But no "important" Zombie ideas on the Left?
Well, I thought. Paul K may not recognise any "Zombie ideas" on the Left, but I sure do. What about the idea of Socialism for a start?
Socialism, no matter what form ("nice" Democratic-Socialism, or not-so-nice Authoritarian-Communism), has been tried again and again. Again and again it's failed. Yet again and again it rises. How it this not seen as the monster "Zombie idea" of the Left? The OG of Zombie ideas. Answer: because it's actually believed. The Left genuinely believes -- at least I believe they believe -- that Socialism holds the promise of equality and justice for all.
And for that reason will do "Whatever it takes" to bring it about.
The fact that it's not succeeded a anywhere it's been tried? The Left's answer: it's never been tried properly. (!)
The Soviet Union, China, East Germany, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Venezuela, Cuba, dozens of African countries... all these don't count as "trying properly"?? Well, I'd call BS on that. But if you still don't accept that, and you still say "it's not been tried properly" there's no falsifying your view. It is inarguable.
In which case, the Zombies have won. At least on the Left. The Zombie idea of Socialism has won.
What then of an idea that's a bad idea, that's been killed off but rises from the dead, like the Zombies, yet still captures the attention of all of academia and swathes of the political Left? What of that?
Well... we might have to admit that the Zombies have won!
And what is it when the Zombies have won? I asked AI and the answer is: Zombie Apocalypse. That's what the Zombies winning is called.
We've now a Zombie Apocalypse in the west.
An old idea. A horrid idea. An idea that impoverishes humankind. Has nonetheless won.
Well done, Left! You've won.
The saddest thing, for me is: I've no longer any hope that in winning "the Left will find out". That the Left will see failure and impoverishment. That they will learn from that. No. The Left has learned nothing of the many previous failures. There's no reason to believe that they'll learn from yet another failure.
Yet now, this Zombie idea, this Zombie Apocalypse, infects not a poor, agrarian post-Tsarist Russia, not a poor agrerian post-imperial China, but the United States. The Anglosphere. The West. The inheritors of the Enlightenment. The vanguard of modernity.
If I'm right that socialism is a very bad idea, that it impoverishes countries it infects, then this Zombie Apocalypse is very bad news indeed.
Yet Paul Krugman, guest at Oxford University, did not talk about this major Zombie idea of the Left. Nor did Oxford Union ask him.
Gloom.
ADDED: re-watching the Krugman talk at Oxford U, I notice in particular that what he does, well enough to fool his audience, is to create one Straw Man after another. And then to rebut the Straw Men. I'll leave that here for now, just to note: see if you can spot the Straw Men!
Below is an article by Brivael Le Pogam, from the French, describing how Marxism was re-purposed by the French and German Schools, and injected into western academia, for ingestion by society. Which is where we are today. It's a good article. Spot on, as far as I know the facts.
Which are handily summarised in Christopher Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution".
That's false. And that's exactly why the world is on fire today. What fell on November 9, 1989, was a machine. A planned economy, a military empire, a concrete wall. What didn't fall was the idea. The idea that the world is divided between oppressors and oppressed. The idea that there is a final equality to be achieved, by any means necessary. The idea that everything that exists (the family, the nation, merit, inheritance) is a structure of domination to be torn down. That idea wasn't in the building when the building collapsed. We need to rewind the timeline, because everything is in the timeline: Economic communism had a fatal flaw: it was refutable. It promised abundance, it produced famines. It promised emancipation, it produced barbed wire. Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, The Gulag Archipelago published in Paris in 1973, the boat people of 1979: every decade, reality sent its refutation. The boat people were a floating refutation, visible from the beaches. So the ideology did what every threatened organism does: it mutated. The mutation has a name, and I've traced its genealogy here: French Theory. Foucault shifted the war from the terrain of facts, where communism lost every time, to the terrain of knowledge itself. If there is no truth, if there are only power relations disguised as knowledge, then no famine, no wall, no gulag can refute anything anymore. French Theory didn't bury Marxism. It made it irrefutable. And the mutation has dates. All prior to 1989. 1934: The Frankfurt School, chased from Germany, sets up at Columbia. The critique of the economy becomes a critique of culture. 1964-1965: Marcuse, German exile turned American professor, replaces the failing proletariat with a new revolutionary subject (minorities, students, outcasts) and writes in black and white that tolerance must be granted to left-wing movements and denied to those on the right. October 1966: The landing has a precise date. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Derrida, Barthes, Lacan present French thought to American campuses. 1967: Rudi Dutschke launches the slogan, the long march through the institutions. 1968: Street revolutions fail everywhere. No matter. The revolution will no longer pass through the streets; it will pass through the classroom. 1975-1985: Yale, Berkeley, Columbia absorb the theory, which becomes the operating system of the humanities. 1987: Allan Bloom publishes The Closing of the American Mind to sound the alarm. A million copies sold. The university calls him a reactionary and moves on. America had its Aron, and it did the same thing to him that we did to ours. Then comes November 9, 1989. The Wall falls. The West celebrates. Fukuyama had declared the end of History the previous summer, even before the fall. We dismantle the missiles, cash in on the peace dividends, declare the match over. We celebrated our victory over an empty address. The ideology had moved out twenty years earlier. We won against the tanks and lost against the chairs. Meanwhile, the other communist empire read the situation the opposite way. Beijing had crushed Tiananmen in blood five months before Berlin. Grim, but clear-sighted on one point: China knew the war was ideological. It chose: abandon Marxist economics, keep control of the narrative. The West did exactly the opposite: it kept the market and absorbed the ideology. Thirty-five years later, look at who's building power plants and who's toppling its statues. You want proof that it's the same software? Make the correspondence table. The class struggle has become the identity struggle. The kulaks have become the privileged. Maoist self-criticism has become privilege checking. The political commissars have become DEI officers. The samizdat has become the shadowbanned account. The nomenklatura left Moscow for Davos and Brussels. And paradise is no longer called the classless society: it's called equity, equality of outcomes. Exactly what I described here a few weeks ago. People will say: there is no Gulag. That's true. That's even the entire genius of version 2.0. Hard communism had to break bodies because it didn't hold minds. Soft communism holds minds: it just has to break careers. No camps, just HR departments. No Moscow Trials, just public apologies. No Siberia, just social death. Ask the Eastern Bloc émigrés settled in the West what they feel when they walk through an American university in 2026. They recognize the smell. And that's why the world is on fire. A civilization spent thirty-five years teaching its own children that it was the problem. Result: it no longer knows how to defend its borders, pass on its heritage, or even name its enemies. When the president of Harvard, before Congress, responds that condemning a call for genocide "depends on the context," you see the software running in production. And the predators from outside read that weakness like an open book: Moscow probes, Beijing waits, Islamism advances in the streets of our capitals. The external fire is only the consequence of internal disarmament. You only burn well the houses that have emptied themselves of their defenders. The Wall didn't fall. It moved. It no longer separates East from West: it now runs through the inside of every Western institution, between those who build and those who deconstruct. The first Cold War was won with missiles and GDP. The second will be won with schools, free media, and AI models. Whoever writes the values into the machines will write the next 1989. This time, let's not mistake the victory. To work. Click
