“AIPAC are monsters.”
It was a remarkable statement, even by today’s political standards.
When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently described the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee in those terms, the immediate reaction was entirely predictable. The charge of antisemitism followed quickly.
Equally predictable was Mamdani’s defense. He explained he was quoting the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Those “monsters,” he argued, were those standing in the way of a new society.
Many commentators understandably focused on whether equating a Jewish organization with “monsters” echoed one of history’s oldest antisemitic tropes.
Important as that debate is, it misses the more significant story.
The real issue is not the word “monsters.” It is the vision of the world that sits behind it.
After Benito Mussolini imprisoned him, Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci was wrestling with a problem that haunted every committed Marxist after Karl Marx’s central prediction failed. Capitalism did not collapse. Liberal democracy did not implode. Workers did not overthrow the bourgeoisie. Communism was not destiny. Instead, Western societies became wealthier, freer, and more stable.
Gramsci’s insight was that perhaps the obstacle was not capitalism alone. Perhaps it was Western civilization itself, and the institutions that gave liberal democracy its resilience – family, religion, education, national identity, and civic culture – were not merely reflections of economic power. They were themselves obstacles to revolutionary change. Before political revolution could occur, cultural confidence first had to be dismantled. Hence Gramsci’s famous dictum that Western “cultural hegemony” was the obstacle to paradise.
Nearly a century later, one does not have to accept every aspect of Gramsci’s analysis to recognize its enduring influence. Large parts of contemporary activist politics are no longer concerned primarily with economic redistribution. They are engaged in a far broader critique and dismantling of Western institutions themselves.
That is where Australia enters the story.
The director-general of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization (Australia’s equivalent of the FBI or Shin Bet [Israel Security Agency]), Mike Burgess, recently delivered his Annual Threat Assessment. His warning was not simply about terrorism. It was about something more profound: a growing convergence of extremist movements whose ideologies differ dramatically but whose hostility toward liberal democratic society increasingly overlaps.
His reference to Australia’s “fair go” was not rhetorical flourish. It was a reminder that our democracy rests not simply on elections and laws, but on shared confidence in a set of institutions and values – mutual respect, tolerance, equality before the law, peaceful disagreement, and social cohesion – and that we need to better disagree with each other without becoming violent. Those values are not guaranteed. They require continual defense.
Viewed through that lens, one begins to understand the strange political alliances emerging across Western democracies.
The revolutionary Left and political Islam should be irreconcilable. One is secular, the other deeply religious. One rejects faith; the other derives authority from it. One proclaims liberation through class struggle; the other through religious submission.
Yet both can find common purpose in opposing aspects of the liberal democratic order they regard as fundamentally unjust or illegitimate because their view of the world is morally simplistic and binary in the extreme.
Israel has become the point where these very different traditions intersect.
For some revolutionary activists, Israel is portrayed as the embodiment of colonialism, capitalism, and Western power. For Islamist movements, it represents a religious and geopolitical adversary. Their reasons differ, but the political destination often appears remarkably similar.
This is why antisemitism has become such an important indicator.
It is not simply prejudice against Jews. Increasingly, it functions as a marker of a broader worldview in which the institutions of liberal democracy themselves are placed on trial. The Jewish state and often Jews more broadly become symbols of a civilization deemed irredeemably oppressive.
That should concern every Western liberal democrat, regardless of their views on the Middle East. Because once confidence in our own civilization begins to erode, something fills the vacuum.
Populist growth
Across the US and Europe and increasingly in Australia, the growth of populist movements reflects more than anger over immigration or the cost of living. It is also an expression of cultural insecurity. Millions of people feel that the institutions that once gave their societies coherence are being steadily delegitimized, while any attempt to defend them is dismissed as reactionary.
The rise of far-right and far-left parties, once minuscule in reach and influence and now mainstream, should therefore be understood not simply as a protest against governments but as a search – sometimes clumsy, sometimes misguided – for reassurance that national identity, cultural continuity, and democratic confidence still matter.
People rarely embrace populism because they reject democracy. More often, they fear democracy has stopped believing in itself.
This is the lesson buried beneath both Mamdani’s invocation of Gramsci and Burgess’s warning.
The greatest threat to a liberal democracy is not merely violence. It is the gradual erosion of confidence in the very institutions that make freedom possible.
Once citizens come to believe that their history is uniquely shameful, their values inherently oppressive, and their traditions obstacles to justice, democracy begins surrendering from within.
Civilizations are rarely defeated only from the outside. More often, they first lose faith in themselves.
The writer is a spokesperson for Jewish Labor, a podcaster, and businessman.