In 1991, as the Soviet monolith crashed down like a badly baked soufflé, a certain breed of Western academic began to hyperventilate about the “end of history.” This argument, most famously peddled with much romanticised gusto by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, suggested that liberal democracy had finally won and every other “ism” was headed for the museum of dead ideas.
But Fukuyama completely ignored the sheer stubbornness of a dead idea. Failed ideologies do not simply pack up and leave. Instead, they enter what the Australian economist John Quiggin calls a “zombie state.” Most become a set of hollow rituals and rhetoric, cut off from reality.
To visualise this phenomenon, one might look at a modern day Labour Day rally. In these, speakers often rely on ‘zombie rhetoric’, reciting slogans from the early and mid-20th century that no longer align with current reality. For example, this disconnect is evident in the way the once-subversive poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib has been stripped of its sting and reduced to a mere aesthetic. Picture a Faiz couplet used as a caption for an Instagram post featuring a latte, or a Jalib quote slapped on to a tote bag. This was bound to happen.
This is ‘zombie socialism.’ A middle-class favourite. It is no longer about the proletariat or the actual redistribution of wealth, but has become a convenient ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘anti-colonial’ cloak, used to hide the fact that those draped in it have run out of original ideas. They scurry around digital echo chambers as if attending a fancy dress party, wearing the masks of Marx, Mao, Che or Lenin. Social media serves as their primary playground, where they flaunt a zombie ideology for ‘likes’.
Failed ideologies often enter a “zombie state”, becoming a set of hollow rituals and rhetoric, cut off from reality. But persistent political anxieties express themselves in this void with monsters of their times
So, a zombie ideology is a set of political beliefs proven ineffective by reality but continuing to aimlessly walk the earth. These ideas have been intellectually decapitated by the failure of their predictions, whether it is the promise of trickle-down prosperity or the utopian dream of a worker-led paradise. Or for that matter, the creation of ‘Riyasat-i-Madina.’
Yet, these ideologies refuse to stay in the ground. They persist not because they offer solutions to contemporary crises but due to inertia and muscle memory. Their followers are now just going through the motions, albeit in a theatrical manner. They also use these ideologies to project an image/perception of themselves.
Liberals are no different in this regard. They too are manifesting a zombie ideology and system in which people are simply emoting rather than voting for substance. They engage in a perpetual performance of outrage and tribal loyalty. As the Irish political scientist Peter Mair argued in Ruling the Void, political parties do not represent social groups anymore but, instead, act as marketing agencies in a hollowed-out democracy.
The American media theorist Neil Postman posited that voters no longer judge candidates on policy but on the images and emotions they project, turning democracy into a branch of the aesthetics industry. In this environment, political discourse is replaced by the grammar of electronic and social media, where a candidate’s perceived image matters more than their platform.
This is ‘zombie democracy.’ It is a primary driver of global democratic ‘backsliding’, because it creates a vacuum in which democracy’s form remains but the substance has withered. Voters are engaging with politics just as a consumer engages with a commercial brand, selecting leaders based on the lifestyle or identity they represent rather than their ability to govern. The result is a political exercise that looks democratic but is intellectually hollow, driven by optics and carefully curated stagecraft. A ‘democracy’ in which populists thrive.
On the right, the 2013 fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt provided a grim punchline to decades of grandstanding by ‘Islamists’. As American political scientist Shadi Hamid noted, ‘Islamism’ has since shuffled into a zombie state. Islamists, both mainstream and militant, are still haunting politics with the dusty slogans and moth-eaten symbols of the second half of the 20th century. Think Qutb, think Maududi.
Today, if you ask Islamists for a coherent plan for modern governance or a functioning economic policy, you will get nothing but vacant stares. They are, as Turkish scholar Sümeyye Sakarya puts it, “walking but not thinking.” But some still like to explode, though.
Contemporary right-wing ideologies such as fascism, Islamism, right-wing Zionism, and Hindu and Christian nationalism have all become increasingly clumsy, aggressive and perpetually hungry for a past that never actually existed. They are zombies in the truest sense, having ditched complex state-building theories in favour of a much simpler diet of pure, unadulterated grievance and resentment. Unlike their old-school predecessors, who at least had the stamina to draft some theocratic pathways, these contemporary ghouls have replaced intellectual substance with primal knee-jerk reactions.
They do not offer a map for the future. They just twitch and shout every time a cultural nerve is poked. This cycle goes back and forth between the left and the right, the liberal and the anti-liberal, the woke and the anti-woke. These are all energetic performances designed to mask a total lack of a governing brain. These performers wander around like a B-movie monster that can only react to the latest outrage but cannot remember how to open a door. They are technically active and undeniably loud, yet possess the collective cognitive depth of a shallow puddle.
Ideologies aren’t entirely dead. They have become ‘zombified’. The world has entered an ‘interregnum’ or a void that functions as a historical dead-zone between the old and the new. In the early 1930s, the Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci famously wrote that the “old is dying and the new cannot be born”, and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Gramsci was writing this during a turbulent period of transition from a dying order and the birth of a new one. To him, morbid symptoms in the time’s interregnum included fascism and ultra-nationalism, whereas to others, the symptom was Bolshevism.
Present-day political anxieties are symptoms of our own interregnum. These anxieties have given birth to populism. They are also keeping zombified ideologies in circulation. The best idea to survive such a period is what the American thinker John Dewey called ‘social intelligence’ or ‘real pragmatism.’
According to Dewey, people should solve society’s problems the same way a scientist solves a mystery, through experimentation, observation and flexibility. This approach looks for practical solutions that bypass ‘zombie ideologies.’
It is the pragmatists, planning their actions after studying real-world results, who are most likely to emerge from the interregnum with a fresh set of ideas that will aid the new to finally be born.
Published in Dawn, EOS, February 15th, 2026
