A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of National Populism. Chauvinism is on the rise, and the left is impotent, offering little beyond reactive gestures. Progressive leftists rightly reject the national populist surge, but they lack a realistic and radical political economy to counter it. The sovereigntist left, far from resisting, often enables national populism—sometimes through passive complicity, sometimes through outright alliances. Meanwhile, the technocratic left offers little more than managerial inertia.

These are symptoms of a deeper malaise afflicting the left: intellectual degradation, ethical confusion, political marginalisation, and strategic naivety.

Intellectually, the decline is most visible in the absence of a coherent political economy. The collapse of both Marxism and Keynesianism has left a void—now filled with warmed-over tenets occasionally updated through frameworks like Modern Monetary Theory. Worse still, the left's obsession with critiquing neoliberalism has blinded it to the deeper logic of the commercial society—a term Adam Smith used to describe market coordination and price signalling as a form of social organisation.

In conflating neoliberalism with capitalism writ large, many on the left miss the more fundamental questions posed by Smith and other classical economists about life in a society dominated by markets. This confusion leads them to mistake the specific institutional arrangements of neoliberalism, rooted in ordoliberal principles, for the deeper and more enduring dynamics of market society itself—dynamics which Smith and his contemporaries themselves found troubling.

Ethically, two dominant failures stand out. First, a moralistic authoritarianism among parts of the socially progressive left, obsessed with purity and symbolic transgression. Second, a cynical indulgence of abhorrent geopolitical actors—from Islamist movements like Hamas and Hezbollah, to authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia, Assad’s Syria, or Netanyahu’s Israel.

Ethics should guide how we build institutions and shape the political actions we take. But politics is not a morality play. It demands judgment, and the prioritisation of outcomes in a messy, morally grey world.

Politically, the left lacks a rooted power base. There is no mass working-class movement grounded in solidarity, mutual aid, and organisation, as there was in the early 20th century. Elites now exploit working-class chauvinism without fear of organised resistance. Rather than serving as a counterforce, the masses have been instrumentalised in the service of fascism and national populism.

Strategically, the left often fails to balance principle and pragmatism. Too many conflate the two—mistaking expediency for realism. Adapting to the national populist mood may appear pragmatic, but it ultimately represents a surrender of the left’s core principles.

This is why a New Realist philosophy is urgently needed. The existing left continually struggles against Charybdis and Scylla, only to be repeatedly shipwrecked by both. What it needs is the cunning of Odysseus guided by the analytical strength of Piero Sraffa with the ethical compass of a Mandela. Only then can we chart a course through the Strait of Messina.

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