The new Iranian revolution offers the international left an excellent opportunity to find its way

An Athenian taxi driver, a Nazi sympathiser, told me recently: “I am a Golden Dawn voter, but I think the world of you.” I would rather that he had punched me in the stomach.

I had the same sinking feeling the other day when I read far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s proposals for achieving peace in Ukraine – proposals not too dissimilar to what I have been suggesting since Putin’s repulsive invasion began. 

While Orbán, unlike the Golden Dawn voter, did not praise me personally, the revulsion was the same.

Over the years, I have suffered immense discomfort when people – whose analyses at least partly resonated with my own – suddenly revealed themselves as fascist anti-Semites, unreconstructed Stalinists, loony libertarians, or, more recently, Trumpists. 

Fine treatises exposing bankers’ shenanigans degenerated into vile attacks on Jews. 

Critiques of the Gilded Age of early financialised capitalism turned into paeans for Uncle Joe. 

Forensic analyses of our central banks’ propensity to play fast and loose with our money concluded with crackpot cryptocurrency proposals redolent of the dangerous libertarian idea of apolitical money. 

And, last but not least, perfectly reasonable reproaches of “liberal” imperialism, or of the liberal establishment’s contempt for blue-collar workers, became calls for erecting border walls, hounding brown people, or invading Congress.

The sacred duty of spotting a fellow radical’s switch from humanism to misanthropy was brilliantly captured by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1925 movie Battleship Potemkin. During a fervent demonstration against the brutality of the czarist army, Eisenstein depicts an agitator who, suddenly, tries to turn the demonstrators’ rage against the Jews – at which point he is shouted down by the other demonstrators. If only it were that easy.