The Ouroboros

Why Political Movements Are Eating Themselves

My voice-to-text keeps translating the word Ouroboros as “Ora Boris.” It sounds like an unwanted houseguest you can’t quite manage to evict. And honestly? That’s exactly what it feels like living through this new brand of political climate.

The Ouroboros is the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. It represents a closed loop—a system that sustains itself by consuming itself. When I look across the cultural landscape today, from the radical fringes of the alt-right to the performative purity of the DSA, and straight through the scrambled mess of the liberal establishment, the Ouroboros is the only shape that makes sense. Everyone is running in circles. Nobody is building anything. We’re just watching political movements chew up their own language, history, and integrity until there’s nothing left but the hunger of the circle. And in this hungry, closed loop, it shouldn't surprise anyone that we are seeing a massive, growing sentiment of Jew-hatred. When a movement stops building and starts feeding on itself, it eventually circles back to the most toxic, ancient tropes imaginable.

And nowhere is this rot more obvious than in the current collapse of the term “antizionist.”