"At a time when geopolitical certainties of old are crumbling away, it has become the go-to quote to make sense of the current moment in all its seeming senselessness. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters is a line attributed to the former Italian Communist party leader Antonio Gramsci. Over the last two months alone, it has been quoted and often mangled by a rightwing Belgian prime minister, a leftwing British political leader, an Irish central banker and in the title of the most recent BBC Reith lecture, given by the author Rutger Bregman."
"We can't let the monsters win, influencers earnestly warn their followers on Instagram; on LinkedIn, business consultants post graphs that visualise the Gramsci gap and its relevance to corporate strategy. The only problem is, Gramsci never said or wrote such a thing. Or at least not in the snappy wording that has made it go viral. The time of monsters powerfully sums up the repulsion and disbelief many people feel about the news in 2026 whether it's emanating from the White House, the Epstein files or the battlefields of Ukraine."
A popular phrase invoking a monstrous interregnum has circulated widely across politics, media and social platforms but does not appear in Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks. Politicians across the spectrum, influencers and commentators have deployed the line to capture contemporary shock and disbelief about events in 2026. The wording that became viral is a snappy rendering rather than a verbatim citation; the original Italian reads In questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati, which translators render differently. The phrase resonates with cultural images such as Goya's etching and modern pop culture, amplifying its emotional appeal.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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