By Cristian Pîrvulescu, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest.
This article was first published in Hotnews on the 25th of September 2025. Link to the original article in Romanian: Un viitor amanetat și alte fantome care bântuie România în aceste zile – HotNews.ro
For the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, public debt and deficit are not mere accounting figures, but genuine specters that haunt states and societies — limiting their horizons of action and justifying political decisions that appear inevitable. And as today’s Romania lives under the specter of a budget deficit exceeding 9%, the figure, repeated obsessively in the public space, is no longer an economic indicator but a spectral presence — one that shapes discourse, fuels anxiety, and conditions the very perception of democracy.
“All questions about democracy, about human rights, about the future of humanity will remain nothing but hypocritical alibis so long as ‘external debt’ is not addressed frontally, responsibly, and systematically.”
(Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, p. 155)
The Phantoms of the Majority
In the name of combating the deficit, the government imposes austerity — postponing, de facto, reforms — while the opposition legitimizes itself by denouncing waste and corruption. Citizens, for their part, live with the feeling that the future has been pawned, that every social promise is impossible, that the state itself stands at the mercy of its creditors.
Thus, Romania fits perfectly into Derrida’s logic, for democracy appears doubled by the ghost of debt, which undermines any debate on rights and freedoms, reducing it to a ledger of constraints. Hence, the phantoms invoked in what often resemble true spiritist séances of government — whether economic, political, or cultural — seem to materialize into an authentic ectoplasm.
A first mechanism through which ideological phantoms materialize is what is known as performative language, a concept introduced more than six decades ago by J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962; Romanian edition, Paralela 45, 2003). Austin explains how a word spoken with authority produces the very reality it invokes.
Authoritative utterances do not merely describe reality — they create it. When a political leader proclaims the existence of a “migration crisis” or an “unbearable debt,” these formulations become performative acts: they generate the state of affairs they claim to denounce.
The discursive construction thus becomes the beginning of an institutional reality. Once materialized through discourse, these specters are captured and codified by the state apparatus. Ministries, agencies, and oversight bodies adopt the language and translate it into procedures, reports, and strategic plans.
What began as a mere invocation turns into bureaucratic norm, and then into law. The phantom now finds its body within the architecture of institutions.
In this light, the spiritist metaphor gains full substance: invoking the phantom is not merely a rhetorical illusion but the first step in a process through which ideological imagination condenses into institutions, norms, and practices — into what we might call a genuine “ectoplasm of power.”
Their Phantoms and Ours
Their phantoms become ours when we internalize them, and our phantoms become theirs when they are politically instrumentalized. In this loop, institutional reality and collective imagination feed into one another. This is precisely why Derrida speaks of spectrology: phantoms cannot simply be “exorcised”; they must be learned, interpreted, and assumed.
The haunted multitude thus grounds its existence not in facts, but in phantoms. It draws its energy, motivation, and cohesion from the specters it projects—and comes to believe them more real than reality itself.
As with Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, these phantoms take three forms, corresponding to the three registers of Time: past, present, and future. The difference is that, while Scrooge awakens and transforms, haunted majorities remain caught in the spell of their ghosts, becoming easily manipulated by leaders who present themselves as exorcists.
The Phantom of the Past
It takes the form of nostalgia, through which the majority imagines a primordial moment of plenitude — when the community was pure, religious order uncontested, and social cohesion unbroken.
This “golden age,” however, is a mythical construction, a story transmitted through education, literature, and religion. Haunted by this ghost, the majority lives in fear of losing a moral and cultural heritage that, in truth, it never possessed in the idealized form it now mourns.
The Phantom of the Present
This one stages the fear of corruption and conspiracy. Youth is said to be corrupted by new ideas; elites are seen as degenerate or bought; minorities are imagined as conspiring against the majority order.
It is the same phantom that justified Socrates’ condemnation, the attacks on Enlightenment philosophers, and the stigmatization of intellectuals under every authoritarian regime. This ghost transforms any critical voice into an “enemy within” and legitimizes persecutory reflexes.
The Phantom of the Future
This one takes the form of anxiety. Here, the majority imagines that the future will bring the dissolution of identity: invasion by foreigners, demographic decline, the disappearance of religion, the domination of technology.
The future becomes a horizon of catastrophe, an imminent abyss. To defend itself, the majority is ready to renounce freedoms, embrace authoritarian leaders, and seek simplistic solutions.
Archaeology of a Spectral Drift
This haunting is not an invention of the present. Throughout history, majorities have lived under the specter of lost status and reacted against those who—through critical thought or simple difference—forced them to confront their own fragility.
To be a “haunted majority” means to live caught between the certainty of power and the unease of a vulnerability felt as inevitable.
The political history of the Western world can thus be read as a succession of the majorities’ spectral drifts. Though numerically strong and institutionally legitimate, these majorities have often behaved as if they were fragile minorities, threatened by invisible specters.
This perception has driven them to seek scapegoats, to persecute critical elites, to stigmatize minorities, and, in the name of “defending order,” to curtail freedoms.
In Athens, 399 BCE, Socrates was condemned to death for “corrupting the youth” and introducing new gods into the city. In truth, there was no concrete crime—only a diffuse unease provoked by the philosopher’s questions, which disturbed the community’s calm, exposed the ignorance of those who believed themselves wise, and undermined blind faith in civic and religious tradition.
The crowd condemned him not for what he did, but because he revealed the city’s own insecurity, its realization that its foundations were no longer unshakable.
Plato, in the Apology, captures this paradox perfectly: how could a single man corrupt all the youth of Athens? And yet, the verdict was guilty. Xenophon, less philosophical and more moralizing, emphasized Socrates’ piety, showing that he was not an atheist but a citizen respectful of the laws. His condemnation, Xenophon writes, did not stem from impiety but from the shame he caused to those who thought themselves wise.
In this foundational scene, we already glimpse the logic of the “haunted multitude” — a community which, though numerically and institutionally dominant, remains obsessed with its own fragility.
This anxiety is projected onto the philosopher, who becomes the first victim prototype of a majority that, though powerful, feels besieged by the ghosts of lost cohesion.
What follows is the drift whose consequences we still feel today — the attack against the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Historian and philosopher Didier Masseau has shown that the opponents of the Encyclopedists built an entire rhetoric of fear around the idea that critical reason would destroy religion, corrupt youth, and disenchant the world. Philosophers were accused of uprooting tradition and exposing the multitude to unknown dangers.
In truth, the culturally and numerically dominant majority was itself disturbed by its own fragility—and projected this anxiety onto a handful of intellectuals.
The Birth of Modern Conservatism
From this matrix emerged modern conservatism, whose classical expression is found in Edmund Burke, but also in the French counter-revolutionaries Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. For them, tradition, religion, and hierarchy were not mere social conventions but sacred guarantees of stability, transmitted across the centuries and legitimized by their very antiquity.
Any attempt to rebuild order on rational foundations was seen as a mortal threat, for reason could never replace the mysterious force of continuity. In this sense, conservatism feeds on romanticism—on the refusal to accept the disenchantment of the world and the desire to restore to it mystery, the sacred, and myth.
If the Enlightenment sought to explain everything through reason, conservatism and romanticism reacted by re-enchanting history, viewing it not as a human construction but as a providential drama, governed by invisible and immutable forces.
Conservatism thus becomes the political expression of an anxious majority, haunted by the ghost of change and by the fear of losing the world’s mystery.
From Conservative Anxiety to Fascist Specters
In the twentieth century, this collective anxiety radicalized and mutated into fascism.
Majorities that dominated numerically behaved as if they were persecuted minorities.
Mussolini stoked Italian resentment through the promise of imperial rebirth; Nazism exploited the anxieties of the middle class, projecting them onto Jews and the “cosmopolitan elite”; in Romania, the Iron Guard turned Orthodoxy and antisemitism into a mysticism of purification.
Fascism became the politics of a haunted majority—obsessed with ghosts and willing to sacrifice freedom for the comfort of identity.
But fascism was not the only spectral formation of the last century. Stalinism and Soviet communism relied on the same mechanisms, speculating on the obsession with the invisible enemy, the fear of conspiracy, and the specter of “imperialism.”
In postwar Romania, the communist regime rewrote these phantoms, turning the “kulak,” the “bourgeois,” or the “cosmopolitan” into demonic figures.
Repression, censorship, and collectivization were all justified through the specter of counterrevolution.
Beneath their ideological differences, the logic was always the same: a haunted society sacrifices freedom for the promise of collective salvation.
Digital Totalitarianism and the Spectral Tyranny of the Unleashed Majority
Hannah Arendt saw in totalitarianism the supreme expression of “organized loneliness”—where the isolated individual seeks refuge in collective fictions. Derrida, meanwhile, spoke of “the specters of Marx” because, as he wrote, ghosts cannot be exorcised; they return, forcing us, cyclically, to relive what history seemed to have repressed.
Thus, fascism, Stalinism, and Romanian communism are not merely closed chapters. They continue to haunt our political imagination, showing how the anxiety of the majority can be captured and transformed into an oppressive force, legitimizing repression and mutilating democracy.
In her chapter on “The Crisis of Culture” in Between Past and Future, Arendt underlined that totalitarianism feeds on a deep cultural crisis—born from the loss of tradition, the dissolution of authority, the failure of education, and the transformation of culture into mere entertainment.
Without the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, legitimate authority from sheer domination, societies become vulnerable to ideological phantoms and absolute political promises.
But this “loss of tradition” does not refer to the mythologized traditionalism invented by the far right. It refers to the break in the Greek lineage of political thought—the loss of polis, deliberation, and civic responsibility. With this rupture, the individual is left without stable bearings, and the public sphere becomes open to ideological invasions.
The Digital Genealogy of Fear
Today, we are witnessing a new stage in this genealogy with the rise of digital populism.
Illiberal movements and parties exploit the anxieties of cultural majorities, transforming fear into political capital.
Ruth Wodak has shown how demographic panic, Manichaean narratives, and anti-intellectualism define the politics of fear.
Numerical majorities—white Americans, Polish Catholics, Romanian Orthodox—behave as if they were besieged minorities, invoking the phantoms of migrants, “gender ideology,” Brussels bureaucrats, and corrupt elites.
In the United States, the paradox reaches an extreme when the antifascist movement is labeled “terrorist,” while neo-Nazi groups are presented as defenders of freedom and order.
Ready-Made Phantoms and Algorithmic Possession
The algorithmization of attention reproduces the cultural mechanisms through which the totalitarianisms of the past took root—replacing classical education, which should cultivate discernment and critical thought, with the endless flux of social media.
Culture becomes instant entertainment, and the ability to distinguish truth from lies erodes.
TikTok, Facebook, or Telegram now deliver ready-made phantoms, perfectly packaged.
This archaeology of majority drift reveals a historical constant: Each time the majority feels haunted by the specter of lost status, it becomes an oppressive force.
The enemies of philosophers, the counter-revolutionary conservatives, interwar fascism, and today’s digital populism all belong to the same genealogical chain—illustrating how the majority becomes the prisoner of its own ghosts and, instead of protecting pluralism, ends up undermining it.
Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, and John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, had already warned in the nineteenth century of the “tyranny of the majority,” when the will of the many becomes abusive, suppressing individual and minority freedoms.
What we see today confirms the enduring truth of their intuition. Anxious majorities, obsessed with phantoms of identity, can become as dangerous to liberty as an enlightened despot or an oligarchic clique.
In Romania, the specter is not only that of public debt and deficit, but also of “foreign ideologies,” “Brussels diktats,” and “demographic peril.” These ghosts feed a populism that claims to speak for the majority—yet risks turning democracy into a spectral tyranny, where freedom is sacrificed in the name of identity security.
The phantoms of the interwar past, of communism, and of the post-communist transition continue to haunt the Romanian political imagination, proving that no majority is immune to the spell of its own ghosts.
__
Cristian Pîrvulescu is the dean of the faculty of political science of the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest. His research interests lie in political theory, comparative politics and political economy.