In the West, young voters are generally flocking to left-wing candidates like Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon and Bernie Sanders. In Israel, though, there is no sign of this. If anything, there is a strong shift to the right. And this is not just the case among the national-religious community or outside the major cities, but also in Tel Aviv’s literary cafes. Even among the young hipster crowd, a traditional stronghold of the ideological left, deep-right trends are taking hold.

The pull of radical leftist ideas that long held a majority of 20-somethings in its sway seems to have nearly evaporated, to be replaced by a flirtation with reactionary ideals or social Darwinism. Leftist culture clubs are disappearing and instead you find libertarian hangouts like Austro-Somalia in south Tel Aviv. Netanyahu’s PR people need to update their positions about Tel Aviv café habitués who live in a leftist bubble; by now some have already outflanked them from the right.

The new issue of Dehak, the literary journal edited by Yehuda Vizan, contains a plethora of conservative political writings. Not religious or populist conservatism like that commonly found in the mainstream media, but actual monarchism. Vizan – an author, poet and fierce literary critic – quotes a number of writings by Theodor Herzl expressing sympathy for aristocratic rule, and he also interviews Count Nikolai Tolstoy, chairman of the International Monarchist League. The man who holds this illustrious title is an octogenarian scion of Russian nobility who was born and lives in Britain, and has published a number of anti-communist tracts, as well as the first section of a trilogy about King Arthur.

Open gallery view Poet and editor Yehuda Vizan in 2012. Credit: Nir Kafri

Vizan eagerly tries to extract from Tolstoy some 19th-century-ish romantic-reactionary statements. He complains to his interviewee about “decades of democratic propaganda” to which the average Westerner is exposed, and aspires to the abandonment of the “deceptive illusion of freedom offered by democracy.” But Tolstoy, it turns out, is more of an easygoing democrat, and the model he proposes is of democratic monarchies like Japan, Spain and, of course, Britain. All he really wants to see is the establishment of other British-style constitutional monarchies, with fox hunts and enough juicy scandals from the royal family to keep the tabloids in business.

Open gallery view Count Nikolai Tolstoy. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images

For, after all, the count is a member of the right-wing populist UKIP party, which purports to support democracy and the sovereignty of “regular folks.” Luckily, he’s ready to toss the interviewer a bone: He suggests that Israel also reinstate a monarchy. “I’ve often thought that Israel could benefit greatly by reviving its ancient monarchy. Is there someone who could prove that he’s a descendant of King David?” he wonders.

For now, monarchism in Tel Aviv is a marginal philosophy, though it is symptomatic of broader trends. A much more dynamic movement is libertarianism – an ideology according to which the free market and individual liberty are paramount. Libertarian student cells are being formed at the universities, and making quite a lot of noise on social media.

In essence, the libertarian circles are fed by the same social cross-section that fed the radical left a decade or two ago. The active core is comprised of a brotherhood of young secular males from the educated Ashkenazi bourgeoisie. Some were previously active in Israel's 2011 social protest movement or in various left-wing movements. In general, they seem mainly motivated by a feeling of being fed up with the current state of the left.

In the past, the bourgeois had no trouble being leftist. But the contemporary left seeks to grant a voice to Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origins), the poor and women. That puts the young Ashkenazi male in a quandary. He’s being asked to keep quiet and cede the stage to other forces. But he doesn’t want to keep quiet. He likes to talk. He’s in the prime of his life, at the height of his potency and intellectual abilities. He’s acquired an education and a vocabulary. He yearns to fulfill his political Eros without apologizing, and this is a basic human right. So he searches for an ideology within which he won’t have to subordinate his will to power to a real or imagined collective, or to the weak and disenfranchised. If the left doesn’t want him to speak, on the grounds that the prominence of too many white males distances the left from the masses, he’ll find somewhere where they do want to hear from people like him. And once he’s taken leave of the left, he’s also released from the constraints of “all that leftist bullshit.”

But here’s where the problem begins: Libertarianism is like Nietzscheanism for nerds. This ideology doesn’t demand that you be a “Superman” or a “blonde beast.” The key is to be fast to comment on Facebook. The libertarian dislikes mysticism and pathos as much as he dislikes socialism.

What issues is the libertarian concerned with? Smoking in public places, the book sale law, the Electric Corporation’s workers committee. Sometimes he sounds like a digital version of the general Zionists, liberals – “Let people just get on with their lives.”

It’s kind of odd that young people with revolutionary fervor are throwing themselves into such issues, the kind that probably won’t decide the fate of humankind.

But what’s worse, as they tout the unblemished spirit of the free enterpriser, the libertarians engage in a special form of whining in which they bemoan the “plight” of the strong. “Look what they’re doing to the poor strong folks,” they essentially cry, spending their days wailing over the crimes of communism and collectivism. In Nietzchean terms, this is not very masculine.

In order to truly convincingly reject the leftist way of being, the libertarians will have to be truly reactionary. And that brings us back to the Dehak-style monarchism, which raises another question: Will the yearning for a monarchy remain confined to the tables at The Little Prince cafe, or will it aspire to real political fulfillment?

Let us recall another monarchist intellectual who was active in democratic, post-war Japan. Yukio Mishima was a homosexual writer and poet who held reactionary-monarchist views. One day in 1970 he walked into the armed forces command center in Tokyo, accompanied by a small group of admirers who had trained with him in martial arts. After imprisoning one of the senior officers in his office, he strode onto the balcony and called for Japan’s democracy to be annulled and for the divine authority stripped from the emperor following the defeat in World War II to be reinstated. When his demands were met with catcalls, he committed seppuku – artful suicide by Samurai sword. One of his followers, who was also his lover, cut off his head and then killed himself as well.

Is this where Dehak’s new right is headed? Probably not. Jewish monarchists don’t commit suicide.