President Donald Trump has issued a strong warning against communist tendencies in his country. A look at the European Union and Germany provides an explanation: figures like Zohran Mamdani can be found everywhere around us.
Two powerful tendencies are currently challenging Western culture. First, Islam is moving into the spiritual vacuum left behind by a toothless and, in many respects, spiritually hollow Christianity. It turns out that a church which has degenerated into a moralizing green NGO can no longer offer people comfort and support in the face of the existential questions of human existence.
Second -- and this tendency has become almost a paradigm within the European Union -- we are witnessing the openly pursued construction of a powerful state economy.
In numerous Western countries, government spending ratios have now reached the worrying threshold of 50 percent. Within this development crystallizes what can rightly be described as faith in the state: the desire to place responsibility for one’s own existence, from cradle to grave, into the hands of government.
The state is not merely acting as regulator, caretaker, and commander, intervening ever more deeply in economic processes and in people’s daily lives. Its desire for control, extending to the construction of a genuine nanny state that only formally still qualifies as a welfare state, consumes enormous sums of money and drives taxes and levies ever higher.
It appears that parts of the West have ignored Hayek’s warning and set out once again to explore the road to serfdom. This road is paved with small incentives and benefits designed to prevent people from recognizing their growing dependence and abandoning the path they have embarked upon.
At the end of this road stands communism -- or whatever term we may use to describe the loss of individual freedom. For President Donald Trump, this danger is real.
Trump is already in campaign mode and has made the threat of communism a central theme. In November, the important midterm elections will take place. All seats in the House of Representatives and around one-third of the Senate seats will be contested.
But Donald Trump is not using the election campaign merely for traditional political issues. In a speech marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, Trump warned of a “return of the communist threat” in the United States. According to Trump, this was not about the usual political disagreements. It was about a very real danger threatening American freedom.
“The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked.”
Trump’s criticism of communism resonates with many of his supporters. The growing influence of the socialist wing within the Democratic Party evokes unpleasant memories of the Cold War, although so far this has remained largely a rhetorical issue.
Yet a strong American Constitution still protects citizens from an overreaching state. Above all, the Bill of Rights forms an immovable protective barrier that has so far successfully prevented the civilizational rupture that communism represents.
But the danger is real. The most recent example was the election of the Islamic communist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. A communist as mayor of the capital of global finance? Either it is the irony of history -- or the Big Apple, which normally demonstrates remarkable resilience against political fanaticism, will ultimately give the ambitious communist and his visible revolutionary ambitions the middle finger.
How should Trump’s warning be interpreted? Mere campaign rhetoric? The familiar bombast of a man who provides his party with political reassurance and ideological self-therapy? Or is there something to the suspicion that what is cynically referred to by critics in the United States as the “EU-USSR” has spread since the presidency of Barack Obama?
A new obedience toward authority, a growing claim by a state apparatus that assumes powers and competencies that the Constitution of liberty does not grant.
In Europe, however, the political space for socialist vandalism appears to be clearly available. We are experiencing an intermediate step from the social market economy toward the construction of a state economy that will inevitably end in a socialist system unless it collapses beforehand under its own internal contradictions, the loss of individual freedom, and economic devastation.
The scale of this devastation caused by the construction of a green and now military state economy is demonstrated by a calculation from German economist Lars Feld. Subsidies in Germany have now accumulated to an annual mountain of 321 billion euros, serving as evidence of a failed transformation agenda -- a system that requires ever more credit every year to keep the failed green subsidy economy alive. A staggering seven percent of total economic output is being pumped by politicians through rapidly emptying channels toward their favored recipients -- 75 percent of this consists of direct transfer payments across various levels of government and subsidy programs.
Seven percent -- the figure may initially appear manageable, but it conceals the underlying truth: millions of jobs and around 400,000 companies are directly dependent on the state. The government is buying support for its transformation policies through a flow of taxpayer money that increasingly drains the substance of the middle class.
In Germany’s subsidy system, the rise of the state economy is taking on a visible form. A culture of subsidy hunting and a complacent free-rider mentality characterize this transition. The principles of performance, property rights, and decentralized coordination through free markets are being pushed into the background. The social and cultural damage caused by this policy can be demonstrated economically and is reflected in rising unemployment, high public debt, and a fading record of economic success.
Trump’s warning about communism is justified. If we broaden the term and speak instead of etatism and collectivism, his argument hits the nail on the head. The road to serfdom leads through a sugar-coated path hidden in the fog. And it is this fog that conceals the inefficiencies of the state economy, visible in the growing impoverishment of the lower middle class.
Censorship and the suppression of opinion, such as the emerging system of chat control, are pushing free debate, criticism, and the desire for liberty into the grey zones of the digital world. There, opposition grows in the many colors of freedom -- a final hope of dissolving the fog rhetorically and restoring a clear view of the true ambitions of politics.
