drupe

My post about Hitler and the far right got millions of views. Clearly, it hit a nerve. So today I'm going to show you, step by step, why the notion of "far right" as it's used in France makes almost no sense. And why the people who wield it are usually the last ones who should be lecturing anyone. Let's start with the only question that matters: what makes a political system work or fail? To a very large extent, it's the economy. A country that produces wealth, that lets its citizens create, trade and build, stays standing. A country that destroys that collapses, no matter how beautiful its slogans are. And in economics, there are really only two worldviews. The first is collectivism. The idea that the State knows better than you. That it must plan production, set prices, run companies, decide what you earn, what you buy, and eventually what you think. The individual is just a cog serving a grand collective project: the class, the nation, the race, the people. The second is freedom. Capitalism, property, individual liberty, individual responsibility. The idea that millions of people creating value for one another produce infinitely more prosperity than an office of planners, however brilliant they may be. Now look at the list of the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Stalin: total planning, forced collectivization, millions dead. Mao: the Great Leap Forward and the deadliest famine in human history. Pol Pot: money abolished, cities emptied, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population exterminated. Mussolini, the man who coined the word fascism: "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." And Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, whose program proclaimed "the common good before individual good." He subjected the entire German economy to State plans: the Four-Year Plan, frozen prices and wages, unions dissolved into a single state labor front, industrialists producing whatever the regime decided. Their flags were different. Their designated enemies were different. But the machinery was the same: the individual doesn't exist, only the collective matters, and the State decides everything. Why does it always end in totalitarianism? Because collectivism doesn't work. And when a system doesn't work, it has only two options: admit failure or force people. They always choose force. Ludwig von Mises proved it as early as 1920: without free prices, without a market, a planner simply cannot know what to produce, how much, or at what cost. He is flying blind. A planned economy isn't a less efficient version of the market. It's an impossibility. Friedrich Hayek drew the political conclusion in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, a book he dedicated "to the socialists of all parties." One chapter is titled "The Socialist Roots of Naziism." Another, "Why the Worst Get on Top." For Hayek, controlling the economy isn't controlling one sector among others. It is "the control of the means for all our ends." Whoever controls your bread controls your life. Then your speech. Then your thoughts. Milton Friedman put it his own way: a society that puts equality before freedom ends up with neither. So we know exactly what works. It's not an opinion. It's a century of real-world experiments. Listen to the Austrian school, Mises and Hayek, with Friedman from Chicago alongside them: economic freedom, limited government, individual responsibility. And this is where we get to the great accusatory inversion. Part of the left-wing press spends its time screaming fascism. Why? Because the fascism fantasy is the best way to never talk about the track record of their own ideas. Deep down, they know: if their collectivist program were applied all the way, it wouldn't work, because a collective economy cannot work. And an economy that doesn't work always ends up having to coerce, surveil and ban. In other words, it becomes exactly what they claim to be fighting. The real heirs of totalitarian logic are not the ones being pointed at. So who gets called "far right" in 2026? People who want safe cities. People who want to keep their culture. People who just want to live a peaceful life, raise their kids, and not have to board up their shop every weekend. People who want the law to apply to everyone. If that's the far right, then the word no longer means anything. And maybe that was the point.