The AfD has dusted off the term “social market economy,” which was used to describe the German economic model from the 1950s through the 1980s and which still survives in numerous documents, largely through inertia. But on closer inspection, there is much more of the 1980s in the party’s program. A return to the energy mix of that era, including coal and nuclear power. Paper money. State-supported revival of manufacturing. An independent economic policy pursued by a nation-state that effectively chooses what it will share with other countries and what it will not, and that can withdraw from a common arrangement if it ceases to be advantageous.
Let me point out that, in the Western world, a return to the era before neoliberal reforms is in many respects the equivalent of what a return to the period before November 1989 would mean for us. And they, too, understand that a return to the past is impossible. We live in an age of different technologies, the global distribution of power and resources has changed, and so on.
What can be revived, however, is the ethos of hard work and reconstruction after years of stagnation and decline. Curtis Yarvin writes that once the rule of the liberal oligarchy has completely collapsed, we will need a modern version of postwar denazification. So here, too, we find a reference to the same historical period.
If only the West could someday recover the enthusiastic optimism of the postwar era. And let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that, after four decades of globalist governments, there is less to repair than there was after 1945.