Mild feelings of panic were induced across the European Union last week, as citizens were urged to prepare for impending disaster. Stock your cupboards! Draft emergency plans! No, it’s not the opening of a mediocre dystopian novel — it’s the EU’s newly minted “Preparedness Union Strategy”. This grand initiative is designed, allegedly, to protect Europeans from floods, fires, pandemics and, of course, a full-scale Russian invasion.
The strategy draws inspiration from Poland, where housebuilders are now legally obliged to include bomb shelters in new builds, and Germany, which is reviving Cold War-era civil defence schemes with a bunker geolocation app. Meanwhile, Norway is advising people to stock up on iodine tablets in the case of a nuclear attack.
The EU wants its citizens to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours, recommending households stockpile food, water, medicine and — why not? — playing cards and power banks. Because, of course, should nuclear war break out, a good round of poker and a fully charged phone will see us through.
Yet, as ludicrous as these preparations might seem, they should worry us all. The Preparedness Union Strategy is only the latest layer in an architecture of control that has been building for decades. It rests squarely on the shoulders of the EU’s recent defence policy reboot, ReArm Europe, now renamed less ominously, “Readiness 2030”.
The core narrative behind this push is simple and endlessly repeated: the idea that Russia is likely to launch a full-scale attack on Europe in the coming years, especially if Putin isn’t stopped in
Ukraine. The European Parliament resolution in favour of the ReArm Europe programme warned that “if the EU were to fail in its support and Ukraine were forced to surrender, Russia would then turn against other countries, including possibly the EU member states”. As Macron recently put it, Russia is an “imperialist” country that “knows no borders… it is an existential threat to us, not just to Ukraine, not just to its neighbours, but to all of Europe”.
But the notion that Russians are massing at the borders, with designs on Paris or Berlin, is a fantasy. Indeed, when we’re told to prepare for war by packing a power bank and a waterproof pouch for our ID, it’s hard not to be reminded of Cold War absurdities like “Duck and Cover”, the “preparedness strategy” of the time designed to protect individuals from the effects of a nuclear explosion by instructing people to crouch to the ground and cover their heads. That campaign, too, sold the illusion of safety in the face of annihilation. And beneath the clownish veneer of the push lies a calculated aim: the EU’s attempt to further consolidate power at the supranational level, elevating the Commission’s role in security and crisis response — domains traditionally under national control.
The EU’s preparedness plan is based on the recommendations of a report from the former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, which calls for the establishment of a central operational crisis “hub” within the European Commission; greater civilian-military cooperation, including by conducting regular EU-wide exercises uniting armed forces, civil protection, police, security, healthcare workers and firefighters; and developing joint EU-Nato emergency protocols.
When considered alongside the EU’s rearmament plans, it suggests a comprehensive, society-wide militarisation, something which in the years ahead, will become the dominant paradigm in Europe: all spheres of life — political, economic, social, cultural and scientific — will be subordinated to the alleged goal of national, or rather supranational, security.
Western governments have been resorting to fear as a means of control for a very long time. Indeed, it’s a telling coincidence that the EU’s announcement coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, which ushered in the most radical experiment ever attempted in fear-driven politics.
The pandemic response used a totalising narrative that wildly inflated the threat of the virus to justify historically unprecedented policies. As the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, put it, it was everyone’s moral duty to “come together against a common enemy” and “wage war on the virus”. In this struggle for the greater good — public health — virtually any action was justified.
From the perspective of “crisis politics”, the widespread use of the war metaphor to frame the Covid pandemic was no coincidence: war is, after all, the emergency par excellence. Across the globe, we saw an authoritarian turn as governments used the “public health emergency” to sweep aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarise societies, crack down on civil liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control.
Throughout the pandemic, we witnessed — and populations largely accepted — the imposition of measures that would have been unthinkable until that moment: the shutdown of entire economies, the mass quarantining (and enforced vaccination) of millions of healthy individuals and the normalisation of digital Covid passports as a regulated requirement for participating in social life.
All this prepared the ground for the collective reaction of Western societies to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a real war at last, after years of rehearsing metaphorical ones. In terms of communication, we immediately saw the emergence of a similarly totalising narrative: it was Western societies’ moral duty to support the Ukrainians’ fight for freedom and democracy against Russia and its evil president.
However, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Ukraine is losing the war, and as the world is faced with Trump’s attempt to negotiate peace, European elites are recalibrating their narrative: it’s not just Ukraine’s survival at stake — but that of Europe as a whole. The threat is no longer over there but right here at home: not only is Russia preparing to attack Europe, but, we are told, it is already waging a wide array of hybrid attacks against Europe, ranging from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to election interference.
All this suggests that Western elites learned an important lesson during the pandemic: fear works. If a population is made anxious enough — whether about disease, war, natural disasters or some polycrisis cocktail comprising all of the above — they can be made to accept almost anything.
The EU’s Preparedness Union Strategy could, therefore, be read within this broader context. It is not really about water bottles and power banks. It is a continuation of the Covid-era paradigm: a method of governance that fuses psychological manipulation, militarisation of civilian life and the normalisation of emergency rule. Indeed, the EU explicitly talks of the need to adopt, in case of future crises, the same “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach first spearheaded during the pandemic.
This time, though, the attempt to engineer yet another mass psychosis seems to be failing. Judging from the social media reaction to a cringeworthy video by Hadja Lahbib, EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management, there appears to be widespread scepticism about the bloc’s fearmongering. But while this is good news, the worry is that as propaganda falters, those in power are increasingly turning to repressive tactics to muzzle political rivals — evident in moves like the electoral ban on Le Pen. This strategy of mounting authoritarianism, though, is untenable in the long run: fear and repression are no substitute for actual consensus, and in the latter’s void, new forms of resistance are bound to emerge.
President Trump has dubbed 2 April, when his new tariffs go into effect, “Liberation Day”. While many investors, financial analysts, and consumers are in panic mode, Trump’s pitch to the industrial working class remains blunt: over the last half century, America cashiered its once unrivalled manufacturing base and high-wage jobs in exchange for a surfeit of foreign goods, leaving it exploited by free-riding allies and geopolitical rivals alike.
His solution is equally blunt. He and his advisers insist that aggressive, universal tariffs, combined with deregulation and corporate tax cuts, will render cross-border supply chains less lucrative and domestic investment attractive for business.
The problem is that virtually every other Trump action since Inauguration Day has undercut the state capacity needed to rehabilitate core industries and shepherd capital and labour towards new ones. Instead of leveraging state power on behalf of massive public-private projects, research and development, and workforce training, Team Trump has subjected government agencies to DOGE’s ruthless budget cuts, and frozen funds from or threatened to terminate President Joe Biden’s flagship industrial policies.
The Trumpians are plotting to privatise a host of government services, and have sent a chill through research institutes vital to breakthroughs in advanced medicine, technology, and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the administration has largely crippled antitrust enforcement, thereby favouring powerful monopolies that can withstand or circumvent trade barriers over mechanisms to coax healthy domestic competition and investment.
None of these actions furthers the purported aims of tariffs and targeted export controls: to create good jobs for the forgotten working class and turn depressed regions into desirable places in which to work and live. On the contrary, slashing and burning state capacity will hinder these goals. Most damningly, the Hamiltonian tradition the Trumpians claim to champion is a powerful witness against the belief that a crippled state can boost manufacturing.
These shortcomings haven’t stopped some of Trump’s most vehement critics on the labour Left, not least United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, from conceding that he is partly right on trade. The bipartisan Washington establishment of the late 20th century made a colossal mistake in offshoring millions of jobs on the naive assumption that high-tech innovation and services would replace manufacturing, the historic engine of American upward mobility and growth.
But despite being motivated by fear over China’s phenomenal rise, Trump’s strategy has proved mostly incoherent, not to say contradictory, sowing serious doubts over whether America, after decades of outsourcing and regulatory capture by major multinationals, has the institutional know-how to meet the new president’s promise of industrial renewal.
“Trump’s approach … betrays the legacy of the GOP statesmen whom champions of his tariffs regularly invoke.”
Trump’s approach isn’t merely myopic, though — it betrays the legacy of the GOP statesmen whom champions of his tariffs regularly invoke to defend the current administration.
The populist Right’s evangelism for Trump’s protectionist impulses has long rested on the notion that he is boldly reviving the “American System” school of economics. This tradition stretches from Alexander Hamilton in the founding era and Henry Clay in the early republic to the heterodox economist Henry Charles Carey, the influential lawmaker Justin S. Morrill (architect of Civil War-era tariffs), and Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. These Republican statesmen and thinkers espoused a doctrine of development premised on diversified manufacturing, vast energy sources, scientific progress, and spreading education in the “industrial arts”.
Scholars describe this doctrine as unabashedly mercantilist. Yet 19th-century Republicans maintained that it furthered the country’s founding ideals of self-government and associationalism: the notion that an industrious, republican citizenry will form voluntary organisations conducive to promoting shared interests that transcend divisions by region, sector, or class.
Neither laissez-faire nor statist, the old GOP that supposedly inspires Trump fused support for large developmental goals from disparate parts of society — inventors, aspiring industrial magnates, prospectors, advocates of “scientific agriculture”, financiers, and tradesmen. The intent was to spread commercial hubs built on regional interdependence, raising manufacturing and agricultural output while also curbing demand for goods from competitors like Victorian Britain.
Tariffs underpinned this system by pushing farmers, merchants, and consumers to purchase US-made goods and support local industries. Post-Civil War, tariffs underwrote pensions for Union Army veterans and their families (then a huge constituency of the GOP). Tariffs were also meant to lessen the competitiveness of imports made by foreign “pauper” labour, attracting the support of skilled workers who had few other avenues to stable wages.
Like Trump, the Republican leaders of a distant epoch believed high tariffs were a means to building national wealth and power. And their aversion to foreign competition ran deep. Cheap foreign goods were, in modern parlance, the real source of “market distortions”, because, unchecked, they made profitable manufacturing less viable and threatened the livelihoods of skilled workers.
Even Republican reformers who, like Theodore Roosevelt, were more attuned to the daily needs of thrifty households and worried that tariffs had given rise to unaccountable monopolies tended to believe that free trade was decadent. On the verge of America becoming a world power, Roosevelt remarked that “pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre”. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was channeling the same sentiment when he asserted in a recent speech that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream”.
But this is where the similarities end. In fact, depicting Trump as a descendant of the old protectionist pedigree misses an important dimension of past Republican thought. From the Lincoln era to Eisenhower’s, Republicans deployed a range of policies besides tariffs to stoke development and progress. The party’s Trumpian incarnation entirely ignores these other strategies, when it doesn’t undermine them.
Take the legacy of Morrill, the lawmaker who, in addition to protective tariffs, authored the legislation that created America’s exemplary land-grant colleges. Morrill well understood the relationship between education in fields like agronomy and engineering and productive innovation. The Homestead Act from the same period, which distributed public lands to frontier homesteaders for a nominal fee, likewise reflected the GOP’s belief in the importance of “decentralised” economic growth for a democratic society.
By contrast, Trump’s sweeping cuts to university grants, including for regional public universities that serve his rural base, disregard the country’s pressing skills shortage. Meanwhile, his lofty campaign pledge to build 10 “freedom cities”, still embryonic, evokes not so much the producer populism of westward expansion, but the dystopian “startup societies” dreamt up by Silicon Valley — or a Middle Eastern petrostate.
The administration’s axiomatic contempt for regulation is also not in keeping with the GOP’s historical view. Reductive histories portray the GOP as always preaching “small government”. But the party once had vigorous debates about the purpose and scope of regulation.
Despite occasionally assailing corporate malfeasance and grilling feckless CEOs in congressional hearings, today’s Right-wing populists have yet to match the Republican “insurgents” from the party’s Roosevelt wing, including the likes of Sens. Hiram Johnson and George Norris, who pushed for corporate regulation, public works, public utilities, and direct democracy, and took a stand against corruption. Though they were rarely “redistributive” in the social-democratic sense, such positions aimed to prevent abuses by the politically connected and to give working people a material stake in democracy.
Earlier Republicans were also quite experimental in their time. President Herbert Hoover, forever marked by his loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for failing to alleviate the Great Depression, was, during his earlier tenure as Commerce secretary, a consummate technocrat who sought to deepen cooperation between various government bureaus and business associations to make policymaking more scientific.
In stark contrast to DOGE’s modus operandi, Hoover’s efforts to reorganise government were founded on a belief in expertise and the legitimacy of using regulation to make markets more rational; the development of America’s burgeoning aviation sector, improvements in radio technology, and national business standards for product sizes were among his achievements.
Hoover was hardly a central planner. Judged by the current GOP’s ethos, though, his record of bureaucratic oversight epitomised the growth of the modern administrative state.
Of course, the New Deal realignment, which hobbled the GOP’s support for a generation, cemented the popular view that Republicans regularly opposed active government. But until the Reagan era, most mainstream Republicans accepted the New Deal order, occasionally endorsed breaking up monopolies, and eagerly supported generous federal funding for science and technology, even as they ritually affirmed the principle of “free enterprise”.
Most famously, the Eisenhower administration’s vast Interstate Highway System updated Republicans’ past support for “internal improvements” for the Cold War era, further propelling the rise in suburban homeownership that characterised the postwar boom. And progressives’ arch-bogeyman Richard Nixon, now frequently regarded as the last “New Deal president”, signed NEPA and OSHA, the country’s landmark laws, respectively, for environmental protection and workplace-safety standards.
In short, major players in the Republican Party adopted a more flexible and interventionist view of political economy than is commonly recognised. Most MAGA influencers today would no doubt dismiss such evidence as not reflecting “true” Republicanism. Partisan progressives would similarly concur, at most allowing that “progressive Republicans” are extinct because the Democratic Party became their natural home.
This is to be expected. A few conservative think tanks and public intellectuals have sought to create a genuinely “pro-development” and “pro-worker” agenda for Republicans. But the anti-government tirades of Newt Gingrich, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and their successors in the Tea Party movement did much to fix the partisan battle lines of the last few decades, few of which the MAGA movement has redrawn besides disavowing George W. Bush’s embrace of globalised trade.
Trump’s GOP is thus fixated on slashing and burning its way through the state, rather than restoring faith in positive government. For a little while, even sceptics allowed that a new working-class base, plus rising tensions with Beijing, might push Republicans to embrace an industrial strategy that recovered some of their party’s authentic traditions of domestic progress.
That possibility has come to naught. While Trump proclaims “liberation” is imminent, the rapid loss of state capacity under his watch promises anything but. Tariffs excepted, there is little concrete government action to compel market forces to meet national economic objectives, and the GOP has bent over backwards to accommodate banking lobbies vociferously opposed to even minor restraints on financial predation.
One hardly needs to be a radical populist to see this doesn’t bode well for American society. As the most perceptive believers in the “American System” understood, an economy that fails to maximise its productive forces and promote workers’ well-being is destined to wither. If America is to avert permanent decline, it needs leaders determined to prevent the spread of servitude masked as “liberty”.
