The state is losing control over the dominant narratives in the competition of prevailing stories. Its apparatus of power responds predictably invasively and reveals its hostility toward dissenting opinions.
The German Bundestag’s Vice President Bodo Ramelow calls for stricter control of social media. “The platforms must be regulated,” Ramelow warns, demanding that operators “be held liable for what happens on their platforms.” In view of the “coarsening of language and writing” in the digital space, he advocates clear identity verification of users.
Of course, the former Prime Minister of Thuringia and self-confessed fanboy of cultivated socialism is as far removed from protecting free speech as he is from a fair exchange of arguments among different interest groups on an equal footing, where the state takes on the role of a passive guardian. No, Ramelow is a representative of the autonomously reproducing caste of statists, whose clearly articulated goal is to develop the state from a referee role into the dominant actor in the societal power field.
Socialism as a Viral Disease
A state that abandons its neutral role inevitably degenerates into an overbearing actor -- socialism as a power construct is the consequence. One can also understand socialism in its revolving character as a kind of intellectual viral disease. Resentment, inferiority complexes, and failure translate in unstable personalities prone to one-dimensionality in societal disputes into vulgar fantasies of expropriation. Economic and cultural crises cause the rapid spread of this civilizationally deforming ideology -- a mental pandemic gaining energy, whose discharge dissolves the pillars of civilization: private property, autonomy of action, family, religion, and cultural life.
It is of fundamental importance to understand at what point in the cyclical course of our society we have arrived. Ramelow’s talk can of course be dismissed as infantile utterances of a provincial politician and salon communist, who, like so many of his comrades, has carved a path through bureaucratic positions, public service, and NGO activism to eke out a life at maximum distance from normal reality. Yet in my opinion, this would be a superficial judgment. Ramelow’s unrestrained demands for control of the supposed sovereign are an expression of the final phase of the societal cycle. We stand at a turning point where representatives of the state feel the overstretching of their power, shaped in growing public debt, collapsing economies, and an as yet unspecific unrest among the people.
State Activates Last Resources
The left-wing power machine’s fight against dissenting opinions and political movements has long been institutionalized. In laws such as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the EU undertakes as a kind of “Ministry of Truth” the obscene attempt to bring social media platforms under state control to counteract its loss of power. Soft, emotionally charged, the enforcers of control cite transparency and youth protection to justify their overreach. The obligation to moderate content and disclose algorithms opens the door wide to political influence.
The citizen’s digital sovereignty as a counter-public, as a new regulatory mechanism against state media dominance, has become the newest battlefield of a society that passively watched the rise of initially gentle socialism and must now experience how from climate moralism and diversity hype emerges a passive-aggressive classic control socialism, which spares no effort to deploy state organs like the judiciary apparatus against the growing dissident movement. In this way, the state forges ever new weapons in the war of memes, a war long lost but seemingly continued as a rearguard action until the bitter end. Consider the flood of lawsuits with which failed representatives of societal transformation like Robert Habeck defend their criticism-immune safe zones.
The judiciary’s assault on U.S. President Donald Trump during last year’s election campaign, intended to sideline the Republican, will go down as a unique case in American judicial history. These cases accumulate into a fundamental problem, drawing the battle line between the state apparatus and the civic sphere so sharply that one can already fairly confidently predict the failure of this pathological control fetish. That the U.S. government has actually managed in recent geopolitical turmoil to initiate the first budget cuts to the propaganda vehicle USAID can be seen as a milestone victory in the open culture war against civic freedom.
Machine Loses Energy
Let us briefly remain in the U.S., where violent protests against the government’s deportation of illegal immigrants under Donald Trump reveal a previously barely visible fragility of the left-wing power machine: Although the sheer violence of the protests dominates media coverage -- in which barely veiled antisemitism mingles with anti-American and socialist fantasies -- it is unmistakable that the machine is losing its campaigning power, that the protests are attracting less support and are perceived as isolated, artificial attacks financed by external funds like George Soros’s “Open Society Foundations.”
The loss of narrative control provokes an almost grotesque fury among today’s Ramelows toward free media like X. Unveiled hatred for antagonists such as Elon Musk and his company Tesla, actually a showcase of green technology and aspiration, sharpens the battle lines: The conflict between state and civic freedom is less complex than it appears in the media. Power in the postmodern social structure derives from media dominance and the ability to transform visible reality into symbolic moralism. From series of knife attacks and imported culture wars, demonstrations against the right can be derived as long as the media barrage of public broadcasters and their largely tax-funded vassals washes over the masses. Platforms like “X” or their decentralized, uncensorable sister “Nostr” (highly recommended) help to duck and work on the counter-public sphere.
Success Vectors Become Visible
A still young, barely consolidated, and propaganda-strong freedom movement grows on the swamp of this dying vulgar socialism. Representatives of the power machine like Bodo Ramelow feel the rising headwind first. Their senses, like their entire political existence, are tuned to sniff out dissenting tendencies and stabilize their own immune spheres. And it is precisely this defensive posture that gives the opposition wings.
Although it is currently unclear how this opposition will ideologically and sociopolitically diversify and what program it will adopt, the success of patriotic-conservative representatives of the new era -- be it Donald Trump in the U.S. or Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán in Europe -- gives us important clues about the political attack vectors leading to political success and the materialization of the new era: the dismantling of the state-centered media machine, a clear commitment to private property and the market as an economic steering instrument, and the end of the self-destructive morality-overgrown politics of open borders, which achieves nothing but the erosion of the binding cultural ferment upon which every nation and culture must necessarily build its house.
Image: Osmar Schindler