The welfare state is the connector between political theory and political practice. Every ideology, including conservatism, needs to pass through the needle’s eye of the welfare state if it is going to be relevant in the real world.
Socialists have a keen understanding of what this means. To them, the welfare state is an institutional weapon for conquering democratic societies that will not bend their knees to authoritarianism. By using democratic elections to make people dependent on tax-paid benefits, socialists have learned to build lasting support for the politics of economic redistribution, the goal of socialism that Karl Marx defined in 1867.
If they cannot eliminate economic differences by the force that Lenin prescribed, they can do it by riding the tidal waves of public opinion. General elections offer the socialist a slower path to ideological victory, but it is a path all the same. By building and gradually expanding a welfare state, the socialist can reduce the income gap between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ until—at least in theory—no such differences exist anymore.
This reduction becomes the rallying cry behind the welfare state.
Conservatives tend to respond to the idea of fighting an ideological battle in the realm of the welfare state with awkwardness. Such a fight is almost antithetical to conservative political theory; conservatism is primarily concerned with the perpetual values of civilization, not the controversies over where fractions of a state budget ought to be spent. By keeping his eyes on the horizon, the conservative aims for victory in the long run.
The problem for the conservative is that socialists preempt conservatives from winning the long-term war by winning the short-term battles. One year they undermine conservative ideological influence over schools by changing education appropriations to the disadvantage of private, Christian schools. The next year, they attack the concept of the traditional family with new social benefits that—as Ronald Reagan eloquently explained in his classic Time for Choosing speech—neutralize the advantages of marriage.
To neuter conservative for-life campaigns, the socialist instigates a government takeover of health care, hence the single-payer system that is well known to most of Europe. Once there, the socialist includes appropriations for abortions in that single-payer budget.
While the socialist claims new land, one step at a time, the conservative loses as much without even moving. Under today’s mature welfare states, which account for the majority of government spending—often by a hefty margin—and which tax away up to half of the money people make, the conservative movement has very little room for political maneuvers.
Unless, that is, the movement decides to tackle the welfare state based solidly on conservative principles.
To be fair, the situation is a bit different depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean one looks at. Of late, American conservatives have made a few attempts to reclaim its presence on the short-term political battlefield. Donald Trump, though not a conservative in the classical sense, has become a source of inspiration for an entire generation of conservatives. Much like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he is despised by the political elite.
As of yet, there is no Trump equivalent in Europe, but the continent is home to a number of conservative policy experiments with varying degrees of success, from Hungary to Poland to Italy. The problem for Europe is not that these experiments may or may not be convincing in their own right; the problem is that they are just that: isolated examples.
To be honest about Trump’s MAGA-conservative revival movement, its long-term influence hinges on to what extent the pursuit of conservative values can navigate the political labyrinth known as the welfare state. Trump and his Vice President-Elect JD Vance (already expected to run for president in 2028) have some understanding of the problems that the welfare state represents. Therefore, they also have a better-than-even chance of making a permanent conservative difference for the better.
If European conservatives are going to enjoy even nearly the same success as their MAGA brethren will, it is high time that they study up on the welfare state, learn about its purpose, and find out how to reform it from a conservative viewpoint. The beginning of any such intellectual endeavor lies in the tension between those who receive benefits from government and the taxpayers who fund those benefits.
To be more concrete, the tension is centered around the question of what moral role government ought to play in the economy in the first place. A traditional conservative viewpoint is that government should prevent people from falling into abject poverty; there is nothing dignified about living in squalor, hunger, pain, and rain.
So far so good, but now conservatives run into a dilemma. If they could define the welfare state ‘from scratch’, they would want it to be a lot smaller than it is today, but they would not know how to resist the efforts from the socialist side to grow the welfare state right back to its full, current size. For this reason, conservatives also balk at even attempting to formulate reform ideas that would transform our current welfare state in a conservative direction.
Overcoming this dilemma starts with understanding the purpose of the welfare state. There is no doubt on the socialist side: they want the welfare state to redistribute income, consumption, and wealth with the ultimate purpose of eliminating economic differences between individual citizens.
To the conservative, the welfare state’s purpose is vastly different. In accordance with the fundamental principle that the role of government is limited but not insignificant, the conservative welfare state offers last-resort help to those who are genuinely without the means to provide for themselves.
The best way to understand the difference between these two approaches, aside of course from their ideological origin, is to look at how they distinguish between the demographic that is supposed to pay for the welfare state and that which receives the benefits. The ideal relationship between the first group, a.k.a., the tax base, and the second group—let us call them the entitled group—is one where the two are completely separate. In Figure 1a, the tax base consists of the green circle, while the entitled group is the small light gray circle:
Figure 1a
By separating the two groups, there is never a question of whether a group benefits or loses from paying taxes vs. receiving benefits. In other words, we have no economic redistribution problem.
The clearest path to the distinction between ‘green and gray’ is to use income taxes as the financing form for the benefits paid out by the welfare state. Those benefits, in turn, should always be subject to the condition that the recipient has no other means to provide for himself. In short, he is unemployed and without savings.
Even if some welfare states started their lives based on the distinction from Figure 1a, over time, they were modified to provide more benefits to a larger demographic. At some point—which for European welfare states often but not always happened after World War II—the benefits group came to include people who are gainfully employed. Social benefits paid out to low-income families became part of the recipient’s regular monthly spending budget.
With working families included in the benefits group, we now have a situation where the two circles from Figure 1a partly overlap:
Figure 1b
The most pressing problem with this situation is that the people who are both taxpayers and benefits recipients end up either better or worse because of their double demographic status. This now becomes a calculated aspect of the design of the welfare state; by definition, we are now engaged in economic redistribution. We compare one household to another to see if the welfare state leaves them better off, or worse off. Based on the results, new programs are added and old programs modified until the desired redistributive result is achieved.
In other words, the purpose of the welfare state, engraved in its structure, is now socialist. Since this purpose is to ultimately eliminate economic differences generally, the only way to accommodate for inadequacies is to add more benefits for more people. Therefore, once this socialist goal has been pursued for a long enough period of time, the demographic that is eligible for benefits from government comes to closely resemble that which pays the welfare state’s taxes:
Figure 1c
If conservatives ever wish to be relevant and make any lasting difference in the real world, they need to understand the welfare state. To understand the welfare state, they need to explain—to themselves, to their peers, and to the general public—why a welfare state based on the message in Figure 1a is better for all of us, but especially for the poor.
In a manner of speaking, Donald Trump has managed to explain this to a large enough share of the American people that it got him a return ticket to the White House. That does not mean he will reform the welfare state in the image of the schematic presentation here—but it means that there will at least be a public conversation during his second term as president where the American people can have an open debate about the welfare state.
Will Europe’s conservatives ever get there?
