🚨🚨🚨 A warning to Americans, from a Frenchman. 🚨🚨🚨 You are starting to elect people who promise you more state, more redistribution, more "free" things. New York already has a democratic socialist mayor, perhaps the furthest-left since Fiorello La Guardia. I'm not here to tell you how to vote. I'm here to tell you how this story ends, because we lived it. France ran this experiment for 40 years, and we are now living its final chapter. It starts in May 1981. François Mitterrand wins the presidency with the Communists in government. The program is pure romance. They nationalize the big banks and industrial groups. They lower the retirement age to 60, cut the work week, add a fifth week of paid vacation, create a wealth tax, and hire massively in the public sector. "Changer la vie", change life itself. That was the slogan. Reality took less than two years to answer. Capital fled. The franc was devalued three times. Inflation stayed in double digits while our neighbors were bringing theirs down. In March 1983, Mitterrand made a U-turn and imposed austerity, "le tournant de la rigueur". Remember this, because it is the pattern. Socialism doesn't fail once and disappear. It fails, reinvents itself, and changes its electorate. After 1983 the Socialists had a problem. They had abandoned the economic revolution, so what was left to sell? The answer was identity politics before the term existed. In 1984 SOS Racisme was born, closely tied to the Socialist Party. The moral battle replaced the economic one. Anyone who raised the question of immigration or integration was no longer an opponent. He was a racist. Then came the first real test. In 1989, three girls showed up to a public school in Creil wearing the Islamic veil. The Socialist government refused to decide, sent the question to the courts, and let it rot for fifteen years. The ban only came in 2004. That was the moment the Republic blinked. The message received was simple: if you push, the state will back down. Over the following decades, the left slowly replaced the working class it had lost with a new coalition. In 2011 the Socialist think tank Terra Nova wrote it down in black and white, saying they should stop chasing blue-collar workers and build a coalition of graduates, youth, and minorities. Electoral clientelism became strategy. In certain cities, local politicians traded subsidies, jobs, and silence for votes delivered by community networks, including Islamist ones. The result today is that in the 2022 presidential election, Muslim voters gave 69% of their first-round votes to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left candidate. A party that once claimed to be secular is now courting religious identity. Let's be precise: this is not about our Muslim fellow citizens, millions of whom are fully French. It is about a political machine that decided a community vote was worth more than the principles of the Republic. Now the economy, because the two collapses are the same collapse. In 2000, the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin, with Martine Aubry as labor minister, imposed the 35-hour work week. The theory was that sharing work creates jobs. What it actually did was make French labor more expensive, destroy the culture of effort, disorganize hospitals that still haven't recovered, and teach an entire generation that work is a burden the state should shrink for you. That is the deep logic of socialism. It doesn't make people richer. It makes them dependent. Every new subsidy creates a voter who fears losing it. Every new public job creates a voter who defends the system. After a while, you no longer have citizens. You have clients. Look where it ends. France hasn't voted a balanced budget since 1974. Public debt was around 20% of GDP when Mitterrand arrived. It is now around 3,550 billion euros, about 118% of GDP. France is once again Europe's biggest spender, with public spending at 57.3% of GDP. And a report commissioned by the government in July 2026 projects that without budget efforts, debt would reach 130% of GDP by 2030. And to be completely honest, the right didn't fix any of this. Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron: they all managed the decline instead of reversing it. The left set the direction, and the right lacked the courage to change it. That's how you get 40 years of slow rot, economic and social at the same time. A country that works less, pays more, gets less security, and no longer dares to say what it is. So today France has two choices, and so will you if you go down this road. The first choice is to stop lying to ourselves. Multiculturalism, meaning many cultures living side by side with no common rules, does not work. It never has, anywhere. When there is no shared culture on top, one culture eventually takes over the others. That's not hate, it's sociology. What worked in France for 150 years was assimilation. You come, you become French, you take on the language, the laws, the history, the way of life. In exchange, the nation takes you in fully, with no asterisk. Assimilation plus controlled immigration. And the deal is already signed with millions of people. Children of Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Algerian, Moroccan, and Vietnamese immigrants who are as French as I am. They are not the problem. They are the proof that the model works when we have the courage to apply it. The second choice is to keep pretending. Let the state get bigger, let debt explode, keep buying social peace with money we don't have, and keep handing territory to those who reject the West. In that scenario, it is not impossible that France first elects a hard-left government, a Mélenchon government. Then, when the system can't pay its promises anymore, something else fills the vacuum. Michel Houellebecq wrote that story as fiction in 2015, in a novel called Submission. A lot of French people stopped laughing at it a long time ago. France is a Western country with Western values. Equality between men and women. Freedom of expression, including the freedom to criticize religion. The law above faith. Work as dignity, not punishment. Some things are simply not acceptable here, and we need to have the courage to say it again. America, you still have what we're losing: a culture of work, a culture of assimilation, the idea that the state is your servant and not your parent. The people selling you "more state" are making the same promise Mitterrand made in 1981. It sounds generous. It ends in debt, dependence, and fragmentation. Don't trade the American Dream for the French Disease. We already paid the price. Learn from it for free.