How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Fascist movements share with social Darwinism the idea that life is a competition for power, according to which the division of society’s resources should be left up to pure free market competition. Fascist movements share its ideals of hard work, private enterprise, and self-sufficiency. To have a life worthy of value, for the social Darwinist, is to have risen above others by struggle and merit, to have survived a fierce competition for resources. Those who do not compete successfully do not deserve the goods and resources of society. In an ideology that measures worth by productivity, propaganda that represents members of an out-group as lazy is a way to justify placing them lower on a hierarchy of worth. This aspect of fascist ideology explains the National Socialist attitude toward the disabled, described as lebensunwertes Leben—life unworthy of life. Disabled citizens were regarded as lacking in value, because value in National Socialist ideology arose from the value of one’s contributions to society through work. In Nazi ideology, those who depended on the state for their survival lacked value of any kind. Fascist governments have exhibited some of humanity’s worst cruelty toward disabled populations. Nazi Germany’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases mandated the sterilization of disabled citizens; this was subsequently followed by the secret T4 program, which carried out gassings of disabled German citizens, and eventually, in 1939, phy...