Fascist playbook: Law and Order

Posted on: June 8, 2025 at 00:15:29 CT

Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless. In fascist politics, women who do not fit traditional gender roles, nonwhites, homosexuals, immigrants, “decadent cosmopolitans,” those who do not have the dominant religion, are in their very existence violations of law and order.

Politicians who describe whole categories of persons as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors. Such language undermines the democratic process of reasonable decision making, replacing it with fear.

Fascist propaganda does not, of course, merely present members of targeted groups as criminals. To ensure the right kind of moral panic about these groups, its members are represented as particular kinds of threats to the fascist nation—most important, and most typical, a threat to its purity. Consequently, fascist politics also emphasizes one kind of crime. The basic threat that fascist propaganda uses to raise fear is that members of the targeted group will rape members of the chosen nation, thereby polluting its “blood.” The threat of mass rape is simultaneously intended as a threat to the patriarchal norms of the fascist state, to the “manhood” of the nation. The crime of rape is basic to fascist politics because it raises sexual anxiety, and an attendant need for protection of the nation’s manhood by the fascist authority.