Fascist playbook: Sodom and Gomorrah

Posted on: June 8, 2025 at 19:38:27 CT

Fascist politics aims its message at the populace outside large cities, to whom it is most flattering. It is especially resonant during times of globalization, when economic power swings to the large urban areas as centers of an emerging global economy, as occurred in the 1930s in Europe. Fascist politics highlights the wrongs a globalized economy does to rural areas, adding to it a focus on traditional rural values of self-sufficiency supposedly put at risk by the success of liberal cities culturally and economically.

Fascist politics feeds the insulting myth that hardworking rural residents pay to support lazy urban dwellers, so it is not a surprise that the base of its success is found in a country’s rural areas. In a 1980 essay on the composition of support for the Nazi Party, “The Electoral Geography of the Nazi Landslide,” Nico Passchier notes that “rural, and especially agrarian, support for Nazism was extensive” and that the Nazis had “special success in areas with small farms, a rather homogeneous social structure, strong feelings of local solidarity, and social control.”

The accuracy of a fascist politician’s attacks on cities is not particularly important to their success. These messages resonate with voters who do not live in cities, and they don’t need to appeal to urban dwellers.

The appeal to the countryside in fascist politics can be obscured in countries with urban centers containing deeply religious neighborhoods, or neighborhoods with impoverished workers from rural areas who are well served by the populist economic policies favored by some authoritarian leaders.

Large urban centers tend toward particularly high degrees of pluralism. In cities, one is likely to find not just the greatest degree of ethnic and religious diversity, but also the greatest diversity of lifestyles and customs. The literature on National Socialism supports the view that urban areas brought with them a measure of tolerance that served to protect, at least for a while, the populations targeted by the Nazis. According to Richard Grunberger, “Jews living in villages and small towns were subjected to window smashing and physical assault, sometimes culminating in murder. This made them seek the anonymity and sense of communal comfort to be found in large centres like Frankfurt and Berlin….Country areas generally tended to be more anti-Semitic than urban ones. In the cities, anti-Jewish feeling was roughly inversely proportional to [the city’s] size.”

Fascist ideology rejects pluralism and tolerance. In fascist politics, everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a way of life, a set of customs. The diversity, with its concomitant tolerance of difference, in large urban centers is therefore a threat to fascist ideology. Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans,” liberals, and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. In many countries, these are characteristically urban populations. Cities therefore usefully serve as a proxy target for the classic enemies of fascist politics.

In fascist ideology, the rural life is guided by an ethos of self-sufficiency, which breeds strength. In rural communities, one does not need to depend on the state, unlike the “parasites” in the city.

Richard Walther Darré was a leading Nazi ideologue and one of the most senior commanders of the SS. The thesis of Darré’s 1929 essay “The Peasantry as the Key to Understanding the Nordic Race” is that true freedom is realized only in the rural agrarian life of the peasant. In the rural life, one is forced to “rely on one’s own abilities” and be self-sufficient, rather than to be a “parasite,” as Darré argues city-dwellers are.

In fascism, the state is an enemy; it is to be replaced by the nation, which consists of self-sufficient individuals who collectively choose to sacrifice for a common goal of ethnic or religious glorification.

To boost the nation, fascist movements are obsessed with reversing declining birthrates; large families raised by dedicated homemakers are the goal.14 In fascist politics, cities are denounced as sites of declining birthrates, which are blamed on the supposed weakening effect of cosmopolitanism on a population, making men and women less capable of fulfilling traditional gender roles (as soldiers and mothers, for example).

Cities, in the fascist worldview, are collective enterprises where people rely on public infrastructure, “the state,” for survival and comfort. Residents of cities do not hunt or grow their food, as in fascist mythology; they purchase it at stores. This runs counter to the fascist ideal of rural agrarian self-sufficiency. In fascist ideology, it is the nation that provides, not the state—small ethnically or religiously pure communities composed of self-sufficient individuals working as a community.

Fascist politics characteristically represents the minority populations living in cities as rodents or “parasites” living off the honest hard work of rural populations.

As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf:

Originally the Aryan was probably a nomad and then, as time went on, he became settled; this, if nothing else, proves that he was never a Jew! No, the Jew is not a nomad, for even the nomad had already a definite attitude towards the conception “work.”…In the Jew, however, that conception has no place; he was never a nomad, but was ever a parasite in the bodies of other nations.

In fascist politics, the laziness of minorities in cities is cured only by forcing them into hard labor. Hard labor, in Nazi ideology, had a remarkable power: It could purify an inherently lazy race.