The Scapegoat Strategy

There is a reason that the majority of right-wing political energy is organized around common enemies rather than common solutions. It's not an accident. It's not a failure of messaging. It is the strategy itself.

Scholars of authoritarianism have a name for it: outgroup scapegoating. It's one of the oldest political tactics in history, and it follows a specific, repeatable pattern. The Italian philosopher Umberto Eco identified it as a core feature of what he called "Ur-Fascism" — the eternal, recurring structure of fascist politics that transcends any single country or era.

The playbook works like this: define an enemy, manufacture fear, and offer yourself as the solution. You never have to deliver a policy result — because the conversation is never about policy. It's about threat. And the threat never goes away, because it was never real to begin with.

The scapegoat strategy requires a rotating cast of enemies. Each group serves a specific purpose in the coalition: immigrants mobilize economic anxiety, Muslims mobilize security fears, trans people mobilize parental anxiety, Black Americans carry the weight of America's oldest prejudice, and "the enemy within" catches everyone else.

What connects them is not what they've done. It's that they can be made to seem threatening while being too marginalized to fight back effectively. That's the selection criteria. Not danger — vulnerability.

The scapegoat strategy isn't just about targeting the vulnerable. It serves a second, equally important purpose: it ensures you never have to solve real problems.

Every hour of political oxygen consumed by trans bathroom debates is an hour not spent on the fact that 66.5% of American bankruptcies are caused by medical expenses. Every news cycle dominated by "migrant caravans" is a cycle that doesn't ask why 75% of American workers can't afford anything beyond basic living expenses. Every rally chant of "build the wall" drowns out the question of why the party that controlled Congress and the White House still has no healthcare plan after 16 years of promising one.

This is not a coincidence. It is the function.

Consider what's actually happening to American families while the culture wars dominate the political conversation:

Twenty million Americans owe medical debt totaling over $220 billion. The Republican Party has promised to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act since 2010. Sixteen years later, there is no replacement. The 2017 repeal effort died with John McCain's thumbs-down vote. In 2025, Republicans are still, in their own words, "stopping short of calling for a full-scale repeal" — because they have nothing to replace it with.

Seventy-five percent of households cannot afford a median-priced new home. The median home now costs five times the median household income — near an all-time record. The share of affordable listings dropped from 65% to 37% between 2019 and 2025. Trump's first term produced no major housing legislation.

Seventy-five percent of workers cannot afford anything beyond basic living expenses. Of the $12,000 added to total compensation between 2000 and 2020, only 46% went to actual wages — the rest was absorbed by rising healthcare costs. Workers are running harder to stay in place.

Kendi's framework cuts to the heart of the scapegoat strategy: you can either blame groups or fix policies. You cannot do both, because they are opposite responses to the same problems. If wages are stagnant, you can either raise the minimum wage or blame immigrants for "taking jobs." If healthcare is unaffordable, you can either regulate insurers or blame "government overreach." If communities feel unsafe, you can either invest in them or blame the people who live there.

The scapegoat strategy always chooses the blame. Because blame is free, and policy is hard.

The pattern extends beyond individual claims. Hate crimes track the rhetoric — and the data is unambiguous. Anti-Muslim hate crimes surged 67% in 2015, the year Trump proposed his Muslim ban. Counties that hosted Trump rallies saw a 226% increase in hate crimes compared to similar counties without rallies. In the first week after the 2016 election, 437 cases of intimidation against minorities were reported.

Brookings researchers found that simply exposing people to Trump's rhetoric made them more likely to write derogatory comments about targeted groups. When a president names an enemy, violence follows. That's not speculation. It's a measured, documented, peer-reviewed finding.

Every historian of authoritarianism who studies Trump's rhetoric arrives at the same conclusion — not because they share a political agenda, but because the pattern is identical to ones they have spent their careers documenting.

Hannah Arendt, writing about the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, identified the key mechanism: the audience doesn't need to believe the propaganda. They just need to stop caring whether it's true. Once the distinction between fact and fiction collapses, the leader can say anything — and the scapegoat can be anyone.

This is the final stage of the scapegoat strategy: not just redirecting anger, but destroying the shared factual basis that would allow people to see the redirection happening. If immigrants "feel" dangerous despite being statistically safer neighbors, the data doesn't matter. If trans people "feel" like a crisis despite being 0.5% of the population, the numbers don't matter. Timothy Snyder compressed this into five words:

And from the inside, Adam Kinzinger — a Republican congressman who served for 12 years, voted to impeach Trump, and watched his party transform — described what it became: not a policy movement, but an anger machine with no off switch and no destination.