As you know by now, I have guest edited a special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly on Foucault and feminist philosophy entitled “Foucault and Feminist Philosophy: Other Perspectives and Approaches.” The issue, which was expected to be published at the beginning of the month, has been delayed. I attribute this delay to ableism, primarily. This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) is motivated by remarks that I make in the article that I contribute to the issue. There, I write:

“In short, MAiD is a form of state violence exacted on disabled people. That prominent commentators on fascism within (and outside of) philosophy do not consider the vital performative role that MAiD policy, the discourse of bioethics, and ableism more generally serve in the eugenic arm of fascism’s neoliberal incarnations and successes is in part testament to the ideological effectiveness of this discourse.”

The quote above is directed in particular at Jason Stanley, whose work on fascism is well known to philosophers. Stanley’s theoretical assertions about fascism and its “pillars” have routinely ignored the apparatus of disability and ableism, despite repeated entreaties (over several years) from me that his understanding of fascism is incomplete and that he must include analyses of ableism and eugenics in his claims about recent and current (neo)fascist movements. An overdue exception to this lacuna in Stanley’s (ableist) analysis of fascism is this set of remarks in a recent post at “Front Left,” his oddly-titled Substack account (“odd,” given that Stanley is a liberal):

“There are many other examples of Nazi thinking in the AfD Party Program for Saxony-Anhalt. One is a call to eliminate inclusive teaching for disabled students – in other words, remove disabled students from classrooms with non-disabled students:

‘The “inclusion” experiment – that is, the joint schooling of children with disabilities and normally developing children, combined with the abolition of traditional special needs schools – has failed across the board.’

To educate a populace to recognize the problematic nature of this element of the AfD party program involves going in depth into Nazi ideology, here in connection to eugenics and social Darwinism” (Stanley 2026)

Yet these remarks, while issuing a grave warning, are in no way revelatory and themselves imply historical occlusions and inaccuracies. Stanley’s remarks suggest that eugenic thinking and social Darwinism were first popularized by the Third Reich and Nazis. As philosophers of disability, disabled activists, and disabled authors have amply documented for quite some time, however, this sort of eugenic thinking predated Nazism. Indeed, the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century eugenics of England, France, and the United States–carefully documented by Licia Carlson, James Trent, and others–offered templates for the German Third Reich.

Although Stanley conceives of contemporary forms of fascism as a distinct reincarnation of the Nazism of the Third Reich of the 1930s and 1940s, German disabled activists and scholars and disabled scholars and activists in other geopolitical contexts regard the eugenics of contemporary Germany as part of a continuous social movement and projects, explicitly tying these eugenic projects and movement to the project of bioethics and thus philosophy.

Stanley is not, however, alone in his ahistorical approach to the ableist fascism of the present . Naomi Klein, who has become a leading commentator on neofascism, likewise routinely ignores ableism and the apparatus of disability in her writing and activism on the current situation. More on that soon…