One of fascism’s key techniques is to grab the “free-floating anger” of a group of people that they wish to enlist in their cause, and focus it on something tangible. In Germany in the 1930’s, the primary scapegoat chosen by Hitler and his fellow “National Socialist” leaders was the Jewish people. In Vienna in the 1910’s, Hitler was a homeless “artist” and found the mayor of the city, Karl Leuger to be very persuasive and a great orator – he was also an ardent anti-semite.
Hitler found that Leuger’s skill at speaking to crowds, coupled with his ability to focus their anger (possibly because of economic challenges as new technologies displaced more traditional work) on a specific target, leading to a building of a sense of unity among the disaffected. Additional targets he later pointed his followers at included immigrants as well as the Roma population. His hatred of immigrants was ostensibly because he believed that they were diluting the “pure” blood of the Germanic people and contributing to the downfall of their civilization.
By giving a disaffected population a group of people as a lightning rod to focus their anger and hatred on, and continuing to blame everything negative (or even making up stories that have no basis in reality and blaming this group for them), a demagogue is able to keep their attention off of how the policies of that demagogue are negatively impacting their lives. In addition, it also focuses that population on “the other” versus the large-scale corruption and. outright theft of public funds and assets that typically accompanies such a regime. Keeping them focused on this enemy group means less attention for the oligarchs and corrupt government officials and their often illegal acts.
If you look at the rise of the far right movements today, you see the same pattern playing out. Immigrants are a convenient and typical target for their ire, even if those people are displaced due to wars and regimes often supported by right-wing governments around the world. One needs to only look at South and Central America and the long term support for destabilizing governments as well as support for autocratic regimes by the United States to see the impact of such policies on migration. Focusing a population that is suffering from relatively high unemployment on “immigrants stealing your jobs” is a frequent scapegoating technique of these right-wing politicians.
To refer back to the earlier point about Hitler blaming non-Germans for diluting German “blood” and causing the downfall of their civilization, you see echoes of that in comments by Donald Trump around how immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the American people. Furthermore, in terms of fictional stories being used to further drive this rhetoric due to a lack of factual support for their feelings, a recent incident that blew up all over the right-wing media landscape referred to Haitian immigrants literally eating people’s pets in a small Ohio community. Following along behind such a machine-gun of lies and reporting that they are untrue has little impact on the hatred brewed among the disaffected by the initial reports that reinforce their built-in biases.
Another technique used by these authoritarian right-wing figures is to take a small population and demonize them to the point that the much larger population they are appealing to feels that the perceived threat is huge and armies of “the other” are coming for them. In Germany in 1933, for example, Hitler stoked the hatred and fear of the disaffected German people about the Jewish population which at that time numbered 505,000 in a country of 67 million – a mere 0.75% of the population. Similar behavior among the modern far right can be seen in their massive attack on transgender women participating in women’s college sports – although there are reported to be approximately 10 such cases out of the quarter of a million women playing college sports.
Again, the ability of these politicians to take a group of people, frustrated by their current economic situation (in many cases caused by a lack of education/training as the nature of work changes, or perhaps not being able to survive on minimum wage, or being out of work due to relatively high unemployment) on a small group means that they sacrifice a tiny number of possible voters (the population they demonize) in return for a harvest of large number of angry voters, is a technique that is not new. This allows the people funding their campaigns (typically very wealthy oligarchs who trade money for political favors that positively impact their business situation later) to not be the legitimate targets of this economic frustration and instead divert the population’s attention elsewhere.
The oligarchs over time think this is a winning strategy for them because they focus on the short-term riches that their support reaps for them. History, even recent history, however shows that this doesn’t end up ending well for them. In Putin’s Russia, he garners huge support for extremely wealthy business owners who get contracts and state funds funneled their way. However, when such a person either becomes less valuable to the leader, or perhaps is seen as a threat to his continued existence in power, they are eliminated. Similar things happened in historical Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s.