The Rise of Medical Fascism

 The Nation - Authoritarian remes always enlist medical systems to ensure their control over the means of life and death, but they do not do so overnight. Instead, medical fascism, by which I mean the integration of healthcare institutions and professionals into autocratic systems of control, coercion, and repression, rises gradually. It incrementally erodes professional ethics, co-opts health institutions, discourages dissent, and provides incentives and ideological support for participation in state violence. Rather than externally imposed, these steps are typically carried out by actors already internal to the field—usually by those doctors most eager for career advancement. This process is underway in the United States, and it didn’t start with Donald Trump.

For decades, medical institutions in the United States have normalized collaboration with violence. This includes participating in forced sterilization programs targeting Black and Indigenous women until at least 2013, the psychiatric pathologization and involuntary institutionalization of Black men participating in civil rights protests, repeated political defense of for-profit healthcare exclusion responsible for at least tens of thousands of deaths each year, and essential support for both the nation’s profoundly racist and harmful system of mass incarceration and its CIA torture programs.  More