The Appointed Enemy: On the Political Utility of Blaming Those Who Cannot Fight Back

No political technology in the recorded history of civilization has proven more reliable, more portable across cultures, or more resistant to moral prohibition than the collective designation of a powerless group as the cause of shared suffering. It has operated in democracies and despotisms, in times of plague and times of plenty, across every religious tradition and every geographic region. Understanding why it works is not an academic exercise—it is a prerequisite for recognizing it in progress.

The Mechanism Before the Name

The anthropological record suggests that the designation of a collective scapegoat predates written history. René Girard's theoretical framework—that societies discharge internal violence by concentrating it on a sacrificial victim—is contested in its details but supported in its general contours by the archaeological evidence. Ritual sacrifice, expulsion ceremonies, and collective punishment of designated outsiders appear in the earliest literate cultures with a consistency that implies a much older origin.

What the written record adds is specificity about the political function. By the time of the first detailed historical accounts, the scapegoating mechanism had already been refined into a governance tool. Athenian ostracism—the annual vote to exile whichever citizen the assembly found most threatening—was partly a check on tyranny and partly a formalized outlet for collective anxiety. The Athenians had institutionalized the impulse, given it a procedure, and called it democracy.

This is worth pausing on. One of the foundational experiments in Western democratic governance included, as a core feature, a mechanism for the community to designate one of its members as the object of collective rejection and remove him from the body politic. The impulse is not a corruption of democratic instinct. In some manifestations, it is continuous with it.

The Plague and the Pattern

The Black Death of the fourteenth century provides the most extensively documented single episode of mass scapegoating in the premodern record. Within months of the plague's arrival in Europe, Jewish communities across the continent were being accused of poisoning wells—a charge with no factual basis and considerable logical incoherence, given that Jewish mortality from the plague was comparable to that of surrounding populations.

The accusations spread faster than the disease itself, moving through networks of communication in ways that historians have traced in remarkable detail. What the record shows is not a spontaneous popular delusion but a structured social process: local authorities received reports from neighboring regions, held formal proceedings, extracted confessions under torture, and issued judgments that then served as evidence for the next jurisdiction down the road. The persecution had the procedural architecture of governance because it was governance—a way of managing social panic by providing it a target.

Three dynamics visible in the fourteenth-century record appear, with variations in costume, in virtually every subsequent episode of organized scapegoating. First, the designated group is accused of crimes that explain the source of collective suffering. Second, the accusations are self-reinforcing—once a community accepts the premise, evidence against it is interpreted as confirmation and absence of evidence as concealment. Third, the violence escalates beyond what any individual actor intended, because each participant is responding to social signals rather than making independent moral calculations.

The Powerlessness Requirement

A consistent feature across the historical record is that effective scapegoating requires a target that is simultaneously threatening in narrative and powerless in reality. This is not a paradox—it is the mechanism's essential design. A group that is genuinely powerful can defend itself, retaliate, or negotiate. A group that is genuinely powerless cannot generate the narrative of threat that makes the scapegoating emotionally satisfying.

The target must be powerful enough to plausibly explain the society's problems—wealthy enough, or foreign enough, or culturally distinct enough to serve as a credible cause—while being weak enough that acting against them carries no serious cost. This is why scapegoating almost universally selects for minorities, immigrants, religious outsiders, and economically marginal groups rather than for the genuinely powerful interests that might actually be responsible for the conditions generating public anxiety.

In the American context, this dynamic has operated across the full sweep of the national history. Chinese laborers were blamed for wage depression in the nineteenth century and excluded by federal statute. Japanese Americans were designated a security threat in 1942 and interned without meaningful evidence, while German and Italian Americans—whose nations were also at war with the United States—faced no comparable collective punishment, in part because their political integration made them a more costly target. The selection of the scapegoat is rarely random. It follows the path of least resistance.

The Point of No Return

Historical analysis suggests a reasonably consistent threshold beyond which scapegoating campaigns become self-sustaining and resistant to reversal. That threshold appears to be reached when the persecution of the designated group becomes materially profitable for a sufficiently large portion of the majority population.

In medieval Europe, the expulsion of Jewish communities was frequently preceded by the cancellation of debts owed to Jewish creditors—a transaction that made the persecution financially rewarding for debtors and politically rewarding for the authorities who authorized it. In twentieth-century Germany, the progressive dispossession of Jewish citizens created a class of beneficiaries—people who had acquired businesses, homes, and professional positions vacated by persecution—whose material interest in the continuation of the system was independent of their ideological commitment to it.

Once this material integration occurs, the scapegoating campaign acquires constituencies beyond the true believers. Reform becomes costly not merely because it requires moral courage but because it requires people to surrender concrete benefits. This is the moment that the historical record identifies as the transition from reversible to irreversible—not the first act of persecution, but the first act of redistribution.

The Contemporary Iteration

The United States is not immune to this pattern, and American exceptionalism has never been a persuasive argument against the application of universal human psychology. The specific targets, the specific accusations, and the specific political vehicles change with each generation. The underlying mechanism does not.

What the record of man teaches—consistently, across wildly different cultures, political systems, and historical periods—is that collective scapegoating is not a sign of social breakdown. It is a sign of social stress seeking the path of least resistance. Societies under genuine pressure tend toward this solution not because their members are uniquely cruel but because the solution works, in the narrow political sense of providing relief from anxiety and a focus for diffuse anger, without requiring the harder work of addressing the actual sources of the problem.

The five-thousand-year record does not suggest that human beings are incapable of resisting this pattern. It suggests that resistance requires active, deliberate institutional and moral effort—and that the effort is hardest to sustain precisely when the pressure driving the scapegoating is most severe. That is the nature of the test. The record shows how often it has been failed. What it does not show is that failure is inevitable.