Disposable Populations: MAGA, Malthus, and the Politics of Abandonment

Soft authoritarianism and the making of expendable populations

Why attack healthcare, public aid, and immigrant labor in a country that needs all three? Because the goal isn’t policy—it’s punishment. MAGA’s logic is not economic, but sacrificial. Entire populations are being marked for exclusion.

Why else dismantle healthcare in a country with rising chronic illness and falling life expectancy? Why else oppose vaccines and masks during a pandemic that killed over a million Americans? Why else wage war on immigrant labor while the economy depends on it?

These aren’t isolated decisions. They’re part of a broader worldview—one that fuses racial anxiety, economic cruelty, and technological exclusion into a quietly authoritarian logic. MAGA doesn’t offer a vision of prosperity. It offers a system for deciding who matters.

One strand of that system is Malthusianism—the old idea that the world has too many people. In Inferno, Dan Brown dramatizes this through a fictional plague designed to reduce population. The right doesn’t need fiction. It has demographic panic. The fear isn’t just over numbers—it’s over who is multiplying.

Right-wing Malthusianism is deeply racialized. The so-called “Great Replacement” theory imagines white Americans being displaced by immigrants—especially those who are Black, Brown, or non-Christian. This isn’t about labor markets or birthrates. It’s about identity. It doesn’t matter that U.S. fertility rates are falling or that the economy relies on immigrant workers. The imagined threat is cultural and racial, not economic.

This helps explain the contradiction between MAGA’s “pro-life” rhetoric and its violent immigration policies. Women are pushed to have more children through abortion bans and restricted access to contraception, while at the same time, the border is fortified and mass deportations intensify. The issue isn’t life—it’s lineage. Reproductive control becomes a tool of demographic engineering.

The goal isn’t to support families—it’s to control who gets to have them. Women are being pushed to have more children, but only the “right” kind. It’s about power, not care.

A second strand is technological. AI and automation are wiping out jobs faster than workers can adjust. For big corporations, that’s great news—lower costs, higher profits. But what happens to the people left behind? They’re just not part of the equation. From that point of view, social services like healthcare, disability benefits, and retirement aren’t investments. They’re dead weight. Easier to cut them off than keep paying for people who no longer ‘produce.’

What we get isn’t open violence—it’s quiet disappearance. Some people still get support. Others are ignored, left to fend for themselves.

It doesn’t need a declaration. It works by disappearing.

Government hasn’t disappeared—it just doesn’t show up for everyone. Some people still get protection and support. Others are left out entirely.

We saw this in sharp relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis wasn’t just mishandled—it was instrumentalized. Public health became a partisan battlefield. Scientific expertise was ridiculed. Preventative measures were politicized. And the highest death rates were concentrated among the poor, the uninsured, the undocumented, the elderly. The pandemic became a sorting mechanism—dividing those whom the state still served from those it no longer bothered to reach.

A third strand runs deep in history. The logic of enclosure, most visible in 18th-century England, evicted tenant farmers so that landowners could turn fields into pasture. The evicted had no choice but to seek work in cities, often under conditions they would never have accepted before. Enclosure was not just an economic strategy—it was a tool of dependency.

That same logic is alive today. Where people have access to land, kin support, or informal economies, they can reject exploitation. But strip away public support—through debt, austerity, or policy—and desperation takes over. The erosion of the safety net isn’t collateral damage. It’s a method. Poverty functions as leverage.

It’s a system where wealth is built by stripping others of what they once relied on—jobs, land, homes, or rights.

The plan doesn’t need to be spelled out. It plays out in the numbers, the laws, and the silence.

The goal is to make labor compliant. Deport enough undocumented workers to open up low-wage jobs, and impoverish the native workforce just enough to make them take them. This isn’t about supply and demand. It’s about strategic pressure.

I saw this firsthand in the early 1980s while doing fieldwork along the U.S.-Mexico border in Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Despite the international line, the two towns functioned as a single community. Around 80 percent of families had relatives on both sides. But the structures of daily life were strikingly different.

On the U.S. side, families were predominantly nuclear—parents and children—while a significant number of households consisted of elderly individuals or couples living independently. Extended families were rare. On the Mexican side, by contrast, extended families were the norm—multiple generations sharing housing, resources, and labor.

This wasn’t just cultural. It reflected infrastructure. In the U.S., public systems helped sustain individual households. In Mexico, absent such systems, families became the safety net. Now, as those U.S. supports erode, American families are being pushed into survival modes they are unprepared to navigate. What’s unraveling is not just welfare. It’s the fragile autonomy those systems once enabled.

All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of global dislocation. Climate change, political instability, and extractive economies are driving migration and displacement across the globe. Instead of addressing why people move, we wall them out and ration what’s left.

Not through spectacle, but through quiet erosion. The institutions remain—but the care is gone.

The system doesn’t fail everyone. It chooses who belongs and who to exclude.

The future MAGA envisions is not overtly fascist. It’s stratified, automated, and quietly ruthless. A racialized core is protected. Everyone else is left to fend for themselves. Not through force, but through systematic disinvestment and civic erosion. A country not governed by laws alone, but by neglect with intent.

And unless we name it for what it is, this logic will continue—disguised as fiscal responsibility, national renewal, or tough love. But at its heart is a simple truth: when a government decides certain people are no longer worth protecting, it is not shrinking—it is shifting. Away from democracy. Toward abandonment as policy.

Suggested Readings:

Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Susana Narotzky, “Between Inequality and Injustice: Contestations of Redistribution and Recognition in Contemporary Europe.” Anthropology Today 28(1), 2012.

Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.