Politics & Power Quote by Suzanne Fields

Fields is poking at a national comfort zone: it is emotionally easy to denounce Hitler, harder to audit the mundane machinery that made his regime feel, to some people, functional. By pointing to "remnants" in welfare policy, she’s not arguing that contemporary Germany is fascist; she’s arguing that history doesn’t vanish just because a country has done the moral work of repudiation. Institutions outlive ideologies. Programs, bureaucracies, and incentives can be inherited, scrubbed, rebranded, and folded into democracy with barely a public reckoning.

The barb is in "won't examine the other reasons". It suggests selective memory: Germans, in her framing, treat the Third Reich as a moral aberration rather than a political project that also offered carrots alongside terror. That implication is meant to unsettle the reader, because it reframes "success" not as righteousness but as administrative efficacy, social provision, national cohesion, and the seductions of stability. Fields is aiming at the uncomfortable thesis that authoritarianism doesn’t only advance through brutality; it can also hitch itself to social benefits, dignity narratives, and the promise of order.

Context matters, and she’s clearly writing into a long postwar debate about continuity versus rupture in German governance. The subtext is also contemporary and portable: any society that congratulates itself on condemning past monsters while refusing to analyze their popular appeal is leaving itself defenseless. The warning isn’t that welfare leads to fascism; it’s that democracies ignore the political uses of welfare at their peril.