When poverty rises, they blame laziness, not economic policy. When climate disasters accelerate, they blame individual consumption, not fossil capital. And now, as disability rates surge, these reactionaries claim the real crisis is not public health failure, exploitative labor conditions, or mass infection but a population growing weaker, softer, and less productive.
This narrative does not emerge in a vacuum. It is a tactical reframing, one that positions disabled people not as citizens to be accommodated but as liabilities to be managed, optimized, or eliminated.
The state does not need to harm disabled people directly. It need only create conditions in which they cannot survive—through economic exclusion, algorithmic gatekeeping, and medical neglect. The coming war on disabled people will not be presented as cruelty. It will be presented as efficiency, as sustainability, as progress.
And it has already begun.
Further reading: Misreading Capitalist Realism – how capitalism absorbs critique and reconfigures power to maintain dominance.
Why disability rates are rising
Disability among working-age adults is surging, and the reasons are neither mysterious nor “unnatural.” In the US, self-reported cognitive disability among adults aged 18 to 39 nearly doubled between 2013 and 2023, from 5.1% to 9.7%—young adults are what is driving the national rise—and in 2024 the employment-population ratio for disabled people aged 16 and over stood at 22.7% against 65.5% for those without disabilities. In the UK, an estimated 1.9 million people reported long COVID symptoms as of March 2023—2.9% of the population—of whom 1.3 million had been symptomatic for more than a year and 762,000 for more than two; 4.2 million working-age adults now claim a health-related benefit, up from 3.2 million in 2019, and spending on them is forecast to reach £63 billion a year by 2028-29.
A rational society would read those numbers as a brief: expand healthcare, restructure labor, invest in accessible infrastructure.
Instead, elites read them as evidence of civilizational decline, and as an excuse for biopolitical control.
Further reading: The Architecture of Harm in Healthcare – how profit-driven healthcare prioritizes efficiency over care.
Three frames for turning disability into a threat
The shift from disability as a condition to be accommodated to disability as a problem to be solved will arrive in three narratives, each with its own policy program.
The productivity frame: “the economy can’t sustain this”
Under capitalism a person’s value is their productivity, so as disability rates climb, reactionaries will argue the economy cannot afford this many non-contributors. In practice that means tighter restrictions on benefits, with bureaucratic obstacles raised under the banner of fraud prevention and more disabled people falling out of the welfare system as a result. It means AI-driven productivity policing of the kind Amazon already runs, where surveillance tracks worker efficiency and terminations follow automatically from performance metrics. And it means automation used as cover for mass layoffs, with disabled workers offered as the reason to replace human labor entirely.
The endgame is not subtle. If disability cannot be erased, it will be excluded from the labor force.
Further reading: Algorithmic Austerity: How AI Facilitates Economic Exclusion – AI as a tool for enforcing economic precarity.
The cultural contagion frame: “kids these days just want to be disabled”
As diagnoses of ADHD, autism, and chronic illness rise, reactionaries will call disability a trend rather than a reality. The program that follows is harsher medical gatekeeping, where people must prove they are disabled enough to deserve accommodation; stricter statutory definitions that exclude conditions deemed subjective, such as chronic pain, cognitive fatigue, and sensory processing disorders; and a moral panic in which accessibility measures are said to weaken society and foster an entitlement culture.
None of this stays rhetorical. It becomes the justification for legal rollbacks, mass disenfranchisement, and institutional abandonment.
Further reading: ABA Is a Capitalist's Wet Dream – how disability "treatment" industries enforce compliance and exclusion.
The biopolitical purity frame: “why are we becoming more disabled?”
The third frame reads rising rates as biological degeneration. Eco-fascist versions blame processed food, vaccines, or air pollution for weakening the population, carefully avoiding corporate malfeasance. Silicon Valley versions promote embryo selection, gene editing, and cognitive enhancement as preventative medicine. Accelerationist versions treat disability as proof of inevitable collapse, in which only the "fittest" will endure.
All three move disability from something to accommodate to something to prevent, which in practice means eliminating disabled people from future generations.
What the infrastructure looks like
The war on disabled people will be packaged as progress, and much of the machinery is already installed. AI will automate the rejection of disability claims, making appeals nearly impossible to win. Brain-computer interfaces and pharmaceutical interventions will arrive as accessibility tools and become requirements for education and employment. Non-invasive prenatal testing is already eliminating entire disability populations, and selective abortion will accelerate on the same logic. Microbiome and gene therapies will be sold as ending suffering while functionally ending disabled births.
By the time any of this is legible as policy, the infrastructure will be in place.
Refuse the premise
The most dangerous trap is arguing inside their frame: debating whether rates are “really” rising, whether ADHD is overdiagnosed, whether some disabled people are faking. Those conversations have no floor.
The answers that matter refuse the terms. If more people are disabled, the response is expanded access, not stricter eligibility. If capitalism cannot sustain disabled workers, then capitalism has to change, not the workers. If surveillance is offered as the solution, it is not a solution; it is a mechanism of control.
Disabled people are not a crisis to be managed. They are a reality of human existence. Fail to fight this and we end up in a world where participation in society is conditional on compliance, optimization, and control.
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