Those policies aren't proven to work and your caveat renders the assertion meaningless.
But regardless: it is well studied that fascism is an appeal to emotion, not reason. Neither Italian fascism nor German nazism were rational or grounded in science. They were pseudoscientific and appealed to notions of blood, purity, sacrifice and nationalism -- that is, they appealed to emotion. They clouded the reason.
To be fair to the people of the day, that pseudoscience was considered mainstream legitimate science at the time, strongly promoted by their equivalent of Elon Musk on their equivalent of ExTwitter.
Just part of what terrifies me about the leadership of the world’s superpower from next year being a toss up between two guys who would have been taught that eugenics was settled fact in school.
I certainly do not support eugenics applied to humans but let's note that we are absolutely apply it to all other life forms on Earth to produce advantageous variants for our various purposes. It works to the extent allowed by genetics and is in effect settled fact for plants and animals. Highly respected public intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s thought it was a good idea to apply it to humans. We all know the results.
Properly speaking the term eugenics applies exclusively to the selective breeding of humans to maximize and minimize behavioral characteristics (it turns out absolutely falsely) associated (by the ignorant) with the (it turns out nonsensical) notion of “race”.
The belief was that behavioral stereotypes (like, for example, frugality, trustworthiness, and work ethic) were inextricably linked to physical phenotypes (like skin color and hair texture) that, via some hand wavy magic around nationality and cultural origin, determined your race.
Eugenics isn’t the same as (or even a straightforward extension of) selective breeding in animals / plants, since no other known organism has ever organized around the entirely cultural artifacts of borders and tribes, nations and races.
Every political system clouds the reason and appeals to emotion. There are very few policies anywhere that are grounded in science. They may be, initially, until they get massacred by politicians to get them aligned with currently dominant ideology (which by definition is a belief system, grounded mostly in fairy tales about who's better than everyone else).
Just take a look at the current state of democracy... and let me know where the science is hiding.
Are those policies proven to work? The war on drugs was proven to be ineffective, many successful businessmen are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and mental asylums were brutal institutions that only propagated mental illness and did not cure it.
All of these solutions, however, make people feel like “someone is doing something”, which is an emotional appeal even though those methods are empirically ineffective.
They don't work, and it's a poverty of the imagination to have no clue of or understand the value of supportive, preventative, or rehabilitative policies.
They work if you are the kind of person who is ok with living in an authoritarian place like Singapore.
I personally am not, I like personal freedom. However, there are actually many people in the world who would feel fine living in Singapore-level authoritarianism.
… I mean, you’re describing, er, maybe North Korea? Not sure anywhere else has those policies. Maybe the Soviet Union in the Stalinist period (substitute gulags for execution).
I’m… not sure that these policies are proven to make most peoples’ lives better. Where are you getting that? Historically, places which pursue these sorts of extremely draconian policies tend to be very, very nasty places to live.
