Racism and Social Darwinism:
The one-two punch driving American inequality
I’ve always wondered what has kept the current Republican Party together for so long. It has always seemed to be two clearly different parties working towards two completely different ends. If the US had not developed as a two party system, these factions would have fractured long ago. The platform is an odd hodgepodge of social conservatism and financial libertarianism. How could those pushing to strip all regulation from financial sectors as a matter of ideology give lip service to causes advocating more government regulation of social interactions? Why on earth would impoverished social conservatives advocate for financial policies that only serve to cement their status at the bottom? There is only so much clever demagoguery can do; how could these two groups form an underlying ideology they could all agree on?
The answer was to bridge two compatible concepts that no one in the GOP wants to talk about: Racism and Social Darwinism.
The former is an old theme that fueled presidential campaigns from George Wallace and Strom Thurmond. It is one that resonates with many lower and middle class whites throughout the country. It is especially acute in the South where Jim Crow laws created a clear social hierarchy and population numbers made integration more impactful. Although unwilling to acknowledge it, many white Americans believe that African-Americans are fundamentally less fit to function in a productive society. They point to crime rates, income levels, civic engagement and other metrics to support these assertions without explicitly expressing the thesis. These ideas are formed without consideration of the sociological influences that created these results. There is no recognition of the fact that until 1863, the US Government’s official position was that African-Americans were sub-human. It does not factor in that there is no incentive for innovation or ambition in slavery. In most cases, displaying either marked you as a threat and put you in potential harm. Education was intentionally withheld from an entire race of people because the powers in charge wanted to ensure that they remained in a subservient position forever.
While we made grindingly slow progress towards equality under our federal laws, the racial and social stratification persisted longer in some states and is still pervasive today in private society. Rather than acknowledging efforts to help African-Americans as the necessarily compensatory actions of a government seeking to level the scales of justice in our nation, many whites see them as a threat to their preferential status in our social hierarchy. Life in poverty is hard no matter what your race, and acknowledging racial equality only broadens the competition for resources. This fear is crystalized in the vision that a large government is going to take what you have earned and give it to someone less fit. This idea serves as the foundation for one side of the GOP’s ideological bridge.
The intellectual thread behind the racist argument in America flows from an un-contextualized expression from Darwin. “Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” This quote is taken and run with, despite the immediate human contextualization provided by Darwin. “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.[1] The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”[2] Darwin came to this conclusion on a misguided view that the societal implications of inequity were entirely due to physiological differences when the root causes were firmly grounded in oppressive societal systems, but his analyses of the motivations behind it are spot on. It takes an evil society to ignore its most vulnerable citizens regardless of the reasoning behind their status.
The dangerous part in the US political dialogue is the subversion of racial arguments in favor of Social Darwinistic ones; this is the other side of the GOP ideological bridge. Poor people are not poor because they are black, they are poor because they are weak. If our society happens to ensure that all black people come from a less advantaged position as a result of their blackness then, so be it, that is how survival of the fittest works. This is Complete Bullshit.[3] This ideology is formed with a total misunderstanding of how big the oppressive forces have been throughout our history and how large the hurdles continue to be for good people seeking to make a positive difference from a disadvantaged position. Nietzche said it best, in his intellectually unbiased way, “Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.”
As prescient and undeniable as Nietzche’s statement was, the clever coupling of racist and Social Darwinistic arguments is difficult to bust asunder. When framed destructively, the argument is persuasive. There is even an egalitarianistic twist given to common human struggles under the demagogic arguments for oppression. “Certain ills belong to the hardships of human life. They are natural. They are part of the struggle with Nature for existence. We cannot blame our fellow-men for our share of these. My neighbor and I are both struggling to free ourselves from these ills. The fact that my neighbor has succeeded in this struggle better than I constitutes no grievance for me. Certain other ills are due to the malice of men, and to the imperfections or errors of civil institutions. These ills are an object of agitation, and a subject for discussion. The former class of ills is to be met only by manly effort and energy; the latter may be corrected by associated effort.”[4]
What drives this narrative is the immediacy of struggle for limited resources. It is a struggle that was planned and effectuated by those who possess most of the wealth in this country. If poor people are left to fight for their existence between each other, then the dividing lines they choose will be exploitable to keep them all poor and fighting. Racist Americans are being used. If you are racist, then, so be it; fight for your rights, but don’t let someone smarter than you convince you to vote for an agenda that will hurt you and your family because you are in the same socio-economic class as the people you wish to oppress. “The distinction here made between the ills which belong to the struggle for existence and those which are due to the faults of human institutions is of prime importance.”[5]
I am glad to live in a country where you cannot make it on pure racism. George Wallace would be lambasted now, but Ted Cruz is close. I have been waiting for one of the GOP candidates to casually drop the N word. We all know what they are saying, but want to skate around it. They are mostly couching their racism in the more socially acceptable Social Darwinism, but the intent is the same. The truth is the ‘highest’ echelons of our society don’t care how you became poor. They don’t differentiate between worthless white people that wasted their advantage and struggling black people that were not up to overcoming the institutionalized racism they face. They just want you to stay poor and keep arguing with each other; the deeper the divisions, the better. As long as that is the driving narrative for our political system, they can maintain and grow the loopholes that keep them rich.
[1] Bolding added
[2] Additional bolding added
[3] My personal emphasis added
[4] William Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe Each Other is a fascinating and edifying read behind GOP policy, despite their misattributed ‘Christian’ focus. file:///C:/Users/jspoo035/Downloads/What%20Social%20Classes%20Owe%20Each%20Other_2.pdf
[5] file:///C:/Users/jspoo035/Downloads/What%20Social%20Classes%20Owe%20Each%20Other_2.pdf
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