The Reemergence of Social Darwinism

The 19th-century doctrine that most closely resembles Trumpism

A lithograph from the late 19th century, entitled “History repeats itself — the robber barons of the Middle Ages and the robber barons of today.”

Friends,

Cut Medicaid to give billionaires a huge tax cut. But why?

They say they want a smaller government, but that can’t be it.

Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States — expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private, intimate life.

Many call themselves conservatives, but that’s not it, either.

They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backward — before the Environmental Protection Act, before Medicare and Medicaid, before the New Deal and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour workweek, before official recognition of trade unions, even before the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

Some say they want the American working class to do better. But that can’t be it, either, because they’re cutting Medicaid and other safety nets the working class depends on in order to finance a huge tax cut for the super-rich. And they support tariffs that will drive up the costs of just about everything the working class buys.

The America they actually seek is the one we last had in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept,” Trump said in January.

Yes, we had tariffs during that Gilded Age. It was also an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, although few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom.

Robber barons such as financier Jay Gould, railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller controlled much of American industry.

They corrupted American politics. Their lackeys literally deposited sacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators.

The gap between rich and poor turned into a chasm. Urban slums festered. Women couldn’t vote. Black Americans were subject to Jim Crow.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought.

Sumner brought Charles Darwin to America and twisted him into a theory to fit the times.

Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings, but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the 19th century.

To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive — and through this struggle, societies became stronger over time.

A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need, because that would interfere with natural selection.

Listen to today’s Republican debates and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. As Sumner wrote in the 1880s:

“Civilization has a simple choice [of either] liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest [or] not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”

Sound familiar?

Trump and his Republicans on Capitol Hill not only echo Sumner’s thoughts but mimic Sumner’s reputed arrogance. They say we must reward “entrepreneurs” (by which they mean anyone who has made a pile of money) and warn us not to “coddle” people in need (for example, they want to put work requirements on Medicaid).

They oppose extending unemployment insurance because, they say, we shouldn’t “give people money for doing nothing.”

Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Trump and other Republican lawmakers are dead set against raising taxes on billionaires, relying on the standard Republican trickle-down rationale that billionaires create jobs.

Here’s Sumner, more than a century ago:

“Millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done. … It is because they are thus selected that wealth aggregates under their hands – both their own and that intrusted to them … They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Although they live in luxury, “the bargain is a good one for society.”

Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late 19th century — the era when, according to Trump, “we were richest.”

Social Darwinism allowed John D. Rockefeller to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted, “the working out of a law of nature and of God.”

Social Darwinism also undermined all efforts at the time to build a nation of broadly based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.

Not until the 20th century did America reject Social Darwinism. Instead of Social Darwinism, we created an inclusive society. We created the largest middle class in the history of the world — which became the core of our economy and democracy.

We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed.

We taxed the rich and invested in public goods — public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health — that made us all better off.

In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival. We depended on one another.

But now America is in its Second Gilded Age, and its new robber barons have found the same rationale as they did in the First.

Under Trump and his lapdogs in the House and Senate, Social Darwinism is back.