What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I've been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.
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 -- eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, "securing" the nation's borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.
They 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 backwards -- before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.
They're not conservatives. They're regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.
It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. Robber barons like the financier Jay Gould, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, controlled much of American industry; the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; children worked long hours in factories; women couldn't vote and black Americans were subject to Jim Crow; and the lackeys of rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators.
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. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's 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?
Newt Gingrich not only echoes Sumner's thoughts but mimics Sumner's reputed arrogance. Gingrich says we must reward "entrepreneurs" (by which he means anyone who has made a pile of money) and warns us not to "coddle" people in need. He calls laws against child labor "truly stupid," and says poor kids should serve as janitors in their schools. He opposes extending unemployment insurance because, he says, "I'm opposed to giving people money for doing nothing."
Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed "negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent."
Mitt Romney doesn't want the government to do much of anything about unemployment. And he's dead set against raising taxes on millionaires, relying on the standard Republican rationale millionaires 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."
Other Republican hopefuls also fit Sumner's mold. Ron Paul, who favors repeal of Obama's healthcare plan, was asked at a Republican debate in September what medical response he'd recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma. Paul's response: "That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks." The Republican crowd cheered.
In other words, if the young man died for lack of health insurance, he was responsible. Survival of the fittest.
Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, 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 twentieth century did America reject Social Darwinism. We created the large middle class that 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.
But make no mistake: If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
In the end the Puritan's had a strong belief that to work hard was Godly. So go to a real school where they don't feed you all that revisionist history garbage. You are being brainwashed.
Not the pride that is a feeling of satisfaction derived from one's own achievements or the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated.
The sin of Pride: inordinate self-esteem; an unreasonable conceit of one's own superiority in talents, beauty, wealth, rank, etc.: the inner conviction that you believe that you are superior to others.
American Exceptionalism is a symptom of our arrogance.
Pride is the sin from which all other sins arise. When we put ourselves above others we completely lose sense of right and wrong. Just because I am smart enough to figure out a legal way to amass wealth doesn't mean it is right.
When we value everything including people by some monetary unit, we have lost our way. Pride allows the poor to starve and the sick to go without medicine because we believe they are undeserving. It is sad that we have so many socially acceptable ways to condone a pathological lack of empathy. Compassion is a virtue, not a sin.
Better to be lowly in spirit and among the oppressed than to share plunder with the proud. Proverbs 16:19
The LORD Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for all that is exalted (and they will be humbled). Isaiah 2:12
We are squeezed between traditional Gilded Age plutocrats and a version of the Krupps (eg, Cheney, Rummy), who profit from our war machine. Rather than being a bio-deterministic apologia or the status quo modern Social Darwinism serves a cabal of multi-national corporations feasting at the public trough. The propaganda machine has dumbed down voters to a state of passive acceptance of exploitation and manipulated resentment towards others in similar circumstances. We have been engaged in an argument over whose end of the lifeboat has the leak. Wake up America!
America's greatest security comes from making friends around the world, not in preventing illegal immigration or even terrorist attacks. If we are good to our neighbors, far and wide, people in those countries will have no inclination to do us harm.
A great battle cry of the Republicans used when we are militarily engaged (at war) elsewhere is that America should not be involved in "nation-building". Well, it is within nation-building that our greatest security lies, in helping other nations to solve their problems with poverty, hunger, sanitation, disease management, education, and with other problems that they cannot adequately handle on their own.
I’m thinking about when Galileo first suggested that the earth revolved around the sun and was almost killed by the Church.
Quite simply, I'd like to see what merit you find in such a social philosophy, as in my opinion, Social Darwinism is even more ruthless than natural selection.
"gilded (adjective ): covered thinly with gold leaf or gold paint"
in other words, fake - not really gold. maybe keep that in mind when touting the advantages of that time in our history.
And it never quite addressed or resolved the problems that the social progressives were critical of during the Gilded Age... in fact things have become much worse.
Over the past 20 years this has begun to change to a belief of I've got mine and if you don't too bad. You see it with Newt when he thinks inner city kids should be given the janitor's job at school because in his mind that is all they could ever be.
By as the income gap is widening and many have been pushed down into the ranks of the working poor this will soon change. People are becoming fed up with a system that is rigged and no longer offers opportunity.
...
Who says Social Darwinism ever went away?
Different words used to justify; same basic agenda.