GOP hopefuls guided by Social Darwinism (Reich/SF Chron)

[pinto]

Right on point, from Robert Reich in Sunday's Chronicle. ~ pinto

GOP hopefuls guided by Social Darwinism
Robert Reich
San Francisco Chronicle December 11, 2011

Listen carefully to the Republican debates, and you get a view of the type of society many Republicans seek. The last time we had it was in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise. It was also 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 his works 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.

Today's Republican presidential hopefuls sound a lot like Sumner.

(more at)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/11/INCK1M8VJ6.DTL

(ed for attribution)

[KT2000]

1. But in their hearts

they are mean. How lucky for them they found something to rationalize and disguise their contempt and lack of empathy. They are just mean.