Robert Reich: The Rebirth of Social Darwinism

[pampango]

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’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 (when) Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties... 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.

http://robertreich.org/post/13567144944

[saras]

1. and along with Social Darwinism inevitably comes eugenics, maybe with a new name

[eShirl]

5. what we have now is kind of a passive eugenics

[deutsey]

2. K&R...Robert Reich is amazing

He could be resting on his laurels in the cozy world of academia in Berkeley, but he's been out fighting for and standing with the 99%.

:thumbsup:

[izquierdista]

3. Repubs can't be for Social Darwinism

Social Creationism, maybe, but Social Darwinism is just a theory and students should be given all the facts before they decide what to believe. :dunce:

[Romulox]

4. Globalism and "free trade" are based on the concept of Economic Darwinism.

From whence do you think the "efficiency" of the world market is derived? Answer: from slashing wages and work conditions in a race to the bottom. :hi:

[pampango]

7. I disagree. The countries with the least economic Darwinism (Canada, Australia, European countries)

have the most globalism and trade (including 'free trade').

The fact is that the developed countries that trade the most also have the most equitable distributions of income, the strongest safety nets and the strongest unions. The US, with relatively little trade compared with progressive countries, as a percentage of the economy has a terrible distribution of income, a tattered safety net and relatively weak unions.

Robert Reich: I think what we're seeing now in America is an outbreak of isolationism, nativism, and xenophobia. The Tea Party is against foreign trade. We are also seeing an outbreak of anti-immigrant sentiment across the country. ... My point is that we are already seeing the hallmarks of the politics of anger and resentment, which led in the 1930s to isolationism. That's very much what worries me.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726575,00.html

Paul Krugman: Every time I read someone talking about the “collapsing welfare states of Europe”, I have this urge to take that person on a forced walking tour of Stockholm. If you believed what the right says, a country with Sweden’s level of both taxes and social benefits should be a wasteland. Strange to say, that’s not what it looks like, to say the least.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/socialist-hellhole-blogging

Trade is 22% of the US economy. It is 78% of the Swedish economy and 49% in Canada.

14.3% of the inhabitants in Sweden are foreign-born. The figure is 11.9% in the US and 18.9% in Canada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrant

In today's world the link between globalism/trade and Darwinism is inverse. The link between Reich's "isolationism, nativism, and xenophobia" and Darwinism is direct.

[Romulox]

8. Nonsense. China, the hub of world trade, is a distopian nightmare. nt

[pampango]

11. China's problems notwithstanding, progressive democracies use trade to promote income equality.

I think we should pattern ourselves more after those progressive democracies than China.

If China is more relevant to some than how progressive democracies handle trade, China's per capita GDP has increased from $250 in 1980 to $7,500 in 2010 and its distribution of income is better than ours though no where near that of the progressive democracies in Canada and Europe.

[Romulox]

12. No, the linchpin of world trade cannot be set aside with "notwithstanding"

when one is defending globalism. :eyes:

"progressive democracies use trade to promote income equality"

OK. But the country with the largest trade deficit in the history of humanity uses trade to promote INequality. That's just reality, utopian capitalism "notwithstanding". :hi:

[jwirr]

6. This the best OP that I have read in a long time. He is absolutely

correct. I first learned about this era from Edwin Black's book "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race". This idea was later picked up by Hitler.

The churches and Tbaggers that get themselves involved in these ideas are so off the track of their basic teachings it is not even funny. And they call us liberal. Ha! They are throwing out the Bible and replacing it with Social Darwinism. They are hypocrites. In fact they are just the kind of idiots that Social Darwinists would have called the weak.

[joeybee12]

9. I hope the term "Regressives" catches on...

A great label.

[Huey P. Long]

10. If OWS gets crushed, more pain ahead. We are abandoned and on our own.

Corporate rule of all parties is in full effect.