Saturday, April 14, 2012

Social Darwinism

The president has tossed this term around lately, so I found the following passage in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism to be as interesting as it is enlightening:
Progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term "social Darwinism" to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb's notion that the state must aggressively "interfere" in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the "unfit" and the poor were the villains for letting a "state of nature" rule among the lower classes.
So if so-called social Darwinists are bad, their progressive opponents can rightly be called social intelligent-designers? No, that doesn't have a creepy "government controls everything" sound to it at all, does it?

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