G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Social Darwinism in American Thought,” describes a fairly wide range of right-wing thought.
But the main guiding principle is a defense of the free market as a moral arbiter, rather than merely a tool for creating wealth.
Just as natural selection allows better-adapted species to thrive and poorly adapted ones to die out, the free market rewards talent and hard work and punishes laziness or lack of talent, in a perfect or near-perfect way.
William Graham Sumner wrote, “'the strong’ and ‘the weak’ are terms which admit of no definition unless they are made equivalent to the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant.”
Conservatives have been echoing that logic repeatedly the last few years. And their embrace of health care as an earned privilege rather than a right actually comes perilously close to endorsing the more radical versions of social Darwinism.
Now, it is true that some social Darwinists took the Darwinian model to its full, literal implications. Others took the idea and applied it in racist ways, and to relations between nations.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/okay-call-republicans-social-darwinists.html?mid=rss
But the main guiding principle is a defense of the free market as a moral arbiter, rather than merely a tool for creating wealth.
Just as natural selection allows better-adapted species to thrive and poorly adapted ones to die out, the free market rewards talent and hard work and punishes laziness or lack of talent, in a perfect or near-perfect way.
William Graham Sumner wrote, “'the strong’ and ‘the weak’ are terms which admit of no definition unless they are made equivalent to the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant.”
Conservatives have been echoing that logic repeatedly the last few years. And their embrace of health care as an earned privilege rather than a right actually comes perilously close to endorsing the more radical versions of social Darwinism.
Now, it is true that some social Darwinists took the Darwinian model to its full, literal implications. Others took the idea and applied it in racist ways, and to relations between nations.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/okay-call-republicans-social-darwinists.html?mid=rss