PrintMay 6, 2012
If Conservatives Are Social Darwinists, Then...
That President Obama certainly has a way with words. The other day he called Paul Ryan's House-passed budget "thinly veiled social Darwinism." Does he mean that Ryan's budget is wearing a burqa? Anyway, he prompted Catholic Rep. Ryan (R-WI) to take his budget to Georgetown University, where the congressman lectured the profs at that Catholic university about solidarity and subsidiarity on the off-chance they hadn't been reading their papal encyclicals.
Social Darwinism has been an all-purpose pejorative ever since the thinly-veiled anathematist Richard Hofstadter wrote Social Darwinism in American Thought in the 1940s. He also wrote Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. So you can see what he was all about. Today we would call him a thinly-veiled enemy of civility. But his writing obviously had its intended effect. In Freethinkers, a mindless liberal screed about secularism, Susan Jacoby anathematizes Herbert Spencer, "who applied...(Read Full Article)
