The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again

The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also wrote a tribute to Sarah Palin in 2009, gushing that her candidacy had made the “ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad.” (There’s a lot going on there.)

“White nationalism,” Hanania wrote as “Hoste,” is “the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.”

Two days after Mathias’s story, Hanania responded, stating, “Over a decade ago I held many beliefs that, as my current writing makes clear, I now find repulsive.” He rejected Mathias’s characterization of his “creepy obsession with so-called race science” as “dishonest,” insisting that he does not believe that Black people are “inherently more prone to violent crime” than white people.  

[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

People can and do change, even those with extreme views like these, but there’s not much evidence that happened here. As the writer Jonathan Katz notes, Hanania recently wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits,” in an angry tweet about the Black district attorney of Manhattan indicting a white man who strangled a homeless Black man on the subway.

It is understandable that Hanania prefers to present himself as a mainstream, respectable intellectual than as a creep interested in the attractiveness of cartoon characters and the genitalia of the Founding Fathers. The eagerness of some of his allies to accept his rather superficial apology—Katz notes that Substack CEO Chris Best praised him for “an honest post on a difficult subject”—is a little more puzzling. As Mathias writes, Hanania’s genetic determinism appears to be popular among wealthy Silicon Valley types, several of whom have blurbed his forthcoming book arguing that civil-rights laws should be dismantled.

Buried in Hanania’s statement responding to Mathias’s reporting is a crucial tell about his ideological project, and why his response is formatted like an apology even though it is not one. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races,” Hanania wrote.

As Hanania knows perfectly well, “acknowledging statistical differences between races” is not a controversial idea on the left. In fact, it’s central to the egalitarianism he opposes. He has elsewhere defined wokeness in part as the idea that “any disparities in outcomes favoring whites over non-whites or men over women are caused by discrimination.” The implication that his critics rightfully find abhorrent is that those statistical differences are biologically determined by race and therefore reflect an inferiority that is inherent and immutable to state interventions. Being coy about this, instead framing the conflict as a liberal reluctance to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, suggests that his views haven’t changed much at all, and that his vague repudiation of them is little more than an attempt to preserve the mainstream credibility he’s accumulated since his days railing against “race mixing” pseudonymously.

One explanation for the resurgence of scientific racism—what the psychologist Andrew S. Winston defines as the use of data to promote the idea of an “enduring racial hierarchy”—is that some very rich people are underwriting it. Mathias notes that “rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania.” As the biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks tells the science reporter Angela Saini in her book Superior, “There are powerful forces on the right that fund research into studying human differences with the goal of establishing those differences as a basis of inequalities.”

There is no great mystery as to why eugenics has exerted such a magnetic attraction on the wealthy. From god emperors, through the divine right of kings, to social Darwinism, the rich have always sought an uncontestable explanation for why they have so much more money and power than everyone else. In a modern, relatively secular nation whose inequalities of race and class have been shaped by slavery and its legacies, the justifications tend toward the pseudoscience of an unalterable genetic aristocracy with white people at the top and Black people at the bottom.

“The lay concept of race does not correspond to the variation that exists in nature,” the geneticist Joseph L. Graves wrote in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. “Instead, the American concept of race is a social construction, resulting from the unique political and cultural history of the United States.”

Because race is a social reality, genuine disparities among ethnic groups persist in measures such as education and wealth. Contemporary believers in racial pseudoscience insist these disparities must necessarily have a genetic explanation, one that happens to correspond to shifting folk categories of race solidified in the 18th century to justify colonialism and enslavement. They point to the external effects of things like war, poverty, public policy, and discrimination and present them as caused by genetics. For people who have internalized the logic of race, the argument may seem intuitive. But it is just astrology for racists.

“The claims that genetics defines racial groups and makes them different, that IQ and cultural differences among racial groups are caused by genes, and that racial inequalities within and between nations are the inevitable outcome of long evolutionary processes are neither new nor supported by science (either old or new),” write Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, and Nicole Iturriaga in their study of how white nationalists weaponize genetics online. “They’re the basic, tired evergreens of ancient racist thought.”

Race is a sociopolitical category, not a biological one. There is no genetic support for the idea that humans are divided into distinct races with immutable traits shared by others who have the same skin color. Although qualified geneticists have debunked the shoddy arguments of race scientists over and over, the latter maintain their relevance in part by casting substantive objections to their assumptions, methods, and conclusions as liberal censorship. There are few more foolproof ways to get Trump-era conservatives to believe falsehoods than to insist that liberals are suppressing them. Race scientists also understand that most people can evaluate neither the pseudoscience they offer as proof of racial differences nor the actual science that refutes it, and will default to their political sympathies.

Three political developments helped renew this pseudoscience’s appeal. The first was the election of Barack Obama, an emotional blow to those adhering to the concept of racial hierarchy from which they have yet to recover. Then came the rise of Bernie Sanders, whose left-wing populism blamed the greed of the ultra-wealthy for the economic struggles of both the American working class and everyone in between. Both men—one a symbol of racial equality, the other of economic justice—drew broad support within the increasingly liberal white-collar workforce from which the phrenologist billionaires of Big Tech draw their employees. The third was the election of Donald Trump, itself a reaction to Obama and an inspiration to those dreaming of a world where overt bigotry does not carry social consequences.

Theories developed from this pseudoscience provide both a justification of contemporary racial and economic hierarchies and an enemy to rail against. If racial disparities are innate, then promoters of equality are to blame for society’s ills. Although genetic determinists occasionally pay lip service to the idea of “equal rights,” their core claim is that certain groups of people are better than others. Ultimately this logic leads to the idea that certain “races” are beasts of burden unfit for higher thinking, meant to toil with their hands while their betters take their rightful place as a genetic overclass.

This is bigotry elevated into ideology, a view of the world in which racial hierarchy explains everything. Most people, including most rank-and-file Republicans who think liberals are prone to oversensitivity, find this kind of racism repulsive when it is made explicit, properly distinguishing it from common prejudice, which is why so much rhetorical deception is involved in advancing it.  

The lure of this logic for the right is obvious: If you want to argue against the state intervening to rectify racial, gender, or economic inequalities, it is simpler to say that the people the state would be helping are biologically inferior, and therefore nothing can realistically be done. If you accept the scientific fact that race is not a biological distinction, then you are left to argue instead that particular policies are flawed in one way or the other. That is often true, but it’s a more complicated claim, and it doesn’t come with the satisfaction of asserting your natural, immutable superiority over others and justifying your social position as an inevitability.

Scientific racism is little more than a resurrection of slaveholder ideology given an empirical sheen. As the proslavery congressman James Henry Hammond declared in his 1850s “Cotton Is King” speech, “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” When Hanania wrote that “even if groups differ in skills or cognitive abilities, we can all still benefit from the division of labor,” he offered a not-so-subtle restatement of this idea. Note that he refers not to “people” or “individuals” but “groups.” Woe to those born into the wrong caste!

This genetic determinism doesn’t just diminish the impact of past oppression; it valorizes it—rendering slavery, segregation, and genocide but the natural consequences of a genetic underclass meeting its betters. The government has no reason, then, to rectify past crimes or resolve present inequalities; they are simply what happens when one group of people is superior to another. The Confederate veteran John T. Morgan summarized this logic in 1890: “The inferiority of the negro race, as compared with the white race, is so essentially true, and so obvious, that, to assume it in argument, cannot be justly attributed to prejudice.” Even the white-supremacist ideologues of the 1890s denied they were racist.

In Superior, Saini describes the stubborn appeal of racist pseudoscience:

Those committed to the biological reality of race won’t back down if the data prove them wrong. There’s no incentive for them to admit intellectual defeat. They will just keep reaching for fresher, more elaborate theories when the old ones fail. If skin color doesn’t explain racial inequality, then maybe the structure of our brains and bodies will. If not anatomy, then maybe our genes. When then this, too, produces nothing of value, they will reach for the next thing. All this intellectual jumping through hoops to maintain the status quo. All this to prove what they have always really wanted to know: that they are superior.

Even for those who lack wealth and status, being a member of an unjustly subjugated genetic overclass has its appeal: Your dream job? A supermodel-like girlfriend? The jealousy and admiration of your friends and colleagues? You should have all those things, as a white man, except that the Woke State took them from you. What W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of whiteness has value for the wealthy and deprived alike. As the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes, this “has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States—to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status.” Those non-elites who embrace genetic determinism rarely seem to notice that the implications of these genetic theories are as classist as they are racist—and that, by those implications, they are also inferior. Understandably, race science enthusiasts are not eager to remind them.

People like Hanania are foot soldiers in an effort to revive this ideological project, which is so important to his allies and supporters that they help maintain his respectability by occluding his actual beliefs. They don’t want civil-rights laws that would level the playing field, or policies that would erode the privileges they’ve inherited. Of course if you are really genetically superior, you do not require a society built on that premise. You seek to create one because, on some level, you know you are not.

A number of wealthy donors never lost their interest in the false empiricism that would justify their position in society, but social media helped it spread. An article in the journal Nature suggests that the use of social media to promote scientific racism has risen since 2016 and skyrocketed during the Trump years. Ostentatious racism and sexism make people on the left mad, which which prompts them to spread those ideas widely in an effort to refute them, and hyperpolarization does the rest: If it makes the left mad, then it must be good and correct, and the more outrageous the views, the bigger the audience. This process seems to have helped scientific racism, white nationalism, and anti-Semitism infect the conservative movement more broadly. Such things are no longer consigned to the fringe.

In June, the pro-Trump conservative outlet Breitbart published text messages from the conservative columnist and Ron DeSantis supporter Pedro Gonzalez in which he called nonwhite people uncivilized and said, “Not every Jew is problematic, but the sad fact is that most are.” Gonzalez later apologized, saying, “You do not have to think about things seriously when you can just engage in performative bigotry at collectives.” In July, DeSantis’s presidential campaign fired Nate Hochman, a conservative writer, after Axios reported that he had inserted a Nazi symbol into a campaign video; Hochman had previously offered qualified praise of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes (which he later apologized for). Young conservatives obsess over the arguments of corny, self-important far-right influencers who “believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”

Overt racism in private conversations among young conservatives is so widespread that the Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium recently wrote on Twitter, “Whenever I’m on a career advice panel for young conservatives, I tell them to avoid group chats that use the N-word or otherwise blur the line between edgelording and earnest bigotry.” This phenomenon is not the problem of one person; it is simply the water that ambitious young conservatives are swimming in.

[Adam Serwer: Why conservatives invented a ‘right to post’]

At the turn of the 20th century, wealthy bigots financed the eugenics movement to provide a scientific-sounding rationalization for a racial hierarchy that placed them at the top. The arguments have not changed, even if the targets have. The insistence that certain people are genetically inferior; that they should be sterilized, prevented from immigrating, or relegated by law to subservience; that the American ideals of liberty and democracy are only compatible with the superior genetic stock of Europeans—we’ve heard all this before. The logic of racial difference leads to arguments for racial “purity,” and arguments for racial purity lead inexorably to genocidal violence, whether at a small or existential scale. There is a reason the manifestos of white-supremacist mass shooters are brimming with misappropriated genetic science aggregated from the cesspools of the internet.  

Of course it’s nonsense—racial categories are recent inventions, inconsistent over time and from place to place. The examples we’ve been discussing illustrate the point. Gonzalez is Hispanic (a census category adopted in 1970 that can apply to people who can trace their ancestors to South America, Spain, Japan, or West Africa), Hochman is Jewish (Jews were targeted by eugenicists in the immigration restrictions of the 1920s), and Hanania is of Palestinian background (Syrians, another group of Levantine Arabs, were declared “white persons” by U.S. courts “in 1909, 1910, and 1915, but not in 1913 or 1914.”) Perhaps diversity is a strength.

How the mighty Klansman has fallen! He can no longer even rely on Madison Grant’s “Nordics” to preach the gospel of the superiority of the white man, a task that must now fall to those whose social and legal status as white has historically shifted with the power dynamics and cultural prejudices of the day.

The descendants of those targeted by a previous generation of eugenicists embracing the racism of the men who condemned their forefathers as genetically unfit is—well, let’s just say the engine of American assimilation is efficient, despite what you might have heard from these same people. Sadly, the idea that Black people are subhuman and the claim that men are better than women draw a broader coalition of people than you might expect—there are few more integrative forces in American history than anti-Black racism, and few more cross-cultural maladies than sexism.

Many middle-aged conservatives seem unaware of how steeped in scientific racism the next generation of conservative activists is. They are so prone to dismissing liberal accusations of bigotry as hysterical smears that they lack the ability to identify the real thing—let alone contain its spread. A notable exception is Michael Lind at the right-wing journal Compact, who published a thorough criticism of what he called the “eugenicons.” But his is a relatively lonely voice of criticism from the right.

The conservative writer David French has called those caught up in the resurgence of far right ideas “the lost boys of the American right.” The metaphor is inapt. The Lost Boys of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan were stolen and reared without parents in Neverland. Today’s “lost boys” were raised by the American conservative movement; they are no one’s lost children. They are merely putting to work the values they were taught by a party too busy fighting an apocalyptic war against the left to realize what kind of children they were raising, and what kind of movement they were creating.