The new eugenics

The Trump administration may not operate from an explicit Fascist ideology of “extinction of the inferior races”, but its politics of cruelty and white male iconography invoke disturbing parallels

Übermensch, anyone? Images from a Department of Labor social media campaign

A few months ago, when the Trump administration was busy slashing international aid and vaccine programs despite (or because of) warnings that such moves would expose millions of people around the world to needless disease and death, I asked Dorit Reiss, a public health expert at the University of California San Francisco law school, if she saw any hint of Nazi-era eugenics in the administration’s actions.

I was thinking of the unseemly glee with which Elon Musk had described feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper”; of the perplexing decision to end programs aimed at curbing malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition and AIDS; of the eagerness Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the health and human services secretary, had shown in withdrawing the United States from an international vaccination initiative known as Gavi. Jeremy Faust, a Harvard public health expert, had just called the Gavi pullout “one of the deadliest decisions ever made by any American”. It didn’t seem impossible that someone in the administration had hatched a plan designed to subject the disempowered and dispossessed to some grand Malthusian fantasy of war, hunger and disease.

Reiss, though, said I was giving them too much credit. “These are people who aren’t thinking ahead,” she said. “I don’t think this administration is looking for policy successes… I don’t think they care about the consequences of their actions.”

Fast-forward a few months, and I wonder if we can still say quite the same thing. The administration might not be thinking any more clearly, but the emerging pattern of targeted cruelty nevertheless tells its own story.

Nothing more shocking emerged from the recent government shutdown than the administration’s willingness to starve more than 40 million American adults and children who rely on SNAP benefits for their basic food needs, as a negotiating tactic. The shutdown started, of course, because Trump and his Republican allies wanted to end health care subsidies that, for millions of Americans, spell the difference between being able to afford health insurance and being denied basic medical needs.

And those are just warm-ups for what is to come. Those health subsidies are still set to expire at the end of the year, and the SNAP program is about to endure a series of deep cuts that will deny coverage to most refugees and asylum-seeking immigrants and impose strict new controls on who else is eligible.

The likely consequences are depressingly predictable. People will get sick. People will go hungry. People will die.

In the international arena, that is already happening on a grand scale. According to Brooke Nichols of Boston University, who uses a data tracker to estimate the impact of withdrawing U.S. aid programs, more than 600,000 people around the world have died of preventable causes since January, two-thirds of them children.

It’s tempting to see a pattern here, an underlying ideology that views large segments of the planet’s population — poor, nonwhite, non-English speaking — as a drag and a threat to the administration’s interests. The war on “woke” has certainly produced an iconography in keeping with such a world-view: all idealized muscular white men, to the near-total exclusion of other parts of society, who show up everywhere from military recruitment videos to a recently launched Department of Labor social media campaign (pictured above). It’s not impossible to imagine some extremist philosopher whispering into the president’s ear about the need for drastic cuts to the world population by fair means or foul, perhaps some rebooted version of the panic unleashed by Paul Ehrlich’s notorious 1968 book The Population Bomb which likened the world’s rapidly increasing birth rate to a cancer in urgent need of surgery.

This is where things get complicated, though, because for the most part such an ideological framework has been notable only by its absence. Yes, the administration has made clear it wants to knock the foundations out from the old ruling order, to destroy the “administrative state” and the 80-year-old political consensus that allowed it to take root and thrive. Yes, there is an unmistakable strain of racist animus in certain policy decisions: refusing admittance to all refugees except white South Africans, for example, or removing temporary protected status from migrants fleeing war or similar hardship in places that Trump once gracelessly designated “shithole countries” (Afghanistan, Haiti, South Sudan, Honduras, a handful of others).

Still, the administration has not offered a coherent, overarching explanation for its actions. In Nazi Germany, the superiority of the Aryan race and the campaign to eliminate undesirable elements of society (Jews, homosexuals, those with physical or mental handicaps, and so on) were front and center in Hitler’s daily rhetoric. The horror was clear-eyed and completely intentional.

That said, I don’t that we need a similarly explicit articulation to see just what is going on here. We don’t have to buy the idea that this is strictly about upending the status quo and owning the libs — the closest to an end-goal that Trump world has chosen to express. We can do some of the administration’s thinking for them and infer quite a bit about the deeper impulses behind their actions and where they are leading, intentionally or otherwise.

Trump and his enablers have in fact been startlingly frank about who they intend to go after, which tells us a lot on its own. They do not like immigrants (unless they are white and wealthy). They do not like people from shithole countries. They do not like people who oppose them politically, and they do not care who gets crushed as they engineer their latest drastic wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich.

They have also made it plain that they are absorbing a variety of extremist ideologies from the far-right ecosystem that animates the MAGA base, ideologies that show up regularly in public statements by cabinet members and government department leaders, in news releases, legal filings, and any number of other outlets. At the fringes, it must be said, those ideologies take unapologetic inspiration from the Nazis, up to and including theories of racial supremacy and the invocation of genocide as a chilling logical endpoint for those regarded as inferior.

Take immigration, the touchstone of Trump’s political identity and the theme that launched his presidential career. Lurking behind many of his alarmist pronouncements about an alien invasion “poisoning the blood of our country” is the Great Replacement Theory, the zero-sum notion developed in France and since embraced by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon that the latest waves of nonwhite immigrants pose a direct threat to the future of white people on either side of the Atlantic. Adherents of the theory aren’t just fanning fears that immigrants are taking American jobs or taking advantage of social services or committing crimes; they are saying it is quite literally us or them. David Lane, a white supremacist warrior from the 1980s who spent the latter part of his life in prison, remains the country’s most influential propagator of this sort of thinking, thanks to his infamous and enduring 14-word mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Lane didn’t hesitate to cast this call to arms in terms of genocide, the only twist to his argument being that, in his view, it was white people who were at risk of being wiped out and needed to act hastily to prevent it.

Much closer to the administration — and, unlike Lane, still very much alive — is Curtis Yarvin, a techno-nihilist thinker-blogger influential with Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, in turn, is close to Vice President J.D. Vance. Yarvin has been arguing since the dawn of the Obama era in favor of an enlightened despot who would run the United States as a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation that has shed all pretense of democracy or social equity.

Yarvin believes that such a shift would create what he calls “decivilized populations”, large swathes of humanity he would put in prison or — taking his inspiration from the Matrix movies — hook up to a virtual-reality interface giving them the illusion of a happy life while in reality they are siloed and “waxed like a bee larva” in sealed cells. He describes this arrangement as “the best humane alternative to genocide I can think of”.

Elsewhere, Yarvin has imagined turning the San Francisco underclass into biodiesel to fuel the city’s buses, foaming people “like turkeys with bird flu”, and relocating the entirety of Gaza’s Palestinian population as the only viable alternative to killing them. (“If blood and soil cannot be separated, this means Gaza needs to be genocided,” he warned in a blog that Trump appears to have noticed because he later borrowed Yarvin’s idea of redeveloping Gaza as a luxury beach resort.)

Yarvin positions himself as a Nazi tease more than the real thing — he generally takes care to pull back from his darkest imaginings. Still, his arguments are all about separating the world out into a privileged elite, who help themselves to everything, and the expendable rest. How much of a tease is that, really? Much the same might be asked of the Telegram feed, leaked last month, in which influential young Republicans joked about Jews and gas chambers and being “ready to watch people burn”. Playing Nazi dress-up is only so funny when real power is in the offing and the man in the Oval Office is unafraid to wield it.

Eugenics, we should remember, was not a Nazi invention. It was a pseudo-science developed in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 19^th century to justify the mass slaughter of native populations in distant colonies and, in the United States, the eradication of native American tribes during the westward expansion. Men and women who regarded themselves as enlightened were induced to believe that the extermination of “inferior races” was a mark of civilizational progress, and that those doing the exterminating were instruments of a guiding providential hand.¹

To listen to Trump and his circle talking about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” is to realize we are back where we were almost 200 years ago, when Charles Darwin described the clash of old world and the new as an existential struggle in which there could be only one winner.

“When two races of men meet,” Darwin wrote in his journal in 1838, “they act precisely like two species of animals – they fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other, but then comes the most deadly struggle, namely which have the best fitted organization, or instincts… to gain the day.” This is Trump’s zero-sum world exactly.

Weren’t we in the west supposed to be long past all this? The madness of Hitler’s killing machine and the collapse of the colonial order at the end of World War Two shocked the great powers out of their eugenicist fantasies and brought about an entirely different concept of international relations, one that aspired to universal values and respect for the life and dignity of every human being. The advent of vaccines and other medical advances — the scientific enlightenment that RFK Jr. has now made his enemy — meant that Europeans and Americans could, for the first time, travel to remote corners of the world without the risk of spreading diseases to which the local population had no immunity and wiping out large numbers of them. Modern technology, transportation and free trading practices made the world more interconnected and forced us to understand that, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., we either learn to “live together as brothers or perish together as fools”.

It is this postwar vision of a more hopeful, less fractious world that Trump and his ilk are furiously seeking to undo. In their mind, the real fools are the ones who’d believe in such a concept. Eugenics might not be the word they use to define their approach, but they are dragging us back to it anyway because they see life as a gladiator fight in which there is no winning without a lot of blood on the arena floor.

In 1893, the American eugenicist historian Frederick Jackson Turner described the western frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” and cheered on the fight to eliminate “the wild man”. That’s where Donald Trump believes we are living all over again. We can only hope we are smarter now about who is doing the savaging, and what kind of civilization we believe is worth fighting for.

1. For an excellent discussion of the many ways in which Nazi ideology was rooted in mainstream western thinking of the time, see Enzo Traverso’s The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York, The New Press, 2003). I borrowed the quotes from Darwin and Turner from Traverso’s research.