Derb – My apologies if I made it sound like I thought you didn’t know that stuff. But if I may raise a peeve. I do not like the phrase social Darwinism, and neo-social Darwinism even less. In the 19th century, the “reform Darwinists” used the phrase social Darwinism to denounce a group of people who largely didn’t follow Darwin nor look to him for inspiration. The supposedly social Darwinist “robber barons” of the 19th century simply didn’t care about Darwinism, then an intellectual fad. They looked to the Bible, to the founding and to Adam Smith far more. The guilt-by-association game in which captains of industry were made into racist Darwinians is largely — though not entirely — a myth perpetrated on America by Richard Hoftsadter and others.

Now, Herbert Spencer was a Darwinist, even a “social Darwinist” in the way the Progressives meant the term, i.e. he was a radical libertarian or a “liberal.” In the 20th century, without heed to the arguments they made in the 19th century, the left used the phrase social Darwinism to describe Hitlerite eugenics, and to make Herbert Spencer an intellectual grandfather of Nazism. Even though before the war such eugenics were almost solely the balliwick of the left and Herbert Spencer was almost the diametrical opposite of a Nazi. Regardless, the label stuck on Nazism too. The result has been a term which means both Nazi-like governmental intrusions into society and libertarian-style governmental withdrawals from society. In other words, anything the left doesn’t like can be call “social Darwinism” without penalty.

I see no need in helping the left use the term at no cost. And neo-social Darwinism sounds like it’s borrowing from all the smears on neoconservatism. Surely, we’re clever enough to come up with something fresh.