Dreams from his eugenicists

National Review, March 10, 2008 by Jonah Goldberg

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LAST year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman started a big debate by waxing righteous about the Republican party's allegedly racist past. He charged that Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign was born in racism and that the Gipper's admirers have been tainted ever since as a result. The lynchpin of his argument: Shortly after he was nominated at the GOP convention, Reagan gave a 15-minute speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss. (It was in Philadelphia that, 16 years earlier, three civil-rights activists had been murdered by segregationist thugs.)

The speech was almost entirely about economics--Jimmy Carter's failed policies and the like--and was delivered in Reagan's typically jovial style. Somewhere along the way he also said that he favored states' rights--something he'd said many times before, and would say many times after. But, as you may know, "states' rights" is an abracadabra phrase. It magically reveals that the speaker wants to make black folk drink from separate water fountains.

I bring this up because, on the night Barack Obama won the "Chesapeake primary," he held a victory rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, at which he declared: "And where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the progressive movement was born?"

Now some readers may be aware that I recently wrote a book arguing that American progressives shared emotional, philosophical, and political affinities with European fascists. But put that aside. Let us instead ask: What did the progressives at the University of Wisconsin believe in?

The president of the university during its heyday as the laboratory of progressivism was Charles Van Hise. A devoted eugenicist, he explained that "he who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot." Additionally, "we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation."

The most famous intellectual at the University of Wisconsin was arguably E. A. Ross, coiner of the phrase "race suicide" and one of America's leading "raceologists." "The theory that races are virtually equal in capacity," quoth Ross, "leads to such monumental follies as lining the valleys of the South with the bones of half a million picked whites in order to improve the condition of four million unpicked blacks."

Ross was hardly alone. Virtually all of the economic policies Obama favors today can be traced back to the efforts of academics at the University of Wisconsin, who helped create the modern welfare state, but did so in the hope of weeding out the dark, the dusky, and the otherwise unfit from the white man's genetic garden. The politics of these progressive intellectuals conformed perfectly to the worst caricatures of George W. Bush. They instituted loyalty oaths, accused opponents of World War I of treason, and saw in militarism the best hope for organizing society.

Reagan was no racist for supporting states' rights; he was a lover of freedom. And Obama is no villain for proclaiming his indebtedness to the progressives at the University of Wisconsin. But the question remains: Why am I a racist because Ronald Reagan believed in federalism, while Barack Obama is an idealist for invoking a bunch of jingoists, racists, and eugenicists who could not have fathomed that anyone with Barack Obama's skin color might be qualified for the White House?