All this playing “Where’s Waldo” with Spencer is going somewhere. There’s a right-wing critique of the Progressive era that is a response to an earlier critique which looms large in US intellectual history— Richard Hofstadter’s 1944 Social Darwinism in American Thought. He didn’t coin the term, but he did popularize it. While Hofstadter’s own work is complicated and has nuances too broad to go into here, the way it was incorporated into US popular consciousness goes something like this:
- In the Gilded Age, evil rich men needed to justify keeping the public
- They used evolutionary notions of competition to justify laissez-faire.
- Likewise, they believed racial inequality was natural and good.
- Then, reformers emerged, insisting that human beings could do better.
Hofstadter was a critic of capitalism, and writing in 1944, as the New Deal had ended the Depression and was delivering the world from fascism, you can see how this broad arc might arise. Of course, he is hardly wholly or even primarily responsible for this story. It’s one that certain progressives, and then New Deal liberals, told about themselves.
The right has a counter-narrative. Their argument, which you can find in popular form in this essay and in academic monograph form in Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers, goes roughly like this:
- Progressives were eugenicists.
- Their eugenics and economics were both intention-driven state actions.
- All such intervention leads, as Spencer warns, to tyranny (and constitutes it).
- Thus, the liberals are the real fascists.
The stakes of who gets to claim Spencer, what they are claiming, and what Spencer himself actually represented are thus quite high. On the right, Nazism and Communism get lumped together as “totalitarian” big government ideas (or at least they did among the conservative Limbaugh listeners I grew up around; increasingly the right now just explicitly says Nazis are good). In this view, Spencer and the mid-20th century libertarians he helped inspire are heroes. Progressives are villains, junior versions of the later “totalitarians,” whose legacy must be dismantled by the right-thinking libertarian forces of freedom.
This is wrong. Early 20th-century Progressive elites took inspiration directly from Spencer, and specifically from his competitive evolutionary vision. The worst of Progressivism— which right-wing critics can be decent chroniclers of!— came from following the spirit of Spencerism. The best of their program (new legal rights for organized labor, food and drug standards) defied it. Things are nuanced. The same people could support shorter working hours on the railroad and racist immigration restrictions. That does not mean these are the same thing!