On a sunny March day in 2017, I navigated a crowd of protestors to get to my constitutional studies class. As an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, I took a politics/history course each semester to provide contrast with my major coursework in neuroscience. The intro politics courses were as stilted as one may expect from the institution which gave us Amy Coney Barrett.1
(Socially, I was still trying to fit in as a man. My egg would crack 3 years later.)
My professor had invited a guest lecturer to address the topic of “inequality” for our class and the campus community: Charles Murray, co-author of the overtly racist 1994 work of pseudo-scholarship The Bell Curve.The Bell Curve argues that human intelligence (conflated with race and class status) exists on a normal distribution (the titular bell curve) and that these differences are rooted in a form of natural selection which places white men as the powerful elite. It is a deplorable work of race science and an explicit justification for the system of cis/heteronormative, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.
Twenty-three years after The Bell Curve was published, my professor deemed Murray as a critical thinker to address Trump’s (first) election win. It was the intellectual version of the mainstream media reporters showing up at Ohio diners to understand the concerns of Trump voters.
As Black student groups organized a protest of Murray’s lecture, my professor continued to argue that this was a valuable use of our class time. He even went on Tucker Carlson’s show to double down, saying that Murray was chosen because he is controversial and in the name of getting students in his my class to think more deeply about “inequality.”
I thought about skipping class that day, but my professor was taking attendance (which he never did when he was giving the lecture). I begrudgingly attended - which I am not proud of. I wish I didn’t give my time to someone who regularly cites neo-Nazis, and at the time I didn’t recognize that my physical presence gave legitimacy to Murray’s campus visit. I regret that choice.
If anything, the lecture cemented the extent to which racist eugenics has been a vocal constituent of right-wing American politics for much longer than Trump’s political career.
It’s been eight years since then. I sometimes think of those years as a distillation of myself, keeping the base core but unlearning the parts that are opposed to my professed values. I hope that remaining core is better than the parts I shed.
Trumpism has changed a lot, too. I think that it has also been distilled over that time. But instead of keeping the good parts, it has been enriched with rot. The eugenic base which platformed Murray in 2017 has morphed into the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
Eugenics is a word that gets thrown around but is rarely defined. A mere translation of the word from its Greek roots (“good genes”) doesn’t quite capture all that eugenic ideologies encompass today. Contemporary eugenicists may avoid speaking of “genes” to obfuscate valid critiques of their eugenic beliefs. Here, I want to elaborate the genetic beliefs of eugenicists to then demonstrate how the concept has expanded to encompass a modern political worldview.
A genes-obsessed eugenicist believes that human traits can be rendered to a simplistic genetic and predictive basis (i.e. genetic determinism) and that these differences represent natural selection of humans in action. Adherents make the jump between those two ideas because genetic differences are “natural” and therefore a reflection of *waves hands* a higher force guiding human history (could be evolution, could be god, etc.). Thus, one’s genes determine one’s behavior which determines one’s “natural” social standing.2
For his part, Donald Trump is very enthusiastic about this explicit brand of eugenics. Look no further than his Truth Social rant during this year’s NFL draft decrying “stupid” team owners for passing on quarterback Shedeur Sanders. Sanders,3 according to Trump, has “PHENOMENAL GENES” because his father Deion Sanders is an NFL Hall of Famer (who also played nine MLB seasons). The ideology is simple, stupid, and a slippery slope into overt racism à la Murray.
Speaking of Murray, you may already be connecting the dots that places him as a transitional figure toward the somewhat more shrouded form of modern eugenics. If the original construction was that genes determine behavior which determines social status, then Murray, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and their ilk mostly stop talking about genes but keep the underlying logic structure intact.
Take, for example, Kennedy’s recent response to a question from Fox host Brett Baier about the ongoing measles outbreak which has already claimed the lives of 3 children. Kennedy, the head of the United States’ health agencies, simply said that “only very, very sick kids should die from measles.”
Well Bobby, is there anything we can do to prevent kids from getting very, very sick with measles? (Yes, vaccinate your children!)
Kennedy’s framing is subtly eugenic. To him, the kids who get very, very sick and die probably had some other condition (or perhaps even a genetic predisposition) which made them broadly unfit. This is the quiet part that Kennedy tries to not say out loud.
Regardless, it’s a heartless stance. But, I have no doubt that he and his anti-vax stooges Jay Bhattacharya (NIH director) and Marty Makary (FDA commissioner) will say the same when COVID infections and deaths spike because they have limited the use of COVID vaccines to those older than 65 and those at risk of serious illness. (Despite their claims, this approach is not “evidence-based.”)
Once elaborated, you may start to recognize the cruel logic structure in unexpected places. I experienced this recently with news that Elon Musk’s data center in Memphis is polluting the air in low-income, predominately Black neighborhoods. At a recent public hearing, one resident bluntly asked “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”
Musk hasn’t answered this question, but it doesn’t take much to read between the lines: By virtue of their including both race and class, these Memphis residents are expendable whereas his pet projects are not.
Don’t just take my word for it. The Memphis data center is tasked with running Musk’s AI chatbot Grok. Recently, Grok started spewing falsehoods about “white genocide” in Musk’s native South Africa. When pressed, Grok admits that its algorithm has been modified to fixate on this bit of gutter racism.
Eugenics serves those in power by using pseudoscience to validate the "elite,” contrary to what my former professor may believe. As such, those with social power are most susceptible to eugenic ideologies. Racism and cissexism are reserves of social power, and Trumpism has capitalized on this to fuel the spread of eugenic ideologies. The result is the MAHA movement, which has been recuperated into a broader set of political grievances rooted in white supremacy.
As a rule, fascism channels these inequalities to gain power and uses that power to protect capital. Eugenics fits neatly within the fascist political project. At its core, eugenics provides a “natural” justification of the inequality in human society. A corollary of this foundation is that out-groups deserve the fate that they end up with.
A key illustration of this is the spending bill that recently passed the House of Representatives. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill will cause 10 million low-income Americans to lose health insurance by 2035 by cutting funding for Medicaid, partly by creating stricter work requirements.
What kind of twisted logic claims that someone’s employment status determines whether they deserve medical care? The logic of capital (which doesn’t want to spend money on people who aren’t contributing to capital accumulation) and of eugenics (which values human lives based on status).
In this bill, eugenic ideologies are also at work deciding which types of health care should be covered by insurance. The same spending bill has come to the conclusion that gender affirming care is not worthy of coverage. The version that passed the House blocks Medicaid funding from being used for gender affirming care at any age and prevents plans offered on Affordable Care Act exchanges from offering gender affirming care as an essential health benefit.4
These provisions target trans people simply for being trans. Cis people will be able to continue to receive coverage for the same care. For trans people ,this care is life-saving, but the thrust of the argument is that trans people are undeserving. When faced with the mortal outcomes of these policies, eugenicists will be surely claim that this fate was deserved.
There’s so many more facets of eugenics in the current administration that I have not gotten to, including Kennedy Jr.’s autism registry and right-wing obsessions with birth rates. I hope to return to these in the near future, but I hope that this piece illustrates the logic of contemporary eugenics so that you can start naming these biases as they pop up in the news or in conversations. These undercurrents have gone largely unnoticed for far too long, and we must not let them continue to proliferate.