‘Eugenics’ comes out of the shadows in recent political rhetoric
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On Sept. 2, in a comment from the White House aimed at justifying sending federal troops into Baltimore, President Trump said this about his targets:
“These are hard-core criminals. ...They’re not going to be good. In 10 years, in 20 years, in two years, they’re going to be criminals. They were born to be criminals. Frankly, they were born to be criminals. And they’re tough, and mean, and they’ll cut your throat and they won’t even think about it the next day, and they won’t even remember that they did it and we’re not going to have these people.”
Not a few Americans probably took Trump’s words at face value, given public stereotypes of the urban underworld and the exaggerated fears of urban downtowns that the administration has excited.
But for students of race and class warfare in America, Trump’s words evoked a line from one of the most notorious opinions ever delivered by the Supreme Court: Oliver Wendell Holmes’ decision in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, upholding Virginia’s compulsory sterilization law aimed at the “feeble-minded.”
Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.
— Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, explaining his resignation from the CDC
Holmes wrote of the plaintiff, “Carrie Buck is a feeble minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony. She is the daughter of a feeble minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded child. ... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Holmes’ words were a quintessential expression of “eugenics,” a pseudoscientific notion that social problems can be alleviated by focusing on heredity, and sequestering, forcibly sterilizing or even murdering those whose genetic heritage jeopardizes civilization. In other words, “guilt by geneological association,” biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in 1984.
Eugenics fell out of favor when the Nazis used it to rationalize the Holocaust and other genocidal policies.
But it has come out of the shadows in recent political rhetoric.
“Many eugenic ideas that may have been under the surface for a while are back with a vengeance,” says Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor of English and history at UCLA who is one of our leading historians of the eugenics movement.
Hiltzik: Confronting a racist past, Caltech will excise names of eugenics backers from campus
Having traveled the difficult road of coming to terms with racism in its own past, Caltech on Friday said it would remove the names of Robert A. Millikan and five other important figures in its history from campus.
Trump’s relentless campaign against transgender people (including banning transgender individuals from serving in the military and defunding gender-affirming care coverage in government programs), for instance, has echoes of eugenicists’ traditional hand-wringing about those deemed defectives infiltrating society.
“Eugenics was initially focused on disability, intellectual incapacity, mental illness,” Stern told me. “Now we see the idea that there are ‘fit’ people and there are ‘unfit’ people — there’s a bit of the idea of ‘survival of the fittest,’ that those who have natural immunity will rise to the top and will survive; and for those who before needed to be coddled by the state, that will no longer be an option.”
The implications of this kind of thinking aren’t lost on legitimate scientists.
“The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines favoring natural infection and unproven remedies will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer,” Demetre Daskalakis wrote last month in his resignation letter as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”
Before digging deeper, let’s examine the history of eugenics thinking. I’ve asked the White House and Department of Health and Human Services for comment on the echoes of eugenicist thinking in contemporary government policies but haven’t received replies.
The term “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, who aimed to apply the findings of his cousin, Charles Darwin, to better society. Galton “advocated the regulation of marriage and family size according to hereditary endowment of parents,” Gould noted in his classic 1981 book “The Mismeasure of Man.”
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used discredited and misrepresented studies to justify canceling research into life-giving vaccines.
Eugenics became popular among the educated elite in the 1920s and 1930s. As I reported in 2020, among its advocacy groups was the California-based Human Betterment Foundation, which advocated “eugenic sterilization.” California became one of the first states in the nation to enact a forced sterilization law, in 1909. By 1938 its more than 12,000 involuntary sterilizations accounted for nearly half of all those nationwide.
Among the foundation’s members and trustees were Caltech President Robert A. Millikan; Rufus von KleinSmid, then the president of USC; Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist who pioneered the study of IQ; and Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
Their affiliation with the foundation ultimately became institutional embarrassments. Caltech announced in 2021 the removal of the names of Millikan, Chandler and four other foundation members from its campus. USC removed von KleinSmid’s name from a campus building in 2020.
Current eugenics rhetoric is, like its forebear, fundamentally incoherent. Trump’s targets when he talks about people who are “born to be criminals” are chiefly low-income non-whites, but the conservative campaign against abortion results in fewer low-income women having access to abortion, while the better-heeled are better positioned to find means of terminating their pregnancy.
Justice Clarence Thomas tried to characterize abortion itself as tool of eugenicists in an concurring opinion to an abortion case in 2019, citing what he said was the historical record. But his claim was roundly refuted by experts on eugenics history. In interviews with the Washington Post, they noted that eugenicists were traditionally and overwhelmingly opposed to birth control and abortion.
“They knew that the women who would use it were the type of women they would want to encourage to reproduce, so-called ‘better’ women — upper-middle-class women,” said historian Daniel Kevles.
Today’s eugenic thought does deviate from the version that prevailed in the 1920s.
Like other tedious conspiracy-mongers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is adding antisemitism to his noxious brew of anti-vaccine lies.
“Eugenics, after all, implies the active removal of those thought to be inferior, either through sterilization or outright killing,” observed the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski. “Say what you will about RFK Jr. and the antivaccine movement, it’s difficult to accuse them of actively doing that. What the antivaccine movement does — and has always done — is basically ‘let nature take its course’; i.e., let nature do the culling. The child who survives was ‘fit,’ and the child who doesn’t wasn’t. “
Gorski and others prefer the term “soft eugenics,” which the podcasters Derek Beres and Matt Remski defined as “more of a shrug and sigh than a battle cry,” as when “you hear someone ... talk about only malnourished children dying of measles and healthy children have nothing to worry about.”
The “survival of the fittest” agenda permeates the cutbacks in food stamps, housing and heating assistance, which are based on beliefs about the “undeserving poor” — those who are supposedly lazy, or unmotivated, or greedy.
That’s also the core of the GOP’s efforts to drive “able-bodied” people off the Medicaid rolls — by which they mean beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which brought childless low-income adults into the program. Mehmet Oz, who heads Medicare and Medicaid, asserted on Fox News in July that “Today the average able-bodied person on Medicaid who doesn’t work, they watch 6.1 hours of television or just hang out.”
There’s no factual basis for that assertion. The truth, as detailed by KFF, is that almost all Medicaid recipients who aren’t receiving disability payments of some type or aren’t on Medicare are working (64%), caregiving (12%); sick or disabled (10%); retired or unable to find work (8%); or attending school (7%).
But those facts aren’t what the conservatives want the public to know.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The author argues that recent political rhetoric, particularly from the Trump administration, contains echoes of eugenic thinking when characterizing certain populations as inherently criminal or unfit, drawing parallels to the infamous 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell that upheld forced sterilization laws.
The author contends that policies targeting transgender individuals, promoting “natural immunity” over vaccination, and cutting social programs reflect a “survival of the fittest” mentality rooted in eugenic ideology, with experts noting that eugenic ideas that were previously underground are now resurging with renewed force.
The author suggests that current conservative approaches to Medicaid and social assistance programs are based on unfounded beliefs about the “undeserving poor” being lazy or unmotivated, despite evidence showing that most non-disabled Medicaid recipients are working, caregiving, or attending school.
The author maintains that modern “soft eugenics” operates through allowing “nature to take its course” rather than active elimination, but still reflects the same underlying discriminatory thinking that historically targeted marginalized communities based on perceived genetic inferiority.
Different views on the topic
Some legal scholars and justices argue that certain abortion restrictions actually prevent eugenic practices, with Justice Clarence Thomas contending that reason-based abortion bans serve a compelling state interest in preventing abortion from becoming “a tool of modern-day eugenics,” though this claim has been strongly rejected by reproductive justice advocates[3].
Conservative policy advocates maintain that Medicaid work requirements and social program restrictions promote self-sufficiency and personal responsibility rather than reflecting eugenic thinking, framing these policies as necessary reforms to encourage able-bodied individuals to contribute productively to society rather than depend on government assistance.
Historical eugenics scholars note that traditional eugenicists were actually opposed to birth control and abortion access, arguing that these reproductive choices would primarily be used by upper-middle-class women whom eugenicists wanted to encourage to reproduce, contradicting claims that abortion access itself represents eugenic policy.
Academic institutions and professional organizations emphasize that confronting eugenic legacies requires acknowledgment and institutional reform rather than avoiding difficult historical reckonings, with fields like marriage and family therapy calling for practitioners to take responsibility for past participation in harmful ideologies and commit to anti-racist practice[1][2].
