If it looks like Social Darwinism it is Social Darwinism

[malaise]

That's what it is Paul Ryan and Willard RMoney.

Psssssssssst - they are terrified of the label and it's a great label.

[saras]

1. It's more like Social Lamarckism, but that's too subtle for politics

[Fool Count]

2. Well, according to David Brooks of NYTimes Social Darwinism is

"a 19th-century philosophy that held, in part, that Aryans and Northern Europeans are racially superior to brown and Mediterranean peoples". Silly me, all that time I thought that what he describes was just called "racism". Poor Darwin. What did he do to deserve such association, if only in the minds of half-educated conservative commentators?

[malaise]

3. Actually Social Darwinism was used to cover a variety of linked

reactionary views.

[Fool Count]

4. That very well it may have, but the particular aspect described by Brooks

is properly called "racism" and have no essential link to Social Darwinism. Just
because some Social Darwinists were also racists doesn't equate one and the
other. Just like Natzism and Catolicism are not the same thing just because
Hitler was Catolic. Most social Darwinists were and are not racist. Or at least
Pretending not to be, like Paul Ryan.