and German national socialists. Ross studied in Germany and then returned to the United States, where he finished his studies among the Germanophiles of Johns Hopkins and under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Ely.
A great bear of a man, Ross was an omnipresent public intellectual, writing for all the right magazines and giving lectures at all the right schools. He served as a tutor on immigration issues to Teddy Roosevelt, who was kind enough to write the introduction to Ross's
Such views didn't stop Ross from getting a prominent appointment at Stanford. Stanford's conservative grande dame and benefactor, Jane Lanthrop Stanford, however, disliked not only his politics and his activism but also his increasingly loud and crude denunciations of Chinese 'coolies.' She forced the president of the school, David Starr Jordan — himself an avid eugenicist — to fire Ross.
The faculty erupted in outrage. Professors resigned. Progressive academics and organizations, led by Richard Ely's American Economic Association, rallied to his cause. The
It is telling that while we constantly hear about America's racist past and our need to redeem ourselves via racial quotas, slavery reparations, and other overtures toward 'historically oppressed groups,' it is rare indeed that anyone mentions the founders of American liberalism. Again, when liberals are the historical villains, the crime is laid at the feet of America itself. The crime is considered proof of America's conservative past. When conservatives sin, the sin is conservatism's alone. But never is liberalism itself to blame.
Consider the infamous Tuskegee experiments, where poor black men were allegedly infected with syphilis without their knowledge and then monitored for years. In the common telling, the episode is an example of southern racism and American backwardness. In some versions, black men were even deliberately infected with syphilis as part of some kind of embryonic genocidal program. In fact, the Tuskegee experiments were approved and supported by well-meaning health professionals who saw nothing wrong or racist with playing God. As the University of Chicago's Richard Shweder writes, the 'study emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and wellbeing of the African-American population.' If racism played a part, as it undoubtedly did, it was the racism of liberals, not conservatives. But that's not how the story is told.
I'm not saying that people who once called themselves progressives were racist and therefore those who call themselves progressives today are racist, too. Rather, the point is that the edifice of contemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist moment. Contemporary liberals, who may be the kindest and most racially tolerant people in the world, nonetheless choose to live in a house of distinctly fascist architecture. Liberal ignorance of this fact renders this fascist foundation neither intangible nor irrelevant. Rather, it underscores the success of these ideas, precisely because they go unquestioned.
The greatest asset liberalism has in arguments about racism, sexism, and the role of government generally is the implicit assumption that liberalism's intentions are better and more high-minded than conservatism's. Liberals think with their hearts, conservatives with their heads, goes the cliche. But if you take liberalism's history into account, it's clear this is an unfair advantage, an intellectual stolen base. Liberals may be right or wrong about a given policy, but the assumption that they are automatically arguing from the more virtuous position is rubbish.
What is today called liberalism stands, domestically, on three legs: support for the welfare state, abortion, and identity politics. Obviously, this is a crude formulation. Abortion, for example, could be lumped into identity politics, as feminism is one of the creeds extolling the iron cage of identity. Or one could say that 'sexual liberty' is a better term than abortion. But I don't think any fair-minded reader would dispute that these three categories nearly cover the vast bulk of the liberal agenda — or at least describe the core of liberal passions — today.
In the remainder of this chapter, I propose to look at each area, starting with the least obvious — and perhaps least important — to see how the progressive urge to reengineer society from the bottom up manifests itself in these three pillars of liberalism today.
THE WELFARE STATE
What is the welfare state? The plain meaning is fairly obvious: a social safety net, a system by which the government can address economic inequalities, presumably for the betterment of the whole society, with special emphasis on the least fortunate. The term, and to a significant degree the concept, begins with Bismarck's Prussia. Bismarck's
But there were at least two important differences between America and Prussia. First, America was a democratic republic with a firm constitution designed to protect minorities (albeit imperfectly) against the tyranny of the majority. Second, Germans already constituted a 'racial nation.' American progressives were frustrated by the first point because they were envious of the second. The progressives believed that, in the words of Justice Holmes, the aim of law and social policy was to 'build a race.' Our democracy, with its inconvenient checks and balances, including a diverse population, made such a project difficult. Nonetheless, progressive social policy — the granite foundation of today's welfare state — was from the outset dedicated to solving this 'problem.'
The American welfare state, in other words, was in important respects a eugenic racial project from the outset. The progressive authors of welfare state socialism were interested not in protecting the weak from the ravages of capitalism, as modern liberals would have it, but in weeding out the weak and unfit, and thereby preserving and strengthening the Anglo-Saxon character of the American racial community.
'Raceologists' like E. A. Ross dedicated their careers to this effort. At the macro level, Ross described the program as one of 'social control.' This meant mining the society for its purest elements and forging those elements into a 'superior race.' For white Anglo Protestants, this would amount to a national 'restoration' (the watchword of all fascist movements). For the rest, it meant pruning the American garden of racial 'weeds,' 'defective germ plasm,' and other euphemisms for non-Aryan strains. Education, in the broadest sense, required getting the entire society to see the wisdom in this policy. Perhaps in a perfect world, the state wouldn't have to get involved: 'The breeding function of the family would be better discharged if public opinion and religion conspired...to crush the aspirations of woman for a life of her own.'29 But it was too late for such measures, so the state had to interfere.
Ross was a showman, but his ideas fit squarely within the worldview of progressive economics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Consider the debate over the minimum wage. The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the 'unemployable class.' It was Webb's belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployables' worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument
Ross put it succinctly: 'The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.' Since the inferior races were content to live closer to a filthy state of nature than the Nordic man, the savages did not require a
