Though his name has largely been forgotten, English philosopher Herbert Spenser’s views inform much of modern conservative ideology.  A contemporary of naturalist Charles Darwin, Spenser shared Darwin’s interest in evolution.  It was Spenser, in fact, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe the process of natural – and social – selection.

 

Since Trump became president we hear more and more about Americans’ lives being threatened by his proposed policies and budget cuts.  And while everyone’s health is threatened, for example, by cuts to programs protecting our air and water, this is a rather nebulous threat – the danger depends (for now, anyway) on where a person lives.

 

But if you have a serious health condition and can’t afford a huge hike in health insurance rates – as the proposed Affordable Care Act replacement would have caused (especially for older Americans), the threat is very real.  And it isn’t just the rewriting of the ACA that endangers vulnerable Americans –Trump has proposed eliminating heating aid to the poor, a cut that will hit Native Americans particularly hard, prompting Eileen Shot, the administrator of this program for the Rosebud Sioux to go on record saying “people will die” without this aid.

 

So why cut it – in the grand budget scheme heating aid is only a tiny part of federal spending – and why take health care away from the people who need it most?  This is where Spenser comes in.  While Darwin believed that natural selection – survival of the fittest in Nature – was the engine driving biological evolution, he made it clear that humans are the one species that cares for the ill, the disabled and the elderly.  In Darwin’s view humans have evolved morally and this moral evolution is a stronger force than natural selection.

 

Spencer held the exact opposite view and his ideas were particularly popular with the so-called “robber barons” who exemplified the unbridled greed of the Gilded Age.  Spenser applied the idea of natural selection to human society, calling it “social selection” and maintaining that if the poor cannot survive without assistance “…it is best that they should die.”

 

Spenser was strongly opposed to any health laws or government aid to the poor.  He believed that everyone is on his or her own and to help people in need only prevents economics from weeding out inferior people – a view that eventually helped lead to forced sterilization of the poor and disabled in this country and took its most radical form in the Nazis’ attempts to exterminate the Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals.

 

The Progressive Era, which “evolved” as a reaction to the Gilded Age, rejected Spenser’s ideas.  But his ideas remain popular today among certain conservatives, fitting well with the mythic “self-made man,” the person who pulls himself up by his proverbial bootstraps to acquire wealth.  Spenser’s ideas have even helped justify the belief that the poor and the disabled don’t even deserve common courtesy (remember how Trump mocked a disabled reporter during his campaign?).

 

It should come as no surprise, then, that in this second Gilded Age where billionaires now hold high office, literally endangering vulnerable Americans’ lives for no meaningful reason is quite acceptable.  After all, this view has helped mold conservative thinking since the 1800s, only until now the more morally evolved among us have outnumbered those who embrace social survival of the fittest.  But no more, so take heed anyone who isn’t fabulously rich – social evolutionists want you and me out of their way.  And now that they hold office, they appear to already be working to make this happen.