social Darwinism

He implied that abortion is a form of social Darwinism, a theory used to justify the discredited and racist practice of eugenics, which aimed to “improve” the human race through planned breeding based on genetic traits.

“Though eugenics were once fashionable in the Commanding Heights and High Court, they hold less purchase after the conflict, carnage, and casualties of the last century revealed the bloody consequences of social Darwinism practiced by would-be Übermenschen,” Kacsmaryk wrote in the ruling.

That acceptance was facilitated by the popularity of the pseudoscience of social Darwinism and a fabricated story that Reconstruction had been a monstrous time of rule by ignorant black people, rather than the largely successful period of progressive and democratic reform that it actually was.

Still, to argue that Lochner provided the judicial underpinnings for an era of social Darwinism, as many of its critics have contended, was grossly unfair, according to Mr. Bernstein, the George Mason professor.

Surely this is obvious today as all vestiges of the social contract, social responsibility and modes of solidarity that get people working together give way to a form of social Darwinism with its emphasis on violence, privatization, ruthlessness, cruelty, war, modes of hyper-masculinity and a disdain for those considered weak, dependent, alien or economically unproductive.