Good genes

On liberal self-delusion and the resurgence of race science.

A little over a year ago, I got coffee with Jess Bergman, my fabulous editor at The Baffler, to talk about a nebulous idea I had pitched her about the resurgence of eugenic ideology on the right.¹ I was convinced that mainstream conservatives would soon accept eugenicist thought in the same way they had come to believe in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. I’d been hearing talk of physiognomy and dysgenic a lot on the fringe right, coquette waif twitter, etc, but it hadn’t yet breached containment. The normies weren’t there yet, but I believed it would happen soon.

I had gone to the Natal Conference in Austin the previous month—which I reported on for Politico Magazine and wrote a bit more about here—and was still reeling from the experience. I had anticipated the usual arguments about how liberals love abortion and have no respect for the family; I wasn’t expecting to hear diatribes about the innate biological superiority of the people in the room.

The first hint came from Ben Braddock, who spoke about Americans’ “declining genetic and epigenetic quality,” exemplified by a Reddit post in which a guy compared a photo of himself to one of his grandfather at the same age and, wouldn’t you believe it, the grandpa was a square-jawed heartthrob and the grandson looked like, well, the kind of guy that comes to mind when you imagine the quintessential Reddit user. We were becoming a country of dysgenics; we’re being sterilized. Birth control, Braddock said, alters women’s consciousness; it permanently reduces their biological urge to reproduce. It’s not enough to change the culture. We’re “swimming around in a toxic soup,” he told the audience, not incorrectly. Hours later, evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman attempted to debunk the “sterilizing memes” that preclude perfectly healthy, normal people from having children—including the fear that their offspring would fall victim to the woke ideology that has taken over every aspect of public life. Not to worry, Fleischman told us. “Your genes are more important than drag queen story hour.”

That stuck with me for weeks. Fleischman meant to reassure the audience, yes, but she also revealed an interesting tension between the right’s fascination with IQ and the threat of the “woke mind virus,” to borrow a phrase from Elon Musk. If a person’s intelligence, personality, and gender are determined at birth, as Musk and his acolytes believe, then what threat does wokeness pose? If your genes are truly more important than drag queen story hour, then what’s the problem with drag queen story hour?

As Fleischman spoke, I skimmed articles published in Aporia, a “sociobiology magazine” to which she contributes. Some representative headlines: “Caring about race differences is not a fetish.” “Elites are genetically different.” “Should Whites Embrace White Identity? A Dialogue.” Around the time I met with Jess, the Guardian reported that Chris Rufo, the culture warrior who orchestrated the ouster of Harvard president Claudine Gay and Ron DeSantis’ hostile takeover of the New College of Florida, recommended Aporia to his own Substack subscribers.² Rufo’s interest in—and sympathy towards—the notion of “human biodiversity,” a euphemism for race science, wasn’t exactly surprising to me, but it raised the same question: if intelligence is among the characteristics that is determined at birth, and said characteristic is both the product of a person’s genetic makeup and correlated to their race, then what’s the issue with “DEI?” Won’t the best and brightest rise to the top on their own, on the merits of their own superiority?

That question nagged me as I wrote and rewrote the piece that was published in the September 2024 issue of The Baffler. It’s annoying to quote your own writing but I’m going to do it anyway:

Among its most committed disciples, the concern is not just that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies encourage colleges and workplaces to relax standards for people of color, or that cities are being overrun by migrants from unfamiliar places—it’s that the differences between white Americans and everyone else aren’t merely cultural but genetic, immutable, and incapable of being assimilated away.

This, of course, is not what Rufo and the other anti-DEI crusaders told the public. Rufo is savvy; he tailored his campaign as a crusade against leftist indoctrination of impressionable schoolchildren—the kind of thing that rankles suburban MAGA moms and liberal opinion columnists alike. I’m going to quote myself again, sorry:

Like any good Straussian, Rufo layers his crusade against DEI and critical race theory with implicit meaning. On the one hand, there is the argument he puts forth in media interviews and in his own writing: parents have lost control of their kids’ education. An initially well-intentioned effort to counteract the harms of racism and discrimination has gone too far. Instead of instituting a system of color blindness, we have replaced one form of racial preference with another. This new hierarchy is enforced by a bloated bureaucracy of consultants, advisers, and academics who are paid handsomely—with your tax dollars—to teach white children to hate themselves for the sins of their ancestors. (And were they really sins, anyway?) When those children grow up and enter the workforce, they’re hobbled by preferential hiring practices that favor anyone who isn’t a straight white man—and the victims of these policies, having been subject to a lifetime of indoctrination, believe they deserve it.

Rufo’s stated goal is to dismantle this unjust system; to replace the Sisyphean quest for equal outcomes with a fair policy of equal opportunity. There is another message below the surface, however, one which he will hint at and direct his followers toward but will never state in explicit terms himself: the reason equal outcomes are unattainable is that all men are not, as it turns out, created equal. Some people are smarter than others; some are stronger. Some are suited to intellectual pursuits, others to manual labor, and others still to bearing and raising the philosophers and peons of tomorrow.

They couldn’t say that last part before. Not in Biden’s America, and certainly not in an election year. It’s a new era now; the message has shifted accordingly.

None of this was an inevitability. We wouldn’t have gotten here without credulous liberals who refused to interrogate Rufo’s motivations, believing instead that the Manhattan Institute fellow was engaging in a good-faith dialogue about the suppression of free speech in the academy. Middle-aged columnists at prominent magazines are fixated with with the goings-on at Middlebury and Columbia and Oberlin as if these things matter in the real world. It’s frankly ridiculous to act like undergraduates have any real power. The whole point of college is that it’s where young people go to figure out what they think, to try on ideas and ideologies until they find the ones that fit. They stumble, they say stupid things, they act a little goofy. They read Foucault and snort adderall and then they read some more Foucault and then they go to a theme party. Maybe they go home for Thanksgiving and insist on doing a land acknowledgement before dinner. Maybe they experiment with their gender presentation. Maybe they write bad diaspora slam poetry. For some people, these things stick, and that’s great; for others, it’s a way of existing in the world for a few years before taking a job at McKinsey.

I don’t mean to say that college students are incapable of serious political thought or of radical action; the encampments that were organized at universities across the country were an incredible example of young people using their limited power to fight for a better world. And the Good Liberals who write for influential magazines saw this as such an affront to the way things should be that they joined forces with someone whose stated goal was and has always been to dismantle liberal institutions from the inside out. These are very educated people who, despite their credentials, seem to lack any critical thinking skills whatsoever. If I’m being generous, they see the world as a thought experiment, a sandbox without any real stakes. They don’t realize that they have ideological enemies. They are, in fact, in possession of the naïveté they claim prevents college kids from understanding the nuance of things like war or genocide. They think they’re participating in the marketplace of ideas—they’re just asking questions!—rather than being cajoled into becoming unwitting agents of their own destruction.

Or, as Paul Blest put it:

Are there reasonable critiques that could have been made of things like the Raytheon pride float and Gushers declaring that it stands with Black lives? Obviously, yes, but those criticisms weren’t coming from the likes of Democratic brand strategists or fancy magazine columnists, from whom corporate statements of support are akin to actual material change. And anyway, it was never about any of that. These people believe in biologically determined hierarchies; they see diversity initiatives and civil rights organizations as instruments designed to elevate the most undeserving among us. I can’t even call the anti-DEI crusade a Trojan horse. It was completely transparent from the beginning, and if you couldn’t see through it, that’s on you.

1. Very early in my career, I was advised to always pitch stories, not ideas. That is good advice that, to be honest, has not always worked out for me. Sometimes you have a feeling and you need to trust your intuition!

2. A nice reminder that this platform makes a lot of money off race scientists, Nazis, other freaks of that nature.