Earlier this week I was a guest on the Ron Smith show on WBAL talking about my Bill Ayers op/ed in The Examiner. The topic of the conversation turned to Barack Obama and the elitist question. Both Ron and I agreed that Obama and his wife by virtue of their Ivy League educations (Columbia and Harvard Law for Barack, Princeton and Harvard Law for Michelle), and corporate work experience that they qualify as elite in American society. One caller took issue with that assessment saying that from an African-American perspective that they would not be considered elite. I’m not here to argue his claim, and to an extent it is a fair point. However, the caller brought up W. E. B. Dubois’ “talented tenth” in regard to the Obamas and other Black elites. It is Dubois’ notion that serves as the point of departure for this post and impromptu book review. 

 

I believe that ideas matter and the history of ideas, both good and bad are important to understand. As a conservative I am big believer in received wisdom and dogma as they provide a base of knowledge, which protect us from the folly of bad ideas. I also wonder in amazement at progressives’ (contemporary liberals) lack of interest in their own intellectual history and origins of their own ideas. Fortunately, Jonah Goldberg’s New York Times bestselling book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning; ressurects that past for us, and it is not a pretty picture. Goldberg reveals that the progressive left of the early 20^th century, the very foundation of modern liberalism, shares common intellectual DNA with what we know as fascism. The progressive movement also shared disturbingly similar views on race and eugenics with the worst of the Nazi raceologists, which brings us to Dubois and the “talented tenth” and the fact that there is more to the term and the history behind it than the caller understands. 

 

Goldberg writes:

 

Sanger, the liberal saint of Planned Parenthood was an outright racist. Indeed the magazine she edited, Birth Control Review, published articles by Hitler’s own director of sterilization, and founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene, Ernst Ründin. Sanger herself gave a keynote speech at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1926. 

 

Goldberg rightly notes that you can’t completely situate Dubois with the objectively racist, white progressives like Margaret Sanger. And for good reason, as Goldberg notes that Sanger’s Negro Project report said, “The mass of significant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes…is in that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger said “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister [Adam Clayton Powell Sr.] is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”  

 

Many blacks were justifiably skeptical of such motives, and rightly so given Sanger’s close friendship with white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote the book titled The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. Sanger invited him to join the board of the American Birth Control League. Jesse Jackson evoked this skepticism in 1977 in a message to Congress saying he considered abortion, “genocide against the black race.” Of course, he switched positions when he ran for the Democratic nomination for president.

 

We see this playing out today in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s comments citing the infamous Tuskegee experiments as justification for his claim that the government deliberately introduced HIV into the African-American population to commit genocide. However, the history—as Wright and most in the media tell it—is completely untrue. The US government did not deliberately infect Black men with syphilis. The fact is the study recruited Black men who already had syphilis to study them, but did nothing to treat them. Just as in the examples mentioned earlier, the Tuskegee study was the brainchild of progressive notions of public health. 

 

These eugenic skeletons in the progressive closet are not limited to race. Take for example the infamous Supreme Court case, Buck v. Bell where the state of Virginia forcibly sterilized a young woman because it deemed her “unfit” to reproduce because they declared her mentally retarded (she wasn’t). The state based its decision on the assessment of a nurse who said of the Buck family, “These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.”

 

No less a liberal icon than Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to his friend, British eugenicist Harold Laski, about his decision in the case, “I…delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day and I felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.” In his zeal to codify eugenics in American jurisprudence Holmes wrote, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

 

Now it is important to note that this history does not mean that modern day progressives and liberals are all racists and eugenic minded folk. In fact they are the first to slap conservatives with those labels. Rather it is important to see, as Goldberg notes that the “edifice of cotemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist moment.  Liberals 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.” 

 

Conservatives are made to own all the sins of their past, both real and imagined. However, it is high time liberals and progressives own up to their own and arguable more appalling history. Maybe then, some will realize that conservatism and its reverence for tradition and dogma is the breakwater against the treacherous tide of meddling progressive ideas, which have left only a trail of human misery, on the path to “make people better,” or create “a better world”. 

 

  

--Malcolm Reynolds