The only thing everyone can agree on about why Donald Trump does what he does is that his reasons are not obvious. There are innumerable proposals on offer for an intellectual framework that supposedly unifies and explains Trump’s chaos—he is Vladimir Putin’s puppet; an unreconstructed disciple of Pat Buchanan Thought; a loyal servant of the conservative think tanks that concocted Project 2025; or a Machiavellian mobster focused single-mindedly on self-enrichment—and yet I can’t help but suspect that Trump’s own explanation is closest to the mark: “I’m a very instinctual person,” he told Time magazine in 2017, “but my instinct turns out to be right.” One need not agree with the latter judgment to recognize that Trump’s account of himself rings true. He values the irrational quality of his decisions as an end in itself. In the first months of his second reign, Trump has appealed more to his instincts than ever before. “I mean, you almost can’t take a pencil to paper,” he said in April, describing his approach to determining tariff exemptions. “It’s really more of an instinct, I think, than anything else.”
This veneration of instinct has led many observers to describe Trump as a social Darwinist. This interpretation of Darwin’s work, celebrating the triumph of the strong and the extermination of the weak, is a common thread uniting the otherwise ideologically disparate set of historical leaders Trump has praised, from the American empire builders of the late nineteenth century to (according to his former chief of staff John Kelly) Adolf Hitler. Darwin saw in animal instincts “one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings,” to wit: “multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” Trump, like many among his social Darwinist predecessors, surely views the impulses he is determined to unleash in similar terms. Of all the various isms proposed to capture Trump’s ideology, social Darwinism has perhaps the most explanatory power. Moreover, it is likely the only one that he—or the writing produced under his name—has explicitly endorsed. “A lot of life is about survival of the fittest and adaptation, as Darwin pointed out,” his 2009 book, Think Like a Champion, asserts.
Since Trump’s initial rise to power, the social Darwinist label has served to mark him as an aberration, someone who failed to learn the lessons that the twentieth century was supposed to have taught us. On the campaign trail in 2016, Tim Kaine implied that Trump’s social Darwinism animated his criticisms of NATO and the system of alliances America built after World War II; last October, Jonathan Chait argued that the social Darwinist commitments Trump shares with the rest of the Republican Party distinguish it not only from the Democrats but “from conservative parties in other industrialized democracies.” But for much of the twentieth century, American liberals had trouble admitting that there even were social Darwinists anymore. In Social Darwinism in American Thought, the 1944 book that popularized the term, Richard Hofstadter writes that the ideology, at least “as a conscious philosophy,” had “largely disappeared” in the United States by the end of World War I, thanks to its uncomfortably Teutonic overtones. Reasoning along similar lines, the historian Carl N. Degler asserted in 1991 that the struggle against Nazism had at last left social Darwinism “definitely killed, not merely scotched.”
But ideas that are truly dead rarely return to life so swiftly and with such vitality. What we’re witnessing is not an aberration but the latest eruption of a supposedly discredited ideology that was never truly extinguished. Even after the Holocaust, social Darwinism quietly remained a meeting ground where defenders of class, race, and gender hierarchy could make common cause. What historians such as Hofstadter and Degler mistook for its death was merely its tactical retreat and metamorphosis. To understand how this happened, we must reconsider what we thought we knew about the world America built in the aftermath of its war against fascism. We must contrast our romanticized view of liberal democratic values with Trump’s blunt characterization of American society: “It’s a cruel world and people are ruthless.”
Social Darwinism first came of age at a moment when the usefulness of liberalism to the development of capitalism seemed exhausted. While for much of the nineteenth century the idea of universal rights had helped empower the middle classes, by the century’s waning decades, political and economic elites increasingly viewed egalitarianism as a spur to troublesome radical-democratic movements and an obstacle to the brutality on which the era’s imperialist expansion depended. Social Darwinism, on the other hand, placed an emphasis on immutable difference that cut a pleasing contrast to liberal universalism and its attendant ideological risks: it proposed strength, rather than self-restraint, as the mark of distinction. Biology made the rich, the white, and the male superior—and endowed them with the right to dominate their inferiors.
After World War II, when the United States’ embrace of the antifascist struggle raised the possibility that its own apartheid system would be the next target, a vanguard of white nationalists and Nazi sympathizers rallied around a private philanthropy called the Pioneer Fund, which had been established shortly before the war. The fund’s grants helped ensure that scientists who shared the founders’ enthusiasm for the Third Reich’s “selective breeding” policies could pursue their work under an all-American aegis. As the civil-rights movement gained momentum, prominent Pioneer Fund–backed race scientists such as Arthur Jensen and the Nobel Prize–winning physicist William Shockley grabbed headlines for announcing that their research “proved” that the genetic determination of intelligence placed firm biological limits on the project to redress racial inequality.
At the same time, a more demure set of scientists was quietly laying the foundation for the renovation of social Darwinism in mainstream biological thinking. The 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to three scientists including Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian biologist and former Nazi Party member who helped found the field of ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior, which he believed ought to encompass humans as well. Though Lorenz eventually distanced himself from his past, he remained concerned about the risk of “degeneration” produced by modern interference with the process of natural selection—a central theme of his Nazi-era work that he continued to express for the rest of his career, albeit with less ominous language. This was a fear shared, with all its eugenicist implications, by W. D. Hamilton, one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the second half of the twentieth century. Hamilton helped develop new theoretical tools that allowed scientists to postulate a genetic basis for a range of complex social behaviors. Among these behaviors, in Hamilton’s view, was genocide, which was a natural if morally regrettable response to population growth among a competing “tribe.”
In the Seventies, the evolutionary-biological approach to the study of human behavior grew even more popular. Its leading exponents were Hamilton’s Oxford colleague Richard Dawkins—who has called Hamilton “the greatest Darwinian of my lifetime”—and the Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson, who recalled his imagination being “captured” by Lorenz at a pivotal point in his graduate studies. Dawkins’s 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, and Wilson’s field-defining 1975 book, Sociobiology, proposed that nearly any feature of human society could be explained in terms of its propensity to propagate the genes responsible for it. Race never lurked too far below the surface of the polemics that ensued. But amid the rise of second-wave feminism and the gay-liberation movement, the champions of sociobiology and its successor field, evolutionary psychology, focused more and more on arguing that differences between men and women were, in fact, rooted in biology, not just social conditioning.
Enter the libertarians and neoliberals. For the late-twentieth-century intellectuals who sought to show, like Margaret Thatcher, that there was no alternative to the “free market,” sociobiological explanations of human behavior provided scientific-sounding justification for their economic policies. In an early response to Wilson’s Sociobiology, the Nobel-winning Chicago School economist Gary Becker affirmed that “the preferences taken as given by economists,” such as “self-interest, altruism toward kin, social distinction, and other enduring aspects” of human behavior, could be “largely explained by the selection over time of traits having greater genetic fitness and survival value.” The neoliberal economist Gordon Tullock shared his admiration for Wilson’s “excellent” book. Tullock’s own foray into “bioeconomic theory,” The Economics of Non-Human Societies, argued that economic modeling could help explain how nonhuman animals like ants managed complex social coordination without central planning. “Social insects and other social species normally only have an economy, but no government,” Tullock wrote. “Humans think that government is a necessary precondition for the function of the economy, thus this proposition may seem bizarre.” This was precisely the premise that the most radical neoliberals sought to use sociobiology to question.
As the historian Quinn Slobodian writes in his recent book Hayek’s Bastards, this neoliberal and libertarian admiration for social Darwinism often extended to ideas about immutable biological differences between the rich and the poor, between men and women, and among races. The economist Friedrich Hayek himself was skeptical about how much genetics could explain human behavior, but he drew explicit analogies between biological evolution and the development of the capitalist marketplace. Many of his followers were more vocal about the role of biology in determining economic outcomes; Slobodian places special emphasis on people like Charles Murray and right-wing think-tank stalwarts such as the market fundamentalist Murray Rothbard. In a glowing review of The Bell Curve—Murray’s widely denounced book, co-written with Richard Herrnstein, claiming that IQ determines success and varies by race—Rothbard wrote that the authors’ willingness to tell “the truth about race and IQ” furnished libertarians with “a powerful defense of the results of the free market.” By supposing to disprove the idea that racial inequality originated in discrimination, “racialist science” served for Rothbard as “an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.”
But Rothbard got the rhetorical order of operations backward. By supporting free-market ideas, which even many liberals embraced during the Clinton era, people unintentionally provided cover for those promoting more extreme beliefs about biological inequality. As neoliberalism colonized American common sense, it brought social Darwinist thinking along with it, rebranding ideas once thought discredited as markers of sober rationality and open-mindedness. In a 2013 lecture, the social psychologist and soi-disant centrist Jonathan Haidt railed against the tendency of “both sides” to deny “inconvenient truths.” The right included “evolution deniers” and “climate-change deniers,” Haidt explained, while the left featured “IQ deniers,” “heritability deniers,” and “stereotype-accuracy deniers”—such that they deserved the label of “evolution deniers” themselves. Haidt is far from the first person to assert that a proper understanding of evolutionary science implies the existence of heritable group differences, including in intelligence, that conform to common stereotypes. This notion has not, however, usually served as a hallmark of political moderation. While Slobodian is correct to call these neoliberal social Darwinists “Hayek’s bastards,” one might think of them instead as a different early-twentieth-century Austrian’s offspring, reticent and a tad embarrassed about their parentage.
Donald Trump is certainly not a heritability denier. “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he remarked in a television interview last October. But Trump has probably never read Jonathan Haidt, or Murray Rothbard, or Charles Murray, or anything, for that matter, besides The Power of Positive Thinking and perhaps his ghostwriters’ drafts of his books. He comes by his social Darwinism the way most people come by any ideology: by living in a world that makes it seem obvious.
After World War II, the United States promised to reestablish the global order on the foundations of liberalism. Trump, born in 1946, has spent his entire life observing that order unmasking itself as the old imperial abattoir reborn: in the ashes of Korea, the killing fields of Indonesia, the burning jungles of Vietnam, the torture camps of the war on terror, and the bloody rubble of Gaza. He has seen the United States dismember its own welfare state, outsource its social services to the highest bidders, and accumulate the largest populations of homeless and incarcerated people in the developed world. The rate of union membership in America has declined by roughly two thirds in his lifetime. He has witnessed the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the calcification of the racial wealth gap. Each year he stands by, as we all do, as tens of thousands of people die because they can’t afford lifesaving health care.
While this history was unfolding, many Americans imagined themselves to be watching a remarkable story of progress—the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. The United States defeated fascism and finally reckoned with its own legacy of segregation; it outlasted the Soviet Union and harnessed the power of the market to cure disease and connect the world. Now we can look back and see the festering presence of social Darwinism lurking throughout the whole postwar era, like a monstrous Forrest Gump. The United States’ enduring attachment to empire and racial domination helped ensure the survival of social Darwinist ideas, just as the imperialist expansion of the late nineteenth century gave the ideology its initial purchase. In turn, these ideas, repackaged and sanitized by popular psychologists and libertarian economists, eventually helped to sanctify inequality as the foundation of the neoliberal order—to create a dog-eat-dog political economy that only strengthened the appeal of social Darwinism as an explanation of how society operates.
For his part, Trump, with the perverse insight with which he is blessed, was able to perceive the cruelty and ruthlessness of the America he grew up in earlier than many of his peers. He concluded at a young age that reason and principle are deceptions—that there are only power and domination and instinct. Now he is far from alone. It will continue to prove impossible to extirpate social Darwinism as long as the American Empire refuses to part with the violence, cruelty, and exploitation that give it plausibility as a description of reality. The main reason Americans keep listening to the propagandists who inform them that some people are inherently better than others is that they live in a society whose organization and daily operation present them with that same message. “I happen to be a person that knows how life works,” Trump remarked in 2017, explaining why he trusts his instincts. This is the fatalistic kernel within all instantiations of social Darwinism: everything you see around you—all the irrationality, all the hierarchy, all the pain—is just the way of the world. The only way we can debunk this claim is to create a world that works differently.
