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Most people have heard by now that Steve Bannon is a believer in genetic superiority. Well, as long as your genes are nice and white. That’s not good news, given his hand is well up Trump’s backside. Compounding the bad news is that Trump is also convinced that genetic superiority is a for real thing, and naturally, he thinks he has said superiority, why he’s just bursting with scientific racism! Oh, I mean genetic superiority. Naturally, all the white supremacists, nazis or otherwise, are brimming with happiness over this news. These don’t even qualify as dog whistles to the white supremacists, more like disaster sirens, because the rhetoric is very plain, there’s little to no attempt to mask it, or wrap it up in flowery bullshit.
Trump has repeatedly connected his success to his “good genes,” as ThinkProgress previously reported. He’s said that his children “don’t need adversity” to build character or skills, because they share his good genetics. In an interview once, he went so far as to compare himself to a “racehorse” and discussing his “breeding” at length.
The belief in the genetic predisposition of qualities like intelligence are a hallmark of white nationalism.
That’s nothing to do with “good genes”. It does have everything to do with being born with a whole set of silver spoons, along with being fed a gross sense of entitlement, especially when much of that came from a wealthy father who was a known bigot. It’s not difficult to see this pattern was repeated with Trump’s own children. Money! Gold! Money, Money, Money! You own the world, babies! If Trump was bursting with this mythical genetic goodness, we might expect to see something like intelligence, and a lifetime spent in cultivating thought, along with how to think, which is something you do have to learn. Instead, Trump swallowed his sense of entitlement whole, where it continued to swell beyond measure, and has spent a lifetime perpetrating fraud, conning people, and occasionally taking time out to assault women, because of course, he and his super genes own all of them, too. But he did inherit all that money, that counts, right? Trump has also gone on, at length, about the importance of breeding. Makes a person wonder why he divorced the first race horse, oh, I meant wife. I guess once she bred, her usefulness was over.
As for his children not needing adversity to build character or skills, all I can say is that money is no substitute. No parent wants their children to meet undue adversity, but it is rather important to learn how to deal with disappointment, a lack of instant gratification, and the like. That simply makes for a better person. When you’re wandering about with the attitude that you can do whatever you want, and get whatever you want when you want it, there isn’t much room for character. I was unaware that lots of good genes makes learning skills unnecessary. Now piles of money, yes, that does rather cancel out the need for skills. Cancels out an ongoing connection with others too, and learning empathy and compassion. But, genes! Really good genes!
Edited to add: If you’d like an interesting insight into how this particular method of child-rearing worked, PZ has a post up at Pharyngula about Ivanka Trump’s recollection of their childhood fleecing of servants and playmates.
There are so many things to worry about, and this is yet another one. No matter how much “scientific” racism is debunked, there are too many people who hold onto it with a death grip, anything in order to justify a sense of superiority, who will cheer this on, and pour support into any policy which may reinforce this notion. Given the amount of white supremacists now poised for power, this is profoundly troubling.
Full story here.
You can’t be a racist or an anything-supremacist unless you utterly fail to understand how genes affect outcomes. It shouldn’t surprise us that Trump and Bannon are ignorant; they’re suffering from the intellectual laziness of the wealthy -- in America one of the most personally transformative experiences is getting rich (or being rich) or famous. Once you’ve leapt over that bar or been placed there by your parents, suddenly you’re a fount of wisdom and you’re enormously popular, too (those people kiss your ass because they love you, not because of your money) It’s a symptom of absolutely terrible leadership. I’ve seen my share of CEOs who succeeded at something fairly simple in a target-rich environment who suddenly think -- oh, I don’t know -- because they can manipulate the New York tax code to their advantage, they can probably also manipulate Europe and Vladimir Putin. How hard can it be? Actually, pretty hard. But it took marching on Moscow and losing 150,000 French dead and 3-4 times as many Russians for Napoleon to figure it out. Let’s hope Trump manages to have relatively inexpensive learning experiences (In terms of public cost; I expect that he’s incapable of learning much, himself, any more).
Marcus:
There’s already been a cost, at least on those already marginalized, along with costs to all people, such as having a climate policy which consists only of denial; millions of people are going to have no healthcare, education has already been gutted, and hate crimes continue to spike. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I have no doubt it’s going to get much worse, because whatever balance there was in government is gone.
And I forgot the biggest thing of all -- normalisation. It’s happening everywhere, and all over, people are indulging in the stupidest and worst rationalisations, and in that, normalising, normalising, normalising. We can’t count on most media anymore, if they aren’t on the normalisation bandwagon or spreading fake news, because Trump and the other uber wealthy are all for intimidation.
Trump and the other uber wealthy are all for intimidation
…. as long as it’s outbound. I imagine they’d be really really shocked if one of them got shot while shopping for cheese, or beaten up because rich people suck. I mean, hey, if we can beat people up because we don’t like their skin color or whatever, why can’t we beat them up because we don’t like combovers?
Trump is an ignoramus or he’d have some basic grasp of philosophy. You can’t believe in genetic determinism and be anything but an ignoramus about how society impacts an individual’s outcomes, and you can’t believe authoritarianism is a one-way street unless you’re a complete ignoramus regarding basic philosophy. You don’t have to read and understand Kant to realize that sauce for the goose works OK on the gander, too.
If Trump has such great genes, why are his hands so little and feeble-looking? Maybe that’s why he appreciates Putin -- Putin is clearly a genetically superior super-being in Trump’s terms?
Because, as with Napoleon, little equals great. This is why Putin is so genetically superior (he’s a really small man, physically); Trump can only aspire to such greatness.
*puke*
Trump’s small hands have clearly evolved to twitter on smartphones, not to do dirty manual labour. Whereas I’m clearly inferior as my giant super strong fingers always hit multiple buttons at once. Homo Twitterus has arrived on the evolutionary ladder.
There’s nothing to add to this.
It’s certainly not distinct from the whole ethos of scientific racism, but Trump’s pronouncements strike me as being much less in the vein of Francis Galton than stemming from the traditional world-view of the European hereditary aristocracy. He uses the modern, scientific-sounding word “genes”, yes, but it’s obvious he’s thinking in terms of “breeding” and “bloodlines” in exactly the same way the powerful noble houses of pre-revolutionary France or Hanoverian England did. Or, indeed, if reports can be believed, the way the English Royal Family thought throughout much of the 20th century (the Queen Mother, in particular, was very keen on protecting the family bloodline).
Which, you’d think, would be absolute anathema to American democratic values. Or, at least, to the values that a lot of Americans profess to have. Societies which actually value democracy tend to be very harsh indeed on aristocratic values, and the hereditary aristocrats in them feel they have to hide or renounce such values very prominently.
Cartomancer:
It’s all bullshit. Colonial America definitely wanted to separate themselves from the British, but they also did not want to give up the notions and benefits of an aristocracy. There’s always been an aristocracy here, and there was an early focus on the “self-made man”, which fueled that American Dream nonsense, which was “anyone can become rich in America”. That said, there’s been a longstanding core of those who have inherited wealth, and a poisonous sense of being aristocrats in colonial America.
As for Trump’s beliefs, as I have said, repeatedly, it doesn’t much matter what he actually believes. What matters is what he does, and what he says, because when he says shit like this, he’s reinforcing all the white supremacists out there, and there are a lot of them. Also, Bannon does believe in genetic superiority of the scientific racism type, and Bannon is in a position to do a fucktonne of harm.
There’s a good Monty Python skit about this….