In a New York Times column “That Other Obama”, David Brooks accuses President Barack Obama of giving a speech in which he called “the Republicans a bunch of trickle-down, Trojan horse-bearing social Darwinist.
“Social Darwinism, by the way, was a 19th-centeury philosophy that held, in part, that Aryans and Northern Europeans are racially superior to brown and Mediterranean peoples.”
WATCHDOG: Brooks takes a cheap shot while accusing President Obama of doing the same. Social Darwinism does not preach “Northern Europeans are racially superior”. However, it is correct that Nazis seized upon Social Darwinism as a philosophical foundation for their racism. Some conservative economist also expropriate Social Darwinism as a basis for justifying the accumulation of great wealth in the hands of the ‘virtuous’ and ‘more competent’ super rich or, in today’s terminology, “the 1%.” It was to the latter group that the president was clearly referring.
David Brooks is a torn individual. We suspect he is a solid Eisenhower Republican, as is the Watchdog, but he feels compelled in his books and columns to occasionally provide conservative Republicans with some ‘red meat’ to justify his role as a conservative voice at The New York Times.
