A Thinking Reed

Bill Bennett and liberal eugenics

Written by

Lee M.

in

Alexander Cockburn weighs in on the brouhaha in his usual iconoclastic fashion:

Every year or so, some right-winger in America lets fly in public with a ripe salvo of racism, and the liberal watchdogs come tearing out of their kennels, and the neighborhood echoes with the barks and shouts. The right-winger says he didn’t mean it, the president “distances himself,” and the liberals claim they’re shocked beyond all measure. Then, everyday life in racist America resumes its even course.

This past week it’s been the turn of that conservative public moraliser, William Bennett. He should have known better than to loose off a hypothetical on his radio show. Announce publicly that “if you wanted to reduce crime, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down,” and many Americans reckon that’s no hypothesis, that’s a plan waiting to happen.

Of course that’s what Bennett did say, and he should have known better. Americans mostly don’t understand hypotheses, any more than they feel at ease with irony. Particularly in the age of the Internet, literalism is the order of the day. Qualifications such as Bennett added (to the effect that this would be “an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do”) are useless.

The deeper irony here is that liberals have pondered longer and deeper than conservatives on how exactly to carry out Bennett’s hypothetical plan, either by sterilization or compulsory contraception.

Read the rest here.

Comments

7 responses to “Bill Bennett and liberal eugenics”

  1. Joshie

    Yeah as a liberal I am SO in favor of compusory contraception and sterilization. I just sterilized five people with autism and a sociopathic hamster this morning. I find it deeply ironic that he attacks liberals for attacking a straw Bennett then attacks a straw liberal himself. Very clever. As a stupid American, I’m surprised I got the irony.

    Reply
  2. Lee

    You clearly missed John Kerry’s campaign promise to sterilize one-third of the population! 😉

    He is right though that people like Hardin and Ehrlich were very influential people with very bad ideas.

    Reply
  3. Joshie

    Indeed, but pinning Eugenics on liberals today is like pinning Lincoln on modern Republicans or Andrew Jackson on modern Democrats or calling modern American conservatives “royalists” since many American conservatives sided with Britain in the revolutionary war. It’s silly.

    Reply
  4. Lee

    That’s a good point – the traditions of “conservatism” and “liberalism” are so heterogeneous that you can find precedent for almost any position.

    Reply
  5. wildwest

    That’s right. His ONLY point was that aborting black babies would be morally reprehensible. But of course. Absolutely no different that the way any good liberal would state it. See, it was actually a liberal ANTI-racist statement, said in one of Bennett’s rare liberal moments! So why do you suppose these liberals weren’t honest enough to see that, but to cut his statement off in the middle as though he meant to say the exact opposite?

    Reply
  6. Joshie

    As I have said elsewhere, I think a big part of the reaction to his statements was not people thinking he actually WANTED to abort all black babies, but that he bought into(or at least appeared to have bought into) the assumption that that blacks are prone to committ more crime. That he actually belive that aborting all black babies would improve the crime rate, whether he would actually endorse such a policy or not. There was a discussion of this a few entries ago.

    Reply
  7. wildwest

    That’s the clarification I was looking for, Joshie. If someone had said you could abort all white babies if you wanted to rid the world of war, greed, and imperialism, “although that would be a morally reprehensible thing to do,” the right wing would be all over that person. And you know it!

    “But… but… but he SAID it would be morally reprehensible! He SAID it! He is emphatically NOT recommending it!”

    So that makes him conservative? Don’t be fooled! The examples people choose reveal a great deal about them! And so it is with Bennett. Alexander Cockburn’s rationalization is equivocal, misleading, and simplistic. I’m not buyin’ it.

    Reply

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