Friday, March 11, 2011

Isn't this what the GOP really thinks?

Martin Harty, a NH state rep tea partier, is 91 years old. If he were younger he'd be more discrete ...

... A Republican in the New Hampshire House of Representatives regrets telling one of his constituents that the mentally challenged and other "defective" people should be sent to Siberia so they don't stand to inherit control of the world.

"The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people," Rep. Martin Harty told one of his constituents. "I mean all the defective people, the drug addicts, mentally ill, the retarded -- all of them."

Asked what should be done with those people, Harty said, "I believe if we had a Siberia we should send them to this and they would all freeze and die and we will be rid of them...
Ironically, Harty is obviously cognitively defective; almost all 91 year olds are. He'd be aboard his Siberian train. That's not just darkly amusing, it's important.

I've written recently about how attitudes towards "the defectives" defines America's cultural and political divide. The Right side of the divide includes ...
... The strong should not help the the weak because ...

* I am strong because I am of the strong tribe, non-tribe is non-person -> Weak person, in denial...
Harty is a weak person who dreams he is strong.

More importantly, he's saying aloud what many right wingers, including the respectable "school voucher" sort, whisper among themselves. Social Darwinism (forgive me Charles) is not dead, it's alive and well in today's GOP.

2 comments:

MaysonicWrites said...

A more explicit version of Tyler Cowen's left-wing economist sin:

"Lack of interest in discussing ethnicity and IQ as relevant for social policy, except in preferred contexts."

Dog whistles (in Harty's case, not so inaudible) for the racists in the Republican base.

Anonymous said...

The concept commonly referred to as "Social Darwinism" is actually the brainchild of Herbert Spencer, who not only coined the term "survival of the fittest", but adopted it as a metaphor for all types of human behavior, including social and economic phenomena. Spencer's philosophy was strongly influenced by Lamarckism, a notion that has lost all credibility in modern science.

While Darwin himself later adopted the "survival" phrase as descriptive of biological evolution, he did not mean "fittest" in the same way that Spencer did.