The New Eugenics
Matthew Goodwin's reactionary message is sold as that of a revolutionary, but we have to recognise whose causes and interests he serves, and what the resurgence of voices like his means.
Famous book-eater and ubiquitous right-wing agitator Matthew Goodwin has turned his rhetoric another ratchet-click towards fascism.
His new book posits the idea of “New Elite” of intellectuals who are undermining traditional values with their top-down imposition of various liberal values. Basically a sloppy rebadge of the antisemitic “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, the short version is that there is a real, honest, virtuous set of beliefs that are held by all right-thinking sons of toil, and also the editors of all the right-wing newspapers and the propertied ruling class. Set against this are liberal academics, “the media” – not the right wing press barons who set the news agenda, but people who make films and TV, and various other degenerate forces pushing absurd and irrational beliefs which, either deliberately or through sheer ignorance, undermine society. Unlike the Government, the owners of all the newspapers, and the propertied ruling class, these people exert the real power – cultural power – through their ability to “cancel” transphobic academics or ban golliwogs.
Like his predecessors on this well-worn path of reactionary whining, Goodwin presents himself and his beliefs as being part of a vanguard. He claims to be on the outside, overturning the current status quo, storming the gates of the palace. What he wants to overturn it in favour of is, unsurprisingly, a bunch of reactionary horseshit from the 1920s.
A clip is circulating online from the “free speech YouTube show” Triggernometry, in which Goodwin claimed the following:
We are on the cusp of developments with genetic coding and science that are going to be complete game changers in how we understand health, medicine, life expectancy, all of that stuff, so the idea that there are not inherent differences between groups is just going to be completely unsustainable. I mean it already is if you look at the evidence, but over the next five to ten years it’s just going to look utterly ridiculous as a lot of this research and evidence comes through.
Goodwin is doing a little rhetorical dance here. It is a bit like saying “We are getting better at engineering cars and planes, and therefore we will surely have flying cars in the next ten years.” The conclusions might appear to follow from the premises, but actually they do not.
Genetics does involve the study of different groups with similar characteristics across populations. The implication that he wants people to make about “inherent differences between groups” is that these characteristics map onto the groups white eugenicists want them to, proving that those with power and status deserve it because of natural superiority.
In this he is following a long and broad tradition of academics who have found much success in explaining why the biases and prejudices of the powerful and wealthy are, to everyone’s total surprise, just objective facts about reality.
One reason he is too chickenshit to say “People like me are genetically superior” out loud is that his role is to push the boundaries of acceptable discourse back towards scientific racism, white supremacy and eugenics. If he made this claim explicitly, he would transgress the boundaries rather than push at them, and therefore become useless to the people who pay him lots of money.
The other reason is that eugenics was not abandoned simply because the politically correct "New Elite” in their ivory towers decreed it to be unfashionable, but because it was bollocks. Goodwin does not want to end up like Charles Murray who, for all his influence behind the scenes in Conservative circles, is too prone towards arguing that he’s finally shown the shallow brainpan of the perfidious Turk reduces their ability for higher reasoning by 12% or things of that nature to be a mainstream propagandist any more. Keeping things in the realm of implication means he can give the broad impression that there is a wealth of serious scholarship that supports reactionary views, but if pushed he can stage a tactical retreat and say, no, he didn’t mean the thing he clearly implied for his target audience of braying racists.
Now, Goodwin is an extremist in what he says, but he is a well-remunerated extremist who gets to put forth his extremism on a regular basis in the British press, gets invited onto TV sofas, and keeps publishing books. And so we must ask, how much of an extremist is he really? There are a lot of people who aren’t Matthew Goodwin with an interest in keeping Matthew Goodwin employed, doing exactly what he’s doing. For all his claims to be an intellectual outsider storming the gates, he certainly seems to be well bedded down in a comfortable room in the palace. In railing against the woke elites he is expressing the majority opinion of the population of newspaper columnists and talk radio hosts, whose collective output creates the background radiation of public discourse. Recognising what he is and what he is doing is an incomplete story unless we also recognise whose causes he serves and why he continues to get booked.
From its inception, eugenics and race science have always been a conclusion in search of evidence. They emerged in a world where white-majority countries had grown fat and happy on the spoils of centuries of imperial plunder and racialised chattel slavery, as a way of justifying that world order as natural, inevitable and correct.
Western society prides itself on its democracy, its fairness, its roots in “enlightenment values”. The manifest inequality it produces, including structural racial inequality and entrenched class hierarchies, is a challenge to that self-perception. Eugenics offers a way out of that, to explain that the system is fair, even though it might appear to be unfair, because some people are simply better.
There are only two explanations for a system producing a disparity of outcomes between equal populations. Differentials in power and poverty are either the result of an unfair system that is biased towards certain people, or of a fair system operating on unequal people. In order for you to have justly prospered under the system, the system must be fair; if the system must be fair, then the people must be unequal.
Those who benefit from an unfair system are always going to reject attempts to accurately describe it, and especially attempts to change it. If the system is biased to select against certain groups of people because of racism, bigotry and chauvinism, then this necessarily implies that it is selecting for other groups for the same reason. If the system is unfair, your status as landowner or university professor comes under scrutiny. People do not like thinking that they benefited from unfairness, because it implies that under a fairer system they would have less, and people don’t want to have less.
Simply arguing for an unfair system that you benefit from, though, is the kind of thing we all recognise as obviously self-interested. What the beneficiaries of such systems need is an argument that says things are supposed to be this way. Not just that this system is fair, but that attempts to change it are the unfairness, because they introduce bias going the other way. When you see people rage against “affirmative action” or “woke hiring”, they are expressing this core belief – that the system currently works fairly and selects for the “best” people to be rewarded with money and power, and so if you remove their advantage, you must be making the system unfairly biased towards the less capable. The liberals and “wokes”, they will further claim, are trying to hide this truth from you because it is unpalatable to their soft liberal sensibilities.
Under such a worldview, where stratified hierarchies are the result of a fair and meritocratic system working on an unequal population, the victories of the Civil Rights movement and other campaigns for racial equality are not seen as the undoing of a great historical injustice. They are seen, at best, as charity; a munificence which only goes to reinforce our inherent virtue.
I think it’s underappreciated how much reactionary discourse can be explained by recognising that the fundamental logic of white supremacy has not simply survived the imposition of equality and diversity projects largely unscathed, but absorbed these projects into that logic. For a large section of the population, civil rights and equalities are something we gave to minorities because we’re nice and kind, and not something they had to wrestle from our clenched fists at great cost. This is used to justify how superior and enlightened we are compared to those savage and heathen foreign cultures, and in turn why that means we should be suspicious of people from those cultures and take steps to exclude them from our society.
What this also means is that civil rights and equalities within western societies are always contingent and subject to removal – we hand rights out on sufferance, we can take them away if you misbehave.
Our enlightened shifts towards equality may have been, according to this worldview, well-intentioned, but we got the right balance sometime in the 1960s when their cartoon version of Martin Luther King solved racism by saying everyone should be “judged by the content of their character.” Now, though, it’s all gone too far, no longer judging people accurately and rewarding people meritocratically based on their inherent skills and characters, but privileging everyone except the straight white men, who are now themselves discriminated against by equalities legislation, forced out of their rightful place and replaced with trans black disabled lesbians to appease the woke mob. Without their guiding hands on the levers of power, we face social collapse, anarchy, dogs and cats living together, things of that nature.
It is clear that such an argument is circular, self-interested guff. It should also be noted that “this is all going too far” is exactly what people were saying years ago when the real MLK was around, before he got shot over it. Every move people make towards wrestling some power back is considered “too far” by the people who are wrestling to keep hold of that power for themselves.
But the thing about flattering, self-serving arguments is that people like them. Most people are far less inclined to pick holes in someone saying “Here is why you’re great and everything you do is objectively correct” than a scathing critique. And, as I’ve said above, there are the material interests to consider. If the system were, in fact, still unfair and biased towards a certain class of people, a lot of people who currently have power and wealth and status would lose the ability to claim that their power and wealth and status were gained honestly through hard work and natural talent, and people fucking hate that kind of thing.
Even those of a more liberal outlook, who might agree in principle that Matthew Goodwin himself is a far-right clown, will find themselves unwilling to go too far the other way. If you are currently advantaged under an unfair, unjust system, then making the system fairer involves removing some of your advantages, definitionally. This prompts constant searching for some middle-road compromise – accepting that systemically disadvantaging whole groups of people is bad, but skittishly jumping back from any kind of change that might meaningfully alter the balance of power.
People like Goodwin are incredibly useful, even to the liberal and tolerant centre. When Goodwin talks about an elite, he neglects to mention that he is a member of one faction of it. In railing against liberalism and wokeness, he is on a recruitment drive for those whose philosophy of power is iron and authoritarian, in favour of strict cultural controls about who ought to be centred in society, and who needs to be pushed firmly to the margins. But the faction of the elite that he rails against, that puts transgender people in beer adverts and black people in Christmas adverts for shops, has just as little interest in radical and transformative change as his own faction. They recognise that liberal moves towards civil rights and equalities, far from destroying the racist and authoritarian logic of the society over which they preside, are necessary concessions that cost them very little, while enabling them to sand off the rough edges and take the heat out of social conflicts.
The presence of far-right firebrands acts as a counterbalancing force against popular grievances with the real, material impacts of an unjust society, and a way of siphoning some of that grievance off into right wing populism and turning its energy against immigrants, minorities, “sexual deviants” and other villains of the right. Without people like him, those who want to keep the balance of power as it is right now would face too much pressure to change things in real, meaningful ways. They would have nothing to “compromise” with.
The danger is that with material conditions declining precipitously, the mutually beneficial détente could be coming to an end. Goodwin’s faction is powerful and in the ascendant. They offer a compelling vision of a world that can be made better simply by eliminating those who would undermine it, and the political centre is losing its capacity to offer meaningful compromises that keep these people safely contained.
The far right is like the atom bomb, a constant looming threat to keep people in line, that is never supposed to be seriously deployed but which you need to keep around as an emergency measure. But like the atom bomb, if you lose control of it, you’re in serious trouble. With the Great Replacement Theory becoming mainstream, with eugenics making a comeback, with every newspaper pushing some form of campaign against wokeness and degenerates, it feels as if the strategy of endlessly compromising with the far right to keep the left in line is starting to break down. Where we go from here doesn’t look good.