Social Darwinism is a philosophy that has been popular among the 1% since its beginnings in the 19th century. Today, most in the 1% deny it, because they prefer not to be associated with where it can lead and has led, but it is easy to identify in their day-to-day activities and attitudes. Robert Reich has written a fascinating piece on how Mitt Romney represents this view.

…We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, of which Mitt Romney is the perfect reflection. The original Gilded Age was a time of buoyant rich men with flashy white teeth, raging wealth and a measured disdain for anyone lacking those attributes, which was just about everyone else. Romney looks and acts the part perfectly, offhandedly challenging a GOP primary opponent to a $10,000 bet and referring to his wife’s several Cadillacs. Four years ago he paid $12 million for his fourth home, a 3,000-square-foot villa in La Jolla, California, with vaulted ceilings, five bathrooms, a pool, a Jacuzzi and unobstructed views of the Pacific. Romney has filed plans to tear it down and replace it with a home four times bigger. We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism. Not incidentally, social Darwinism was also the reigning philosophy of the original Gilded Age, propounded in America more than a century ago by William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, who twisted Charles Darwin’s insights into a theory to justify the brazen inequality of that era: survival of the fittest. Romney uses the same logic when he accuses President Obama of creating an “entitlement society” simply because millions of desperate Americans have been forced to accept food stamps and unemployment insurance, or when he opines that government should not help distressed homeowners but instead let the market “hit the bottom,” or enthuses over a House Republican budget that would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. It’s survival of the fittest all over again. Sumner, too, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” When Romney simultaneously proposes to cut the taxes of households earning over $1 million by an average of $295,874 a year (according to an analysis of his proposals by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center) because the rich are, allegedly, “job creators,” he mimics Sumner’s view that “millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done.” In truth, the whole of Republican trickle-down economics is nothing but repotted social Darwinism… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Christian Science Monitor>

I have plucked a very small excerpt from the midst of a very large article, one so profound and so important that you owe it to yourself to click through and read it in its entirety.

To provide perspective, here is some more information on Sumner Social Darwinism.

According to Social Darwinism the sole objective of a race is its physical, economic and political development. Individuals’ happiness, well-being, peace and security appear unimportant. No compassion at all is felt for those who suffer and cry out for help, for those unable to provide their children, families and aged parents food, medicine or shelter, or for the poor and powerless. According to this twisted concept, someone poor but morally upright is regarded as worthless, and that person’s death will actually benefit society. In addition, someone rich but morally corrupt is regarded as “most important" for the “progress of the race" and, no matter what the conditions, that individual is seen as very valuable. This twisted logic propels Social Darwinism’s proponents towards moral and spiritual collapse. In 1879, another Social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner, expressed this perverted trend’s deceptions: … we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; non-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members. The most savage adherents of Social Darwinism were racists, the most dangerous, of course, being the Nazi ideologists and their leader, Adolf Hitler… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <AntiDarwinism.com>