Transcript

Episode 12: Genetics & the American Far Right

KEY TOPICS

  • How does the American far right view genetics and genetic technologies? 

  • What is the history of the American cultural pursuit of trying to choose smarter children? What has science shown us about the relationship of heredity and intelligence?

  • How does the idea of eugenics influence the current administration?

  • How does the American far right use the concept of time?  

  • What is the metapolitic? How did the far right build the metapolitic? How does this influence our political future? 

 

Interview

Susanna Smith

Hi everyone, I’m Susanna Smith. 

This is Genetic Frontiers, a podcast about the promise, power, and perils of genetic information. Find us wherever podcasts are found and go to GeneticFrontiers.org to join the conversation about how genetic discoveries are propelling new, personalized medical treatments but also posing ethical dilemmas and emotional quandaries. 

This season we’re focusing on Genetics in American Politics & Culture. We talk with historians, journalists, technologists and philosophers about the alluring but dangerous pursuit of improving the human species through genetics. We discuss how ideas about people’s genetic worth and worthiness are driving American politics and policy today.

On today's episode, I will be talking with Dr. Alexandra Mina Stern. Dr. Stern is a professor of English and History and works at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA. Professor Stern has spent her career researching and writing about the dark history of eugenics in the United States and elsewhere. Her work digs deep into how eugenic ideologies, past and present seek to categorize people, and assign them value. based on false ideas about biological or genetic superiority. The aim of these dangerous ideologies is to improve the human race by controlling who can and cannot have children. 

Professor Stern was a guest on an earlier episode of Genetic Frontiers, Episode 6 about the eugenic origins of the genetic counseling profession. But today, we're going to retread some ground that Professor Stern covers in her book, Proud Boys & the White Ethnostate, which explores the culture of the American far right, including far-right views about genetics and eugenics.

So thank you for coming back on Genetic Frontiers, Professor Stern.

Alexandra Minna Stern

Thank you for having me. So many of our listeners are genetic counselors or clinicians.

Susanna Smith

Can you talk a little bit about how the far right views genetics and genetic technologies? 

Alexandra Minna Stern

First of all, there is really a concern with demography, and as you have seen in the news, with baby making and a panic over fertility in the United States or lack thereof. And far-right leaders have really been endorsing pronatalism and the use of, not all of them, some of the pronatalists reject genetic technologies because they view them as unnatural, but a good number are what we would call, kind of like techno-utopians. And they want to create a world using genetic technologies such as IVF, genetic selection from embryos, and potentially even using information from GWAS studies and other types of large-scale genetic data to make decisions about their offspring and perfecting their own offspring. And that is an idea that they want to expand more generally to kind of solve the supposed crisis of depressed fertility in America. These conversations are happening in other countries as well where there are low fertility rates, but they've really taken off in the United States. For example, with the recent conference that happened at UT Austin, which was all focused on pronatalism and on using different reproductive and genetic technologies in the service of bolstering birth rates. 

I'd like to note that, you know, the language that was used in that conference and that you will often read about in the media is one that kind of sidesteps the issue of race and tries to paint a picture of this as kind of more racially inclusive. But if you scratch the surface of people like the Collins family that's promoting this, or others who were at that conference, what you will find is that they are often referencing some of the more suspect literature that focuses on race and IQ scores. So, for example, Charles Murray and his ideas about race and IQ, or others, demographers or psychologists who have been discredited for really pushing unconfirmable ideas about the relationship between race, ethnicity, gender, and IQ. So that's one way in which we're seeing this techno-utopianism merging with the far right to really push forward ideas of what the future of America should look like.

Another aspect of what's happening that really concerns me, when I think about the good work that so many genetic counselors are doing out there in the world and trying to be ethical and share the results of genetic tests with patients and clients, is that many of the products that are being used and have been created are becoming more and more unregulated. Now, in general, they have been less regulated in the United States than they have been in other countries, for example, you know, in Europe and so on. But what we're seeing now is, you know, with the push towards deregulation of so many aspects of health and environment under the Trump administration that it is more and more likely that it's going to become even a wilder west out there in terms of the deregulation and the ultra-commercialization of genetic tests and technologies. Such that it's just private individuals, so to speak, who are purchasing and using these technologies. Obviously, some individuals have the resources and the money to do so, and, you know, many others will not have that opportunity, which in and of itself creates a massive inequality in terms of access to more broadly, genetics as healthcare, genetics as kind of informing health decisions, and so on. 

So that's another way in which I see this playing out, and it really concerns me because it means that genetic counselors or purveyors of genetic information, those who are working in, be it academic settings or, you know, public health settings, you know, potentially have less and less control over access to the services and the technologies that they're using. And I don't know what's going to happen with insurance and reimbursement, but that's a whole other area that I'm sure will be tested in the years to come.

Susanna Smith 

Yeah, I just want to pause there and explore this a little bit, because there was, of course, the executive order sort of expanding access to IVF. If you don't sort of sit in the Collins' camp of maybe the most extreme pronatalist pursuit, but for a genetic counselor perhaps someone just shows up and says, ‘Well, I want to select my embryos; I want the smartest babies.’ Can you talk a little bit about the history in American culture of trying to choose smarter children, and then the flip side, the science of what we know about the relationship of heredity and intelligence?

Alexandra Minna Stern

It is not proven that there is an association between genetics and intelligence, so that's one thing. I mean, there's no, like, hard and fast proof. What's more interesting, in a way, is that there has been a quest to determine that and to prove that for the past 100 plus years. So if you go back to the early eugenics movement, you know, one of the initial concerns of eugenicists was really to identify through looking at family studies, looking at pedigree charts, that there was a kind of causal relationship, not even a correlation, but a causal relationship that you could see being passed down from generation to generation, or perhaps skipping a generation due to recessive genes for traits such as intelligence and criminality. 

And if we think back to the eugenics movement, one of the most popular terms that, you know, was also one that induced a lot of anxiety was the idea of “feeble-mindedness.” And that was really connected to IQ. So, someone who had an IQ of less than 100 was viewed as less than normal, someone who had an IQ of 140 was viewed as potentially a genius. Those who had IQs that were in the lower ranges, anything below 80, according to Lewis Terman, who developed these scales, a label would be attached to them, such as, you know, not only “feeble-minded,” but broken down even more, with more precision to “idiot,” “moron,” “imbecile,” and so on. So, this idea that disability or, you know, cognitive defectiveness could be measured through genetics or looking at heredity has a long, long history. Then, of course, that was attached to gender, it was attached to race, but that kind of disability or concern or, like, the ableism that was at the heart of the eugenics movement is still very much with us today. That's something that does get underplayed in some of the media stories. At the same time, what's underlying all of it is really a very strong ableism, which, to me, I see throughout, whether it is an individual going to a genetic counselor saying, ‘Look, I want to take the most up-to-date tests and get the best results, to have the best baby possible,’ or something like the pronatalist movement with the Collinses, who are using all the technologies at their disposal to have superior babies.

Ultimately, you know, the first criteria there is that the baby, the offspring will not be disabled. It will be physically, mentally, cognitively normal, if not superior. And so, the ableism underlying all of this, it's been at the root of eugenics from the beginning. And it is sitting at the core of the pronatalist movement today. And of the anxieties that potential parents bring into the genetic counselor's office when they want to come in and get tests. 

And on some level, you know, we can understand that people want to have healthy children and healthy babies. We live in a culture where disability is so maligned and so misunderstood, and the spectrum of what is considered basically being a normal human being, or celebrating human variation is so restricted that…. It really is, I mean, I don't know what else to say about that but you get the point.

Susanna Smith
Yeah, and I agree. One of the things I want to jump in and say is even how we define disability we need to understand as, like, a cultural norming because you can also see many of these things as difference potentially, and not always, sometimes it's a source of genetic difference that doesn't mean it is a disability. 

Alexandra Minna Stern

We can see this vicious ableism in the recent comments and the policies promoted by Kennedy, who's now the head of HHS, who went into a long speech about basically, the subhumanness of people with autism, saying that they would never have families; they would never have jobs; they would never be able to do this. In other words, they didn't qualify, really, to be productive citizens, and to be full human beings because of their autism. Now he wants to start a registry for people with autism. Well, that sounds a lot to me like the registries that eugenicists wanted to create in the early 20th century so that they would be able to track everyone who was identified as “feeble-minded,” or having some other dysgenic trait, really kind of state by state. 

So that kind of idea of a registry for people with autism does send chills down my spine. And is really reminiscent of the push that eugenicists made in the early 20th century that was then very much intertwined with sterilization programs and state reproductive control from about the 1900s to the 1950s.

Susanna Smith

Yeah, well, and in some of your work, you show it goes even later.

Alexandra Minna Stern

Yes, I mean, definitely, I'm thinking of the states, you know, what happened in the states that passed laws. But yeah, I mean, this is still going on. I mean, this hasn't completely gone away, and some states allow for and have even promoted through their criminal legal systems, the sterilization of people seen as defective for a range of different reasons, be they biological, psychological, or social.

Susanna Smith

Yeah, and I just want to back up to the autism registry, because it raised such huge red flags for me as well how that could play forward in terms of really depriving people of rights. And the other piece I found really interesting about it is we see sort of these two camps within the far right: so this very discriminatory and misinformed views of what it means to be autistic. Simultaneously, we see people like the Collinses who have been very forthcoming about at least one of them identifies as autistic and that they choose to select embryos that are autistic. So, I think there are these competing views specifically around autism, within even the camp that is the far right. 

Alexandra Minna Stern

Well, that is true, but that also goes back to the IQ scales developed by Turman, where unproductive autistic people who had IQ scores of 80 and below were viewed as undesirable. But autistic savants are those who were trending into the genius category or the superior category were viewed as more desirable because they were so unique, and they were so smart.

Susanna Smith

Yeah, I think that's a really important point, sort of the ties between value judgments being placed on autism and its links to intelligence. And intelligence really being this foundational view of eugenics, where people are ranked based on ideas, false ideas often, about whether or not they are intelligent, and intelligence being the path to being a contributing member to society. 

But when I really think about this word, “eugenics,” I often feel like it's a word that circulates in academic circles. But what we're really talking about with eugenics is this idea of bettering humanity, and I'm doing air quotes here, “bettering humanity” through choices about reproduction.

Do you think it matters whether this idea, the idea of eugenics, actually influences this administration?

Alexandra Minna Stern

When you look at the early 20th century eugenics movement, you see that it was… the ideas were really popular. And there were things like Better Babies contests, or Fitter Family contests that people participated in across the country, and that kind of made it more palpable and more interesting. Everyone wanted, you know, parents wanted to learn about having healthier children and things like that. That is what has been deemed kind of the more positive eugenics although it has obviously an underbelly of white supremacy and exclusion that's part of all aspects of positive eugenics. Really where you see more of the harms happening is in the area that has been called negative eugenics, or that is associated with euthanasia, which was taken to its greatest extreme and the “Final Solution” in Germany but also with sterilization policy. And that is where the state and health officials actually had the power to dictate whether someone would maintain their reproductive liberty or not. 

And so that seems really important to think about what is, what was the power of the state during the heyday of eugenics when these policies were in place from the 1900s to the 1960s, right? So, thirty-two states had eugenic laws on the books, which allowed for and authorized officials to sterilize individuals who are deemed “unfit.” Now, that changed in the 1960s and 70s and into the 80s, although we continue to see sterilization abuse, sometimes funded by federal dollars in sites of confinement such as prisons and other institutions. And certainly, you know, it has continued on to this day in pockets here and there supported still by, you know, these same ideas.

So what concerns me is really thinking about how the power of the state, and here we're talking about both individual states, but the power of the federal government to actually come in and mandate sweeping reproductive policy, potentially through executive orders that could cause the same, if not worse, type of harms as we saw in the early 20th century.A lot of this now revolves around kind of anti-abortion policies and support for that. On one level, it seems a little counterintuitive to think that, you know, if there's such strong proponents against abortion, quote-unquote “pro-life,” although that's a problematic term in power now, well, how could they also then support sterilization, which is about people not having babies? Well, it's really two sides of the same coin that we see in countries or polities in which the state has a lot of control over reproduction through policies, laws, and other practices that are implemented on a regular basis. So, that's something that I'm very concerned about. 

So let's go back to our autism discussion, this registry of people with autism is created, let's say that that then is the precedent for another set, you know, another registry of people with a certain type of disease let's say it's actually a genetic disease that has been more codified, or let's say it's kind of a more social or psychological trait. What then happens with those registries if certain people should be having babies, well then, should certain people not be having babies? I mean, if you follow the logic through it is not that far-fetched to think, you know, we could, if the rate things are going in the next, you know, year, two years, to be in a place where actually there are certain orders that come down. I don't know the extent to which Congress would support them. I would obviously hope not. They would obviously end up being fought in the Supreme Court, and we'd have to see how that played out. But these are the types of deprivation liberty through reproductive control based on eugenic ideas that we could see playing out in the next few years.

I mean, that's… it's a very scary prospect, but the seeds are being planted for this. And the ideology is more than in the air, it's actually being supported and perpetuated and expanded through different domains in American society. You know, it is as Ezra Klein, who I like to listen to on the podcast, said, he was talking about deportation policy and what happened with Abrego, “The emergency is here.” And I would say the emergency has been here for a while around reproductive politics, but it's definitely here as well with the prospect of, you know, a kind of 21st century eugenics ideology playing out at the level of the federal government. And that, I just want to reiterate, you know, yes, Buck v. Bell was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927. And ironically, it's still on the books, although it has been diluted by a range of different decisions that were, you know, made really starting in the 1950s and 60s. The Supreme Court upheld in 1927 the right of states to sterilize people based on their supposed “unfitness.”

Susanna Smith
Yeah, and I just want to back up to this point about Buck v. Bell, and just point to sort of how very old, 200-year-old laws are being used currently to deport people. So, I think it is more relevant than ever to look at laws that we might have considered historical but that could be turned to, and how they could be deployed today. That's just frankly terrifying.

Alexandra Minna Stern

Well, I think, you know, you're right, and what, you know, I was talking before about how when I was looking at the alt-right and white nationalists, they, you know, their vision, their ideal vision is of, like, 1950s America. It's a totally romanticized, mythologized vision that comes in part from TV shows and Norman Rockwell paintings and things like that, but really, you know, what we're seeing now is a push to go back to the 18th century, you know, a time when slavery was still the law of the land. And this is something else that is crucial to what's going on right now, is that there is a battle over the telling of American history and whose history is being told. The version that is being promoted is one that takes us all the way back to these, you know, late 18th century ideas of who is an American, and their ideas of white supremacy, and a certain kind of White republic version of America. And those versions of whose history is being told and what history should be literally, like, erased through removing exhibitions, stopping exhibitions, archival materials, you know, being purged or being taken offline, and so on and so forth. I mean, that is something that, as a trained historian obviously, I'm very concerned about, and that has to do with the idea of who's writing the narrative, who has the power to write the narrative. We want to make sure that all these histories that have been captured over the last decades through things like ethnic studies and women and gender history, LGBTQ history, you know, we have to make sure that that is not lost.

Susanna Smith 

Yeah, and this is a weapon that's been deployed in so many authoritarian regimes, purging of history and the retelling based on the desired narrative. Along these same lines, it is very much related to the idea of narrative and history and whose story gets told is this idea of time.  You sort of touch on it in your book around the importance of pre-1965, the importance of the 1950s. Now we're sort of rewinding all the way back to the 1800s. But that was one of the most fascinating chapters of your book, was the chapter about time and the relationship of the far right to time. And the thing that I really kind of latched onto was you sort of throwing out there that possibly understanding time and the way the far right uses time, the concept of time and narrative is one way to push back against the Far Right. So could you talk about that?

Alexandra Minna Stern

What I found again and again was that a good number of alt-right thinkers were very taken with cyclical understandings of the past, and those often relied on a primordial understanding of society. The human race writ large, and civilization such that there would be, you know, cycles of kind of darkness that would eventually result in a new era of light, or a kind of golden age. And that is very much wrapped up in certain ways, with the thinking around making Make America Great Again. Or let's return to this glorious past, which, in and of itself is kind of been identified as one of the key aspects of any neo-fascist state is that there's this idea of a rebirth or some kind of, like involved, fraught process that has to happen, and out of which kind of a glorious new beginning will emerge.

In terms of how do we push back against that? Well, we push back against it by understanding what kind of a narrative device it is and by deconstructing it and taking it apart. And by, I would say, referring to certain metaphors of time, such as the arc of history moves towards justice, or, you know, whatever we think of different metaphors that are about really, kind of engaging in, I would say, the struggle and promise of America, which is one that, you know, if we go to the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights gains of the 1950s and 60s, the gains from, you know, the women's movement and LGBTQ and all of the rest that we've seen over time. I would say we support and build a narrative, have some control and ownership of a narrative that is invested in a multiracial democracy that is built on increasing inclusion and the promise of the American Constitution and interpretations of it that are inclusive and democratic. And so there is a time frame connected to that, that does involve fits and starts, and three steps forward and two back, or right now it might be one step forward and five back, or whatever, but you just kind of understand that there can be more inclusion. And it will be fractious, and it will take time. 

So, from my perspective, understanding how time is distorted and deployed by the far right is really important to understanding the ways in which they want to achieve power and kind of own the future. And we can't let them own the future. We have to have another narrative of the future that involves more inclusion and a fight for rights and equality for all. And there are many instances in history where we can find examples of that. I think drawing from those and not forgetting those is really important.

Susanna Smith

Yeah, I agree with that. So I want to turn to a concept in your book that I was really interested in, which is the idea of the metapolitic and how a story or narrative is built over time in a decentralized way and how this metapolitic is what actually feeds real political change and real political power.

So could you talk a bit about how the far right built the metapolitic and how this is playing out today and what that means for the future?

Alexandra Minna Stern

I'm glad you brought up the idea of metapolitics because as I was preparing for this interview and thinking about the moment in which we currently find ourselves, really metapolitics is so central to understanding the success and the pervasiveness of far right ideologies today.

So, metapolitics is an idea that goes back, really, to the 1960s when it seemed like in Western Europe and the United States that rights’ movements and what we'd say liberal or left politics student movements were winning the day. Those who affiliated with kind of more conservative movements, or we would call them, you know, right-wing movements saw the areas that they had had control over such as cultural spaces or universities really changing, and changing in a way they didn't like. And they kind of stepped back and said, “Well, we're probably not going to win this battle right now but what we're going to do is we're going to really try to create this space where we can exert some control.” And it was dubbed metapolitics. That comes from French New Right thinkers in, like, the 1960s and 70s who really began to develop this idea. And then it caught on in the United States, really, by the 1990s and early 2000s and became a kind of staple trope for White nationalists and, you know, the alt-right.

And it's interesting if you think back to Steve Bannon and something he said, which is, he said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” And that, in a way, perfectly encapsulates the idea of metapolitics, that the way to control politics and the political sphere is first you have to control culture and the cultural milieu.

And on the far right, you know, the disgruntlement was really that the left and liberals. had won the culture war, had managed to define the terms of culture and music and art and what was valued in books and TV and the rest of it. Over time all of that had kind of changed in a way that the far right really found distasteful and repulsive and not in sync with the version of America that they wanted to see.

So one of the ways in which the alt-right really wanted to reclaim the metapolitical terrain was by using social media was by winning, like, the meme war, let's say.  Another way in which we've seen the metapolitical terrain being redefined is really through podcasts and podcasters such as Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro, who invite far right thinkers to be interviewed and help kind of disseminate their ideas. It really behooves us to think about the ways in which the far right is winning the war now on the metapolitical terrain. And how this has been a long game for them. I mean this has been going on for a long time, it's not something that happened overnight. And I would say that, you know, those who are more liberal or on the left really need to think about, kind of, culture. Obviously, politics is something that needs to be engaged in but culture has been redefined, and is being redefined, in the context of the current administration.

And the way in which you bring people to your political side is often not through describing the virtues of a particular piece of legislation or getting into details about different aspects of policy but is really through, as we know, kind of hearts and minds and cultural emotive appeal. And so I think that, in many ways, the far right has been very successful in understanding metapolitics and understanding how controlling the levers of metapolitics is essential to gaining the kind of, let's say, soft power that can lead to a harder kind of power.

One of the reasons that we see an assault on universities is that universities are seen as one of the primary metapolitical spaces where culture and cultural values have redefined in ways that the far right does not like and views as anathema to its vision and version of American society. If we look at the assault on universities, it's an assault on quote-unquote “wokeness.” But really, you know, if we think about it more broadly, it's an assault on what is seen as the most effective, from their perspective, metapolitical spaces where change has happened over generations and remade American society in the form of younger people pursuing their lives in America and having a range of more egalitarian values that the far right doesn't like.

You know, another component of this is the assault on science. There's the financial imperative to take back all the money that is supposedly being wasted on all these projects, including DEI projects funded by the NIH or the NSF or other agencies. But also there's the assault on science itself and against forms of knowledge that are seen as threatening and as not critical to the current political agenda.

Susanna Smith 

Thank you, Professor Stern, for joining me again on Genetic Frontiers.

Alexandra Minna Stern

Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciated our wide-ranging conversation.

Susanna Smith 

For anyone listening who would like to learn more about Professor Stern's work, please go to https://www.ssjlab.org. Professor Stern's book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, as well as her other books are linked to in our show notes. 

Genetic Frontiers is co-produced by Brandy Mello and by me: Susanna Smith. Music is by Edward Giordano and design by Abhinav Chauhan and Julie Weinstein. Thank you for listening to this episode of Genetic Frontiers connect with us at geneticfrontiers.org or on Instagram and Linkedin at Genetic Frontiers, to continue the conversation. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support our independent production. Please make a donation to Genetic Frontiers through our Patreon account.

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