From Darwin to Hitler

“This was a central characteristic of progressive thought in the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. From Darwin, who provided the scientific rationale for such racism, to Margaret Sanger and her ‘human weeds,’ to George Bernard Shaw and the eugenics craze, to Hitler’s final solution, progressives have a lot to answer for. But instead of answering for it, they dropped the whole thing like a hot rock after Hitler, and (of course) turned on traditionalist whites in the South who did not have the kind of flexibility in their joints that makes secularist advances in ethical theory so fun to watch. After a century or so of bloodshed and general mayhem in the name of progressivism, it was apparently time to upbraid Southern Christians for their intolerance” (Black and Tan, p. 32).