The Man Who Believed in Nothing- Part II
Spencerism in America
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
[ This is the second in a series I began in November. You can find part one here.
The Man Who Believed in Nothing- Part I - by Henry Snow
Herbert Spencer and the Nihilism of the Right
Now for today’s installment!]
Where we left off with Herbert Spencer, his wild popularity was beginning to decline in Britain, but it was rising in America. By the late 19th century, Spencer was a bitter, angry man. The young Spencer at least presented his anti-ethical competitive universe as something that would lead to improvement for all. In his later years, Spencer’s most optimistic promises faded. His opposition to militarism— the only part of his ideology that was defensible— seemed to have achieved nothing, despite his literary success. And neither states nor regulation were fading away.
But Spencer was about to have a long afterlife in the United States. I’ve been struggling to write this installment for a number of reasons— prosaic reasons like “trying to figure out how to actually have an income with a history PhD in 2025” and “how do I write about this in a way that’s complementary to rather than substituting for my book” but also deeper problems relating to ongoing events. The unconstitutional coup by Elon Musk’s DOGE, in particular (see the WIRED pieces linked in this sentence, and definitely check out the reporting Nathan Tankus has done on this) is undeniably Spencerian… but it’s also so vacuous and impulsive that intellectual history risks implying there is actually much intellect involved. There are intellectual discontinuities in the MAGA project too, because of course there are: while Musk is doing a kind of slash-and-burn in the name of “free markets,” the White House itself is pushing major tariffs, which are traditionally anathema to libertarian economic thinking and cannot be justified in the same way. Trump is a President of impulses. Vibes. Not ideas.
Fortunately for our purposes, Herbert Spencer was also a philosopher of impulses and vibes, not just libertarian economics.
Herbert Spencer’s most famous appearance in American history today is nearly a footnote: a reference in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s blistering dissent in Lochner v. New York (1905). Against the majority opinion that insisted American freedom included the “right” to work terrible hours in unsafe conditions— the decision struck down a New York law limiting bakers’ work week to 60 hours— Holmes thundered that the Constitution “does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”
While the court actually held that it did, this was in one sense a high water mark for American Spencerism. The Progressive era was coming. Its intellectual groundwork had already been laid by figures like Richard T. Ely and his pupil John Commons (the guy in the thumbnail for this post), economists who argued for a kind of benevolent technocracy: public decisions should be made by well-meaning, knowledgeable experts, not the public. Ely did not shy away from calling this aristocracy specifically. Another figure in this orbit, Edward Alsforth Ross, actually wrote a book specifically called “social control”— as a how-to guide, not a warning. All three were influential economists in their day, who played a role in policy-making and in the development of academic economics in the US.
Their vision would seem to be everything Spencer was against. Government officials making intentional decisions using the coercive authority of the state was exactly what his entire philosophy warned against. Commons and Ely were not socialists; Ross was more complicated, but ultimately, likewise, a technocrat rather than a populist. But they did believe in an active, interfering state. They believed, in short, in what Republicans now call (grind your teeth while you say it; spit at the end) “government regulation.”
Yet Ross, Commons, and Ely were Spencerians in two critical senses. First, they still believed in the competitive evolution of human society. Their goal was to do better than the natural evolution Spencer claimed would take hold through laissez-faire economics. In principle, each in his own way actually said as much in their writing— for more on this, see my book, which will be out next year. And in practice, their policies reflected this. Ely proposed economic regulation to increase competition specifically. Commons advised technocratic and corporatist negotiation by the state between labor and capital, rather than empowering workers directly.
Second, Ross and Commons in particular were avowed white supremacists in a decidedly Spencerian manner. Both personally contributed to the myth of “white genocide” that Elon Musk and company cite today. Like Spencer, they believed “the races” were in competition with each other, but unlike Spencer they were far from confident in the practical superiority of Europeans, who they feared might be outcompeted by others (not just echoes, but direct links here, to the “pronatalist” anxiety about birth rates on the right). In eugenic as in economic matters, they proposed state intervention in order to direct the outcome of competition, not to put an end to it.
The Progressive movement took inspiration from both the economic and eugenicist elements of this technocratic post-Spencerism. Economically, Wilson’s opposition to big business was in the name of competition itself. Labor won some significant victories during his presidency, but many of these provided temporary. This was also the era of— and several of these figures advocated, in various forms— forced sterilization in the name of “eugenics.” Woodrow Wilson’s personal racism was a reflection of the broader racism of Progressive-era elites. It undermined the best of his internationalism, enabled a brutal and senseless invasion and occupation in Haiti, and set back progress on racial equality in the US. Regulation on railway working hours and international military adventurism were not something Spencer would endorse, but pro-competition economics, “eugenic” restrictions on reproduction, and the development of a federal police apparatus that could and did suppress the left— these were Wilson positions straight out of Spencer.
All this playing “Where’s Waldo” with Spencer is going somewhere. There’s a right-wing critique of the Progressive era that is a response to an earlier critique which looms large in US intellectual history— Richard Hofstadter’s 1944 Social Darwinism in American Thought. He didn’t coin the term, but he did popularize it. While Hofstadter’s own work is complicated and has nuances too broad to go into here, the way it was incorporated into US popular consciousness goes something like this:
In the Gilded Age, evil rich men needed to justify keeping the public
They used evolutionary notions of competition to justify laissez-faire.
Likewise, they believed racial inequality was natural and good.
Then, reformers emerged, insisting that human beings could do better.
Hofstadter was a critic of capitalism, and writing in 1944, as the New Deal had ended the Depression and was delivering the world from fascism, you can see how this broad arc might arise. Of course, he is hardly wholly or even primarily responsible for this story. It’s one that certain progressives, and then New Deal liberals, told about themselves.
The right has a counter-narrative. Their argument, which you can find in popular form in this essay and in academic monograph form in Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers, goes roughly like this:
Progressives were eugenicists.
Their eugenics and economics were both intention-driven state actions.
All such intervention leads, as Spencer warns, to tyranny (and constitutes it).
Thus, the liberals are the real fascists.
The stakes of who gets to claim Spencer, what they are claiming, and what Spencer himself actually represented are thus quite high. On the right, Nazism and Communism get lumped together as “totalitarian” big government ideas (or at least they did among the conservative Limbaugh listeners I grew up around; increasingly the right now just explicitly says Nazis are good). In this view, Spencer and the mid-20th century libertarians he helped inspire are heroes. Progressives are villains, junior versions of the later “totalitarians,” whose legacy must be dismantled by the right-thinking libertarian forces of freedom.
This is wrong. Early 20th-century Progressive elites took inspiration directly from Spencer, and specifically from his competitive evolutionary vision. The worst of Progressivism— which right-wing critics can be decent chroniclers of!— came from following the spirit of Spencerism. The best of their program (new legal rights for organized labor, food and drug standards) defied it. Things are nuanced. The same people could support shorter working hours on the railroad and racist immigration restrictions. That does not mean these are the same thing!
Policy considerations in present-day right-wing critiques of the Wilson era invariably end up revealing the “injustices” conservatives are actually concerned with: Leonard’s book actually concludes by whining about the minimum wage and “occupational licensing” (you know, requiring a doctor to have a license). He insists these lead directly to tyranny— that, as Spencer would have it, forcing someone to pay a certain wage to an employee is just like and leads to forcing someone not to reproduce, or not to speak out in dissent. Since the road to hell is paved with good intentions, best not to have any intentions at all. Evolution alone can decide what is right, what is good, what wins. Regular readers might hear a familiar tune from me here, but it bears repeating: the right-wing economic vision is a world without should claims altogether.
This hostility to intention would define the postwar right. I’ll pick up the story in the postwar era next installment. For now I want to return to the present, and the puzzle I set out at the beginning— and end on a hopeful and perhaps useful note as we face down the present-day manifestations of Spencerian nihilism.
One thing this historiographical and polemical debate about early 20th-century Progressivism should tell us is that Spencer was flexible: his ideas could be mobilized by a variety of actors to a variety of ends. Still, finishing the first draft of my book prior to the election, and working on some articles on this subject around the same time, I found myself hesitating as I tied things to Mr. Spencer. It couldn’t all be him; he’s one of those figures you see everywhere when you look, but that doesn’t mean you should. I never bought that the J.D. Vance “national conservative” (NatCon) wing of tariffs and industrial policy was more powerful than economic laissez-faire on the right, but surely it counted for something.
And it did! But less, even, than I anticipated. Tariffs, mostly. Musk’s DOGE cuts look like the wildest dreams of old-fashioned Tea Party types, not the NatCons who supposedly believe in big government as long as it works for them. What the entire MAGA right agrees on is Spencerian evolution, in economic and racial terms. The world is a game to be won. For Elon Musk, this means ransacking the state because it isn’t based around private profit. For JD Vance, it means selling out everyone and everything for personal power, and embarrassing himself by trying to “win” a meeting to decide the fate of a war-torn country that needs our help. For Trump, it means imposing tariffs and “making deals” with Russia. Much of this is at odds with Spencer’s actual political prescriptions, but the underlying worldview is his— not just by correlation, but as you’ll see next time, by actual influence. And the “free market” billionaires seem to be having much more wins in the new administration than the “postliberal” NatCons.
Herbert Spencer is a useful figure in explaining the right not just because of his influence on it, but also because he explains the actions of a certain kind of nihilistic cynic even if that person has not, in fact, read Spencer. In part one, I mentioned that Spencer’s libertarianism extended into the mind itself: he believed it was tyranny for individuals to impose their own will over their own instincts and impulses. The mind, for Spencer, is a raucous collection of impulses that must be let out, worked out, unleashed to defeat and be defeated, strengthen or die, in the grand competition of existence itself. Your good desires will be magnified and your poor ones stamped out, when released; to let any part of yourself take the lead is to inhibit this process of evolution.
No man lives this unexamined life better, perhaps, than Trump. More importantly, Spencerian impulsivity describes his movement: a fractious coalition of competing interests, led by a man who seems entirely motivated by his id, held together by a shared belief in being winners. This is an evangelistic nihilism that does not just passively dismiss but actively spurns belief, in anything. That’s how we end up with the pervasive “vice signalling” of the right— MAGA figures gleefully, pointedly, publicly reject any kind of ethics as woke nonsense, and perpetually flirt with or openly embrace Nazism, eugenics, war crimes, etc.
People have tried to pin an affirmative politics to Trump: at least he’s pro-worker (a take you might find in the fascist rag Compact), at least he’s anti-war (to a certain anti-liberal leftist contrarian), he cares about the health of the American volk unlike those marketeer Koch brother types (the NatCon ideal). All of these are wrong, demonstrably. At each turn, he’s demonstrated a single-minded interest in what he feels is winning. The world is a game to be won. To act otherwise is to be a sucker.
Nothing predicts being a sucker better than believing you aren’t one, though. Thankfully for us, Trump’s conception of winning strategies and an actual practical political calculus do not always intersect. Trump is gambling away US influence in Europe and across the world because he prefers something that feels like victory to actual American power. His tariffs will sacrifice actual economic prosperity for, as far as I can tell, vibes.
This is not simply because he is a fool. It is because Spencerian nihilism contains a descriptive lie in its foundations. It cannot recognize the power of cooperation, intention, and planning. Spencer insists that disorganized competitive evolution overcomes all. But the most powerful and prosperous economies have come about only through careful engineering backed by popular will. A revolutionary army fighting for each other can beat a disorganized mercenary band, who turn and run at the first sign of defeat.
To believe nothing but winning matters is to ignore the human willingness to stop playing the game and start redefining it. We risk our lives or even give them for people we might never meet. We take care of the people we love even when they cannot give us anything. We go easy on our little brothers so the Monopoly game will be more fun. We get humanities PhDs. Not all of this has to be about ethics— we reject Spencerism simply by valuing something, for aesthetic or spiritual reasons as well as moral, enough to care for it even when it’s impractical or difficult in material terms. This behavior, this tendency, and these beliefs matter, in a historical and political sense.
My home state of New Hampshire proclaims Live Free or Die as its motto. I used to find this tiresome— surely it should be live free or try to fix the situation— and irrittingly libertarian. But live free or die can be a left-wing, anti-Spencerian idea too. There are things worth fighting for. There are things worth losing for. And when we fight for them anyway, sometimes, we’ll win. Altruism and ethics can win out, specifically because we don’t choose to be good in order to win. Trapped in instrumental reasoning, the right denies whole categories of human value— ironically, including categories conservatives claim are sacred. This isn’t just wrong. It’s impractical. It’s a weakness. We can defeat them.