THE DARWINIST RIGHT:

If hard-line, race-based immigration restrictions were a deviation from the Reagan era, an opposition to Great Society civil rights and poverty programs, particularly those aimed at helping Black Americans, seemed very much like a continuation of it. But the new writing on Black Americans, inequality, and government intervention deviated sharply from Reagan's libertarian-minded approach. Reagan asserted these programs failed because they were a matter of government overreach, interrupting the natural state of the market and social relations. He offered an optimistic (even Pollyannaish) view of what would exist without government interference: a colorblind, meritocratic, and equality-based society.

Writers like Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and Dinesh D'Souza painted a much bleaker picture. When they looked at Black inequality--in wealth, in educational attainment, in life expectancy, in political power--they saw the root cause not as racism or ineffective government intervention but as problems that existed within the Black community--in Murray and Herrnstein's case, an intelligence deficit; in D'Souza's, a cultural one.

Those arguments would not only lay the groundwork for a more pessimistic, color-conscious racism on the right but also provide a more respectable version of anti-Black politics than that of someone like David Duke (who, for all his efforts to appear respectable, could never truly disassociate himself from the Klan).

Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve became an instant sensation when it hit shelves in 1994. In it, they offered a number of arguments about IQ, societal problems, and race. The core contentions were that IQ was, to a significant degree, heritable and unchangeable; that low IQ correlated to both race and negative social behaviors, leading to poverty, crime, and out-of-wedlock children; and that policy should take those correlations into account.

Though crammed full of charts and equations, The Bell Curve was not a scientific tract--the authors were a political scientist (Murray) and a psychologist (Herrnstein), not scientists or geneticists. It was instead a policy book that used poorly interpreted and dubiously sourced pseudoscientific data to build its arguments.

The new writing on Black Americans, inequality, and government intervention deviated sharply from Reagan's libertarian-minded approach.

The Bell Curve was a broadside against the Great Society and a call for new policies that, while not explicitly race based, would have profound consequences for Black people and nonwhite immigrants. The authors called for, among other things, elimination of aid to poor mothers so they would stop having children; an end to the use of affirmative action in college admissions, which they argued raised low-IQ people of color above their ability levels; and a shift in immigration law from family-based immigration to merit-based immigration in order to favor higher-IQ immigrants.

These were not new ideas, of course. Scientific racism had been around for centuries, confidently asserting schema for racial classifications and racial superiority. Herrnstein himself had been on the race-IQ beat for almost a quarter century, part of a renaissance of scientific racism repackaged around contemporary intelligence research. In a 1971 piece for The Atlantic, he argued government spending on education and antipoverty programs could not promote equality, because they did not address racial groups' inherited differences in IQ.

The article proved as influential as it was controversial. In the White House, Pat Buchanan, then an aide to President Richard Nixon, drafted a memo arguing against federal programs focused on integration and poverty. "The importance of this article is difficult to understate," he wrote to the president, confusing "understate" with "overstate." "If correct, then all our efforts and expenditures not only for 'compensatory education' but to provide an 'equal chance at the starting line' are guaranteeing that we wind up with the intelligent ones coming in first. And every study we have shows blacks 15 IQ points below whites on the average."

Nixon sent the article to presidential counselor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who a few years earlier had authored the Moynihan Report, which argued Black poverty was a function of failings in Black culture. Moynihan told the president that Herrnstein's arguments rang true. Yet, while both men agreed with Herrnstein, in a private Oval Office conversation about the article, the sense of taboo hovered: "Nobody must think we're thinking about it," Nixon told Moynihan, "and...if we do find out it's correct, we must never tell anybody."

Nixon, whose racism is well documented, stressed that he hadn't wanted to agree with Herrnstein and other race-IQ researchers like Arthur Jensen, but he ultimately did. "I've reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me, and I don't base it on any scientific evidence, that what Herrnstein says, and what was said earlier by Jensen, and so forth, is probably very close to the truth."

It mattered that Moynihan and Nixon did not declare their agreement with Herrnstein publicly. They may have agreed, but their agreement did not shape the public debate about social and economic programs. The trajectory for The Bell Curve was markedly different: controversial as it was, it entered mainstream political discourse and became part of the right's conception of race, IQ, and policy.

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