If you’re trying to wrap your head around who is bearing the brunt of the budget hatchet, here’s a hint: the programs that have been slashed all aide “citizens less able to advocate for or help themselves,” as one official put it. Civil rights enforcement. Special education funding and oversight. A Health and Human Services outfit that distributed funding to high-poverty communities. All have been decimated by the Trump administration’s layoffs. And if you believe Trump’s latest bluster, they’re gone for good.
As for the ‘why’ behind these particular cuts, Trump was quick to offer an explanation. “These are Democrat programs that we disagree with.” A staffer at Housing and Urban Development described the layoffs and loss of funds as “the nail in the coffin of the Great Society,” adding, “They finally figured out how to do what not even Reagan could.”
I’d like to add another rationale for the administration’s moves, especially as they pertain to education: the putrescence of race science that hangs over virtually everything that Trump and his allies are up to. Why the constant references to low-IQ individuals—a standard Trump insult? Why the obsession with so-called “bad genes”? And above all, why the disproportionate attacks on programs and policies that make the country a more equal place?
Historian Quinn Slobodian, author of a fantastic recent book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, provides some essential answers. Slobodian argues that race science, with its noxious claims that ‘biology is destiny,’ comes roaring back during periods of social change. He traces today’s obsessive focus on IQ back to the social tumult of the 1970’s and the revolt against ‘political correctness’ in the 1990’s. Regardless of the time period, the argument for race science is remarkably consistent: since destiny is baked into the genetic pie, what’s the point of costly public policy interventions, public education chief among them?
And while this is admittedly a grim topic, the history that Slobodian excavates so skillfully in his book offers a bit of encouragement. Not only has race science been discredited again and again, forcing its adherents back under their assorted rocks, but the idea of ‘biology as destiny’ is deeply at odds with the egalitarian impulse that still runs pretty deep in our national veins, believe it or not. In other words, there’s a reason why the Trump administration has been savaging services to kids with special needs under cover of darkness.
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