Sohrab Ahmari is wrong that hereditary thinking will lead to hyper-capitalism

Apr 12, 2024

source: Wikipedia

Sohrab Ahmari is an Iranian American convert to Catholicism and a populist conservative political columnist. Ahmari is an advocate for making the GOP friendlier to the working class and for the Right to seriously address income inequality. However, Ahmari is vehemently against the Right flirting with White identity politics and hereditarianism.

Sohrab Ahmari has a recent article in the New Statesman, on why the New Racist Right are Uniquely Dangerous. Ahmari states that “Eugenic, racial and IQ-obsessed conservatism can also help blunt demands for economic reform: if the poor and working classes are impoverished not by the power differentials generated by markets but by their own mental deficiencies and endemic laziness, then labour unions, antitrust, social welfare and the like can do little to improve the lot of the powerless. The best social policy can do is get out of the way of the asset-rich, whose wealth is only the “natural” product of their genius.”

I disagree with Ahmari about hereditarianism and blame blank slatism for a lot of the worst policies and ideologies on both the Left and the Right. For the Left, it is their view that since inequality is a product of racial discrimination, enforced racial equity is the only solution to inequity. For the Right, it is their view that poverty and inequality are a product of laziness and moral failings, so people just need to pull themselves up from their bootstraps.

Once we accept that inequality is largely a product of hereditable traits, then we can cut people some slack for their personal failings, and come up with more pragmatic policies. Hereditarian thinking could potentially lead to eugenics or Social Darwinism, but ironically could also make people more comfortable with a welfare state or UBI, and put pressure on elites to embrace nobles oblige.