In This Article

• What is modern eugenics, and how does it operate today?
• How did America influence Nazi Germany’s eugenics laws?
• Are today’s policies a form of systemic exclusion?
• Is the GOP agenda intentionally eugenic, or just politically convenient?
• What can we do to break this pattern and build a regenerative future?

Eugenics in the 21st Century: Alive, Well, and Wearing a Red Hat

Let’s start with a history lesson they don’t teach in high school. Eugenics wasn’t born in Nazi Germany. It was cultivated right here, in the land of the free and the home of the sterilized. By the early 20th century, over 30 U.S. states had laws that allowed the government to forcibly sterilize those deemed “unfit”—a word that included everything from epilepsy to poverty to being an orphan.

The high-water mark of this disgrace came in 1927 with Buck v. Bell, when the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck. She had been institutionalized for being “feebleminded,” a diagnosis that conveniently covered anyone society found inconvenient. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sealed the deal with his cold-blooded declaration: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

In 20th-century America, one of the easiest ways to silence a woman was to call her crazy. Across the country, thousands of women were institutionalized not for illness, but for disobedience. Say the wrong thing, dress the wrong way, or simply want a divorce—and you could find yourself locked away.

Nowhere was this more evident than in places like the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, where women were committed for “infractions” like being too independent, too sexual, or too loud. This wasn’t healthcare—it was social control masquerading as medicine. And it laid the groundwork for a much broader system of exclusion we still live with today.

That line should haunt every civics textbook, but most Americans have never heard it. Maybe that’s by design. Because if they knew how easily we once erased people for being poor, disabled, or just different, they might start asking uncomfortable questions about what’s happening now.

What Exactly Is Eugenics?

Eugenics, stripped of its academic window dressing, is the belief that some people are biologically superior—and others are defective enough to justify elimination, exclusion, or forced control. The word itself comes from Greek, meaning “well-born.” But don't let the classical roots fool you. In practice, eugenics has always been about power: deciding who gets to reproduce, who gets to participate in society, and who deserves to simply exist. It was paraded around in the early 20th century as “science,” but the real motive was always the same—control the population by pruning the so-called “undesirable branches.”

American eugenicists weren’t some backroom cult. They were doctors, lawmakers, college professors, and judges. They believed they could “improve” the human race by encouraging the “fit” to breed more and sterilizing—or institutionalizing—everyone else. Poverty, disability, mental illness, even promiscuity or alcoholism could land you on the wrong side of the ledger. It was class warfare disguised as public health, racism dressed up as reason. And long before Hitler marched through Europe, American lawmakers were already marching thousands of citizens into sterilization wards, backed by courts, universities, and billionaires who thought they were engineering utopia.

When the Nazis Took Notes—and Took It Further

While Americans like to pretend Hitler was some monstrous anomaly, the truth is he was an admirer of American policy. Nazi Germany’s early sterilization laws were modeled directly on U.S. statutes—especially those from California. American eugenicists weren’t fringe figures; they were respected scientists, philanthropists, and government advisors. The Carnegie Institution and Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled eugenics research that Nazi Germany cited approvingly.

In fact, Nazi lawyers borrowed the legal reasoning of Buck v. Bell when drafting the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. That’s not conspiracy theory—it’s documented history. Germany sterilized over 400,000 people under that law, and from there, it wasn’t a big leap to the death camps.

American eugenics was the dry run. Hitler just removed the brakes.

From Scalpels to Spreadsheets

Today’s eugenics doesn’t need white coats or surgical wards. It wears khakis and holds budget meetings. The scalpel has been replaced by the spreadsheet. The ideology’s still there—it’s just been repackaged into legislation, talking points, and “market-based solutions.”

Let’s call it what it is: systemic exclusion. The poor don’t need to be sterilized if you can simply cut off their access to healthcare, deny them education, and make housing unaffordable. The disabled don’t need to be hidden away in asylums if you can let them fall through cracks wide enough to be chasms.

And people of color? Immigrants? LGBTQ folks? The new approach is to bury them under red tape, criminalize their existence, or erase them from curriculums and voting booths. It’s eugenics-by-algorithm. Targeted outcomes without getting your hands dirty.

“Real Americans” vs. The Rest of Us

Here’s where politics takes center stage. The modern Republican Party—especially in its MAGA incarnation—has embraced a worldview that defines “real Americans” in ever-narrowing terms. Everyone else? They're a threat. A burden. An infestation. In other words, the new riff-raff.

Take a look at the rhetoric: - Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” - Trans kids are “a threat to our way of life.” - Poor people are “lazy” and “dependent.” - Black voters are “stealing elections.”

This isn’t just dog-whistle politics. It’s a symphony of scapegoating. And behind the curtain? Policy after policy that cuts services, restricts rights, and punishes those who don’t fit the mold.

Medicaid work requirements. Abortion bans. Book bans. Voter roll purges. Privatization of everything. These aren’t random. They’re coordinated moves in a long game of exclusion.

Unconscious Eugenics—or Strategic Cruelty?

Let’s give some folks the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they don’t see what they’re doing. Maybe, to them, it’s just about saving taxpayer dollars or protecting “traditional values.” But intent doesn’t matter as much as outcome.

When a child in a poor ZIP code can’t access decent healthcare or food, while billionaires hoard more wealth than medieval kings, something is deeply broken. And when those breaks line up conveniently with old racist, classist, and ableist assumptions, we should probably stop calling it an accident.

The truth is, some politicians know exactly what these policies do. And they’re fine with it. They’d rather eliminate problems by eliminating people—at least from sight, if not from existence. If that sounds harsh, so be it. History is rarely polite.

America’s Eugenics Isn’t Dead—It’s Just Gentrified

We like to think we’ve progressed. But all we’ve done is change the window dressing. The ideology of eugenics—of valuing some lives more than others—still informs far too much of our public policy.

From how we fund schools (based on property taxes) to how we zone cities (to exclude affordable housing) to how we police neighborhoods (with military gear and broken windows theories), the goal is often the same: keep the undesirables out and the “fit” secure.

We’re building a country for the already fortunate and calling it meritocracy. That’s not evolution. That’s gentrified eugenics.

Trumpism and the Resurgence of Eugenics in Plain Sight

The Trump era didn’t just flirt with exclusion—it embraced it, institutionalized it, and promised more. From family separations at the border to attempting the largest forced population removal in American history—upwards of 10 to 20 million people, overwhelmingly Latino—Trumpism has revived the logic of eugenics in a form tailor-made for modern politics. You don’t need lab coats and sterilization wards when you can deport millions, slash healthcare, criminalize poverty, and suppress votes. The tools have changed; the goals have not. These policies aren’t just punitive—they’re demographic. They create a future where certain people are engineered out of the American story by design.

The historical parallels are unavoidable. Early eugenicists used the law to sterilize the poor, institutionalize women who defied norms, and pathologize entire races. Today’s version encourages births through abortion bans while erasing millions through deportation—creating a chilling demographic equation: expand one group, eliminate another. Add in the rhetoric—"vermin," "poison," "infestation"—and you have the same dehumanizing language that always precedes atrocity. Let’s be clear: the difference between demographic cleansing and genocide isn’t moral—it’s logistical. And if you think it “can’t happen here,” look again. The groundwork—legal, psychological, and political—is already being laid.

What’s Happening on the Ground

Today, this isn't a theory. It’s happening. ICE has been transformed into an armed force of demographic control—its budget now rivaling national militaries. Annual funding has ballooned from around $8.7 billion to approximately $27.7 billion—placing it alongside Canada and Turkey in military spending rankings—and the broader deportation package exceeds the military budget of every country besides the U.S. and China.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Florida’s Everglades, facilities like “Alligator Alcatraz” are rising—detention centers surrounded by swamps, alligators, and pythons, built in days to house thousands far from public scrutiny. A second center is already planned. People are being rounded up, held in remote, unregulated hellholes—sometimes shipped to countries they don’t even speak the language of. If we don’t call that eugenics, what are we calling it?

The Slippery Slope Has Been Greased

History doesn’t begin with Auschwitz. It begins with laws. With paperwork. With speeches about “safety” and “purity.” It begins with ordinary people convinced that excluding others is not only necessary, but noble. That’s how the eugenics movement operated in the United States in the early 1900s. It was never about jackboots and death squads at first. It started with judges, school boards, and social workers—all just trying to “fix society.” Buck v. Bell didn’t feel like genocide. It felt like reform. Until it didn’t.

That’s what makes this moment so dangerous. We’re watching the same pattern unfold with 21st-century polish: bureaucratic cruelty framed as policy, mass suffering explained away by budget math, and entire populations dehumanized until their removal seems rational—even humane. And let’s be honest: when you’ve already got detention camps, razor wire, and a militarized border force, you don’t need imagination—just orders. Deporting 10 or 20 million people isn’t just a logistical nightmare. It’s a moral Rubicon. Cross it, and the distance from deportation to destruction shrinks fast. Not because the policies are explicitly genocidal, but because the psychology has already arrived.

History’s Echoes Are Louder Than Ever

It’s easy to dismiss all this as alarmism. But that’s what people said in the 1920s too. Back then, eugenics was seen as common sense. Efficient. Modern. Scientific. Only later did the world see it for what it was: barbarism in a lab coat.

We’re at a similar crossroads today. The language may have changed, but the outcomes are creeping in—through legislation, bureaucracy, and silence.

So here’s the question: Are we going to wait for the future to shame us again? Or are we going to recognize the pattern now and choose something different—something humane?

The Future Has No “Unfit”

A healthy society doesn’t sort people by worth. It nurtures worth in every person. If we want to survive as a nation, as a species, we need to abandon the cruel calculus of eugenics—modern or otherwise—and embrace interdependence. There is no regeneration without inclusion. There is no democracy without dignity for all.

And if you think it “can’t happen here,” ask yourself this: if a people who lived through the Holocaust can watch their own government bomb refugee camps, starve civilians, and reduce entire families to ash in Gaza—what makes us think Americans are immune to that same slippery slope? If memory isn't enough to stop atrocity, what is? Historical trauma does not inoculate a nation against future cruelty. It only shows how fragile morality becomes when fear and ideology take the wheel.

The fear machine wants us to look sideways at each other. But maybe it’s time we looked up—at the systems, the ideologies, and the puppeteers pulling the strings. The riff-raff didn’t break America. The exclusionists did. And they’re still trying. The only question left is: will we stop them?

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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Article Recap

Modern eugenics operates under the radar, no longer wearing white coats but woven into laws, budgets, and talking points. From early American sterilization programs to today's systemic exclusion of the poor, disabled, and marginalized, the thread is clear. This article exposes how these patterns reappear in current Republican policies—and argues for a regenerative, inclusive path forward built on interdependence, not exclusion.

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