The narrative spinners in the Obama machine have recently deployed the term "Social Darwinism" as a weapon with which to define what Romney and the GOP would bring to the victim class. A clever tactic, for it provides a talking point, lending a veneer of intellectual sophistication to those who seek to whip up fears among potential voters dependent on taxpayer largesse, and get them out to the polls. They want you to die, as the former Congressman put it.

It turns out that the veneer itself is synthetic.  In the Weekly Standard, Jonah Goldberg, a genuine intellectual historian as well as a pundit, peels back the tactics deployed by both the media and political arms of the progressive machine as they launched the meme into the media maw.  Before the handlers let the term escape the president's lips, they loosened up the soil for a couple of months, planting uses of the term in friendly venues.

The term "Social Darwinism" turns out to be an intellectual fraud itself, largely propagated by progressives, in part to cover their tracks for having embraced eugenics as a scientific Darwinian strategy for improving the race. Jonah names names, and brings his characteristic wit and humor to the subject.

...the myth that Social Darwinism was a popular term in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was largely created by the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, whose 1944 book Social Darwinism in American Thought didn't merely transform our understanding of the Gilded Age, it largely fabricated an alternative history of it.

Jonah G makes learning intellectual history fun, which is why his important work of intellectual history, Liberal Fascism, led the New York Times bestseller list. Coincidentally, he has a new book coming out May 1st [take that, Commies!] called The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas

Based on the Social Darwinism sample on display in the Weekly Standard, this one is going to be a gigantic bestseller, and influence the conduct of the campaign. The Obama media are spinning phony narratives based on class warfare. It looks like Jonah is going to debunk and ridicule them, and arm conservatives with information that acts as a solvent to peel away the fantasy veneer being peddled in the media.