tbh people go talking “oh, this is just a revival of the same racial discourse we’ve had for centuries”

I don’t think they’re accounting for the collapse of agriculture as the fundamental human substrate

Like, for most of humanity the modal experience was raising, nurturing, shaping living things with an eye not to their self-realization but for breeding, harvest, and consumption; purposive use

The eugenic-to-genocidal themes of the early 20th century are such echoes of preceding scientific agriculture - you could say “listen as our doctorates and outreach workers teach you to invest in the best and cull the rest” and people would recognize that as an idiom that had in fact improved their lives, made their countries stronger in living memory

All the genetic stuff coming out of what Sailer and whoever were pushing in the 90-2000s - haplotypes, epigenetics, Watson’s Bell Curve - has been so marginal to the recent social reorientation around race, it’s there if you’re migrating in from a subculture that insists on having something in that role I guess

The themes where I do notice continuity go back to the post-WWI “Return to Normalcy”, the 1940s antifeminism that presaged the 50s suburban idyll, ‘70s Nixonian law and order

Which is to say themes fundamentally about what it’s like to live in urbanity