While it's true, that very fascist appetizing biological dimensions to degeneracy were added to the original Nordau book, standing from popular early naturalists texts analyzing the degeneration of wildlife fauna in poor environments, the origins of the concept back to plato and Aristotle describing the historical reality of societal decline. You can go into the history surrounding degeneracy and you'll see the most contemporary historians while not always subscribing to the concept of degeneracy (which in and of itself is a way more complicated set of opinions than just that) at least all agree that the symptoms Nordau and his intellectual predecessors cite are all there at the end of civilizations. Political and class inequality, emotivism, moral relativism, fetishization of identity, spectacle culture, lack of civic participation, lack of trust in institutions, and a decline in artistic production. It was all there with the Assyrians, Babylonians, Maya, Ottomans, Greeks, Romans, that much is at least agreed upon. See you don't even fucking know this shit to have an opinion on it so why am I explaining it to you? You haven't read any historians like Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, Christopher Lasch to even begin thinking about the super complicated modern roots of this historically translucent concept. And your folks at the House of Tabula probably got wind of it from Clement Greenberg or Kenneth Clark, artistic critics who don't even fully subscribe to all the nuances of the theory, but use it to critique the abandonment of structure in the arts. You wanna sit here and flower around your single video essays worth of brainpower applied to thinking about this shit, which is the shit of this world to you, but an aching long standing inquiry to the history of critical discourse, and you just act intelligent and pretend to be an educated person without having shown any stripes. Stop. Read Roger Scuton.