Sometimes an author lands on an insight that your mind had been circling for ages, waiting for clear articulation. I had that experience with a new essay in First Things by Colin Redemer, on the changing spirit of eugenics. Eugenics was once conceived of as a project of improvement via elimination. Now, elimination is the primary attraction. Redemer writes:

The old eugenics of Galton and his heirs, of Buck v. Bell (1927) and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was many terrible things, but its terribleness was at least coherent. It believed, with the confidence peculiar to the late nineteenth century, that the human species was a stock to be managed, and that the managers were identifiable by their breeding, their cranial measurements, and their position in the social hierarchy.........

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