modern-day eugenics enrolls each of us in its blood-soaked imagination—asking us to shoulder social problems, inviting us to purchase an illusion of safety, making any demand for robust public investment in the goods, services, and infrastructure required for everyone to live well appear unimaginable.

Americans are usually too comforted by our stable creed and distracted by the flash of novelties to look hard at ourselves. Only a few times in history have we been forced to doubt the survival of self-government. It takes a very large shock to alert us that the engine room has gone silent. A shock on the scale of 2020.