Is Our Democrats Learning? Not Really

This post was originally published on this site

Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model. In the last century, eugenics was enthusiastically embraced among Anglo-Saxon elites, then by Communist Russia as a means of creating a hyper-selfless Homo Sovieticus, and, most infamously, Nazi Germany’s drive to create a “master race” via racial-hygiene laws and the extermination of people with disabilities and other “lives unworthy of life.”

Speak plainly! Russian President Vladimir Putin snapped at his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, at a televised security council meeting on the eve of his shambolic full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Naryshkin was visibly nervous. Once he had finally stammered out his support for recognizing the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states-the words Putin was waiting for-he was abruptly told to sit down, like an unprepared pupil flubbing an oral exam.