I knew FDR’s racism was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad. The Tablet has an excellent writeup of a new exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on FDR’s deep and total investment in eugenic theories of racial superiority, including the highly scientific finding that Japanese people were inherently warlike due to the shapes of their skulls (“The president wrote back asking whether the ‘Japanese problem’ could be solved through mass interbreeding”) and a top secret plan to force Jews to leave Europe after the war and settle in widely scattered enclaves spread “as thin as possible” around the world. The U.S. taxpayer spent $10,000 a month on the development of this secret plan from its inception in 1942 until FDR’s death, when Truman terminated the project upon discovering its existence.

Image HTs to The Forward and History.com.

Don’t miss this outstanding essay on populism and the future of liberal democracy by William Galston.

This is only one of many essays I have seen in the last year by champions of liberal democracy engaged in rethinking the tendency toward materialistic and oppressive “culturally neutral” technocracy. I wonder if, in the struggle between people who are tempted toward soulless technocracy and those who are tempted toward exclusionary tribalism, one advantage the technocrats have is the fact that because they have power, and have had it for a long time, they are responsible for results – so when disaster strikes, they rethink.

Those tempted in the tribalist direction never seem to deviate from their stale formulas because they think they know the answers already. Technocracy, in its extreme form, leaves liberalism behind; but it inherits from its liberal roots an openness to the possibility of rethinking and new solutions.

That’s something we can hope for, anyway.

My second post on “vocational sacraments” at TGR looks at a definition of what a sacrament is to consider how the sacraments are vocational. Here’s one of the takeaways:

When I do my daily work, I am to do it with Christ at the center of my cosmology; it is in Christ that all things, including my work, hold together. I am to hear this calling proclaimed by the institutional church; this does not mean I am hostage to the limited vision of any particular pastor who “doesn’t get it,” but it does mean that in seeking to discern my vocation, I cannot say to the institutional church “I have no need of you.” And I am to think of myself as an actor in cosmic history; I participate in the story that began with Adam and Eve, reached its shocking surprise twist with the first coming of Christ, and will conclude (no doubt with equally shocking surprise twists) with the second. When Christ instituted the sacraments, he located their meaning within redemptive history – looking backward in remembrance and forward in missional hope – and our daily work is to do the same.

Let me know what you think!

This is an outstanding summary of a history that is widely familiar among political scientists but not much known anywhere else – a century of reforms intended to make government more “democratic” have profoundly undermined the functioning of our democracy in ways that played a major role in the ascension of Trump. Chief among them have been restrictions on the ability of political parties to conduct their own business as private organizations, and direct election of Senators, both of which removed important checks on the reduction of democracy to mere transient populist majoritarianism. Give it a read.

In the excerpt of his new book that ran in NR, Jonah Goldberg builds his case for classical liberalism on the back of the Bible, repeatedly denigrating the contribution of real religion – as opposed to religious institutions – to liberal democracy. Goldberg wants to reap the social benefits of religious institutions without getting any trouble from that pesky God, who creates so many problems.

This is a classic example of bending over so far backward to avoid one error that you fall into another. Goldberg is anxious to discredit claims that classical liberalism is simply and solely the development of a single, specific religious/cultural construct (whichever one you prefer – many claimants have been advanced as the “real” cause of liberalism). It is true that liberalism is not identical with any one particular religious/cultural construct. But Goldberg is so anxious to deconstruct this kind of thinking that he falls very deep into the opposite error, which is that liberalism does not come from religious or cultural roots at all, in any way.

I get the strategy here; Goldberg is trying to position liberalism to survive in a world ruled by secularists. But insofar as he succeeds in persuading secularists to embrace this account, he will save liberalism by helping entrench secularism – which will, contra Goldberg’s explicit assertions, kill liberalism.