It’s not what is new, but what is old, that’s so depressing in the current moment

One of the elements of the current moment that has made me most depressed is not its novelty but its familiarity, its recursion to a kind of politics I thought we were moving past. For many of us on the left—and I’m being ecumenical in my usage here, including everyone on the left left to more liberal and mainstream Democrats—the case of Abrigo Garcia is a straightforward human rights atrocity, which needs to be fought tooth and nail. If you read the press, the right and the media are using this story to reprise a very familiar game that the right knows all too well how to play, pitting the security and safety of ordinary Americans against those crazy proceduralist […]