(This article originally appeared in the Canandaigua Daily Messenger)

Let’s talk about Hillary Clinton.

It’s not uncommon for progressive enclaves to hold that someone who agrees with them 85 percent of the time is so much worse than someone who never agrees with them, much in the same way that many conservative Republicans are far more angry at Republicans In Name Only than they are at Democrats. Even so, the level of sheer loathing and contempt that young progressives hold for Hillary Clinton goes above and beyond the call of either duty or sense. The idea that it is better not to vote at all than to vote for Clinton against Donald Trump, it’s a kind of lunacy.

Regular readers of this column know I have a lot of issues with Clinton, and my personal dislike of her at least has the honesty of having met her. But even if the vicious images of Clinton held by so many people weren’t absurdly over the top in the first place, they are completely incompatible with her time as a U.S. senator from New York (her only time actually in an elected office), where she excelled in almost every possible way.

The same conservatives who now see her as an incarnation of evil never bothered to rally against her when she ran for re-election in 2006. That’s because she won their communities over. She went around to every town, village and hamlet in Upstate New York, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, met every municipal official and sat through their all-day presentations on Erie Canal economic development and agricultural policy. And took notes. And asked intelligent questions. And then got back to them, in the weeks and months that followed, with concrete ideas about what her office could do to help.

Many of these Upstate Republican officials disagreed with her on matters of ideology, but nobody had ever given their bread-and-butter issues so much time and attention. Not even other Upstate Republican officials. Sure they theoretically supported her opponent, but only theoretically. They liked working with Clinton because she made their issues her own, and she never stopped working on them.

That woman would make a great president.

What happened?

Continue reading Why are young progressives so angry at Hillary Clinton? →

This is written in response to a group of young (and less young) progressive types who I chat with online, in response to an argument that given the state of police departments as a whole, most individual police must be evil.

So I’ve written a lot, and unapologetically, about the need for police reform – like here, and here, and here too – and I stand by everything I’ve said.

But that’s not the same as saying most police are evil.

Have any of you ever read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography? “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”? It’s an amazing book, in which he tells the story of how he grew up a slave, managed to teach himself to read, and then escaped to be the nation’s leading orator and abolitionist leader. It’s incredible testament to the story of the human spirit and our capacity for greatness.

The only problem is that it has been used by … oh, let’s say less than sympathetic elements … to suggest that all slaves should have done this. “Hey,” they’ve said. “His story proves that if a slave really wanted to, he could educate himself and escape. So slaves who didn’t must not have really wanted it.”

It’s a batshit crazy argument, but it’s the kind of argument that comes up in a lot of contexts. Most recently in Republican Presidential Candidate Ben Carson (it’s really hard to say that with a straight face) when he argued that the problem with the Jews in Germany was that they didn’t arm themselves and fight back. Why didn’t they do that? It’s like they wanted to be exterminated.

It comes up in other contexts too. Are people homeless? Well, the fact that some people were able to work themselves out of homelessness must mean that the people who didn’t really want to be homeless.

(Living in San Francisco, one often hears about the homeless “Why don’t they just learn to code?”)

Continue reading A note to my internet friends who say police are evil →

While the Republican Presidential Nomination is the obvious car wreck to watch, I find myself more compelled by

1)  The American student protest movement

2)  The South African student protest movement (which I have also written about in brief here)

and

3)  The trend towards autocracy in Poland. (Which you can also quickly read about here )

There may be a number of things that they have in common, but I think the common denominator for me psychologically is the way to which they all call into question – and rather terrifyingly – the assumptions on which we base our notions of progress.

Continue reading What’s the matter with Poland? (And everywhere else …) →

Much in the way that the second Star Wars trilogy made the original worse, the seventh installment in the series makes episodes 1-3 look better.

The original Star Wars was undeniably – and admittedly – a pastiche of all the pulp genres that had come before it (cowboy, samurai, Flash Gordon/space opera) their content was wholly derivative but their mixing was novel, their aesthetic unheard of (nobody had ever presented a technologically advanced civilization with dirty second-hand tech in constant need of repair before) and the film style used to hold them together – the sharp fades and non-stop pace of the plot, the quick archetypal treating of characters otherwise held so tight they had no room to breath – was a genuine stylistic breakthrough. The original trilogy was so superb in no small part because the medium was the message, and it was a genuine advance.

The films that followed (episodes 1-3) were so disappointing to fans I no small part because they actually tried to do something different. This is not to excuse their many flaws in execution, which were significant and ultimately the real problem with the films, but those flaws have obscured one central fact from popular observation: rather than simply repeating his blockbuster formula (really “the” blockbuster formula), Lucas had a vision to create something new that would extend, deepen, and (had it gone right) enhance the original story he told.

Continue reading A bad Star Wars movie would have been better than a pointless one →