what people are made of

Look. It's not about who voted for who after complaining about who. It's not about chopping up the left into a thousand little slices, like you're writing an Audubon guide. And it's certainly not about the learned helplessness that compels people to declare the impotence of the party which holds the presidency and the Senate and that inexorable weight of demographics I keep reading about.

This is what it's about. Liberalism's most sacred belief-- the conviction that underpins it all-- is the belief in the equal value of all human life. It is the commitment to the notion that all human life is equally worthy of protection, that the interdiction against taking that life is equivalent between and among all people. That is not a radical idea or a socialist idea or a Marxist idea or a pacifist idea. It is the fundamental, elementary commitment of liberalism. People who call themselves liberals or progressives who defend drone strikes, and the broader campaign of aggression without due process against the law, are hypocrites because they profess a belief while violating its central tenet. That many conservatives see the brown peoples of the earth as sweaty wogs, eligible for murder without right or review, I take as a matter of course. That some of those who profess liberalism feel the same, I take as something even uglier.

Make no mistake: when you justify the killing of Muslims because of their aesthetic similarities to terrorists, you are asserting that they are less than human. You deny them and only them basic human rights not by denying that those rights are rights but by denying that Muslims are human and are thus ineligible. There is no other logic. You might refer to that as hypocrisy, or as total moral failure. Myself, I don't really care what you call it.