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 obsessives on the left. As one Republican congressman put it, “While Democrats are fighting on behalf of illegal criminals on your dime, Republicans will continue [to] fight for the safety of American citizens.”

This is a fight that the right has been waging since, easily, the 1960s—when it used law and order as a catchall to take on the Warren Court, the Black Freedom struggle, the Great Society, the antiwar movement, and the welfare state—through the opening years of the Bush war on terror, when neocons laughed at liberal indulgence of procedural niceties. The Constitution, they said again and again, is not a suicide pact. There and then, the trap was laid: abide by the law and die, we were told, or break the law and survive. (Though now, I guess, we’ve got the worst of both worlds, where we’re being enjoined to both break the law and die.)

Again, you have to pull back from the revulsion over the immigrant-bashing and the horror of the Salvador option, which I can barely bring myself to think about, in order to read the rhetoric of the coverage and see what’s just beneath the surface.

It’s the same bloodthirsty embrace of the resumption of the death penalty, after 1976; the desire to set the police free of all the Warren Court restraints and exclusionary rules; the ghoulish celebration of the darkest holes of the prison complex in Texas and Alabama and Mississippi and California and New York; the even more ghoulish rehearsal of all the details of the crimes committed against “ordinary Americans”; the popular embrace of vigilantism in movies like Death Wish; the moral rage and moral panic and moral self-righteousness that destroyed any concern for the rights of the innocent, and the rights of the guilty, both of whom were caught up in the crushing tide of vengeance.

I said that I had thought we were moving past this. And I genuinely believed that we were. I saw everything from the pushback to the Iraq War to the Black Lives Matter protests to the decarceration movement as a healthy sign of a society slowly recovering from nearly 50 years of waging what it perceived to be a holy war, and holy violence, against what it called evil.

Instead, we seem to be replaying the same tape, as if we have learned nothing at all, doing to immigrants what was done to Black people and Arab and Muslim people, believing that every social problem, and even every social non-problem, can be solved by excision, removal, sequester, elimination, and social death.