Seattle City Councilman and former council president Nick Licata made official today what many people expected: he will not run for re-election in 2015, retiring after 18 eventful years on city council:

“I’ve been lucky to have an exciting life filled with challenges taken on voluntarily, not out of hardship.

“Perhaps the greatest challenge we all face is the need to improve the lives of Americans who are seeing their future increasingly impeded by the outrageous growing concentration of wealth, and I would add power, in this nation.

“No one city can resolve this problem. But Seattle has done much in attempting to do so. I would like to play more of an active role in that effort. And see what I can do to have Seattle’s accomplishments duplicated elsewhere.

“I hope after my current term ends this year that I may have that opportunity in some capacity. So, I will not seek re-election.”

Local politicos immediately pivoted to speculation on this year’s council races. Licata and sometimes-ally Mike O’Brien both live in the same district, so Licata’s retirement allows O’Brien to run for his district seat and for both to avoid running against a fellow incumbent (Sally Clark or Tim Burgess, neither of whom face serious opposition as yet) for an at-large seat. But before immersing themselves in this year’s horse race speculation, the city’s political class would do well to stop and pay homage to one of the most significant and effective council members in modern Seattle history.

First, the disclaimer: Nick has been an acquaintance, casual friend, and political ally of mine for nearly a quarter century. I first met him in the early ’90s, when he and a mutual friend both lived in an urban land trust on Capitol Hill called PRAG House. I worked with him in 1995-96 in the futile effort to block public funding of not one but two sports stadiums, opposed by the public but built anyway. The visibility from those campaigns helped fuel his successful run for city council in 1997, the last unabashed progressive to be elected to council until Kshama Sawant 16 long years later.

In that race, Licata narrowly defeated Aaron Ostrom, who insisted – with the backing of much of the city’s political elite – that he was the true progressive in the race. Ostrom went on to found and still leads Washington FUSE, a “progressive” activist group that endorsed the execrable Richard Conlin over Sawant in 2013. That arc is pretty much a microcosm of what Licata has faced throughout his council career: a civic establishment that prides itself on its progressivism, so long as all the money goes to the Right People.

Over the years, I haven’t always agreed with Nick. But having been an activist for nearly 40 years (!), and a paid political journalist and commentator for nearly 20, I’m comfortable that I’m separating both my friendship and my politics out of the equation when I say the following:

Nick Licata is the best elected official I have ever known. At any level. Period.

Despite having been the most left-leaning council member for most of his tenure, Licata has more high-profile accomplishments than any of his colleagues. (Do you like that Seattle requires paid health leave for our city’s businesses? Thank Nick.) But most of what has separated Nick from any other elected official I’ve ever seen is the stuff behind the scenes.

Before his election to council, Nick worked writing insurance policies. As it turned out, that’s ideal training for serving on city council, especially in Seattle. Much of the job is dull, and much of the way our city’s economic elites feed at the public trough is buried in the details of legislation that doesn’t make the news: zoning changes, city budget line items, and other bills that are genuinely soporific bedtime reading. The devil, in Seattle politics, is almost always in the details, and Licata has been masterful at getting language changes that make decent proposals good and awful ones less awful. In the perennial political struggle between ideals and effectiveness, Nick does the best job I’ve ever seen of managing to serve both.

More than that, however, Licata is the exception to the Seattle political rule that coopts even the best new legislators. (Does anyone remember that pro-business stalwart Margaret Pageler was originally elected as a reform candidate? Or that Conlin, when he was also first elected in 1997, was affiliated with the Green Party?) Nick has kept his priorities – and his commitment to openness and to treating people decently – long after most politicians abandon such things. And he has had a remarkable ability to go into a room with his ideological opponents, find common ground, and hash out a compromise that still serves his priorities. Nick is both on the side of the angels and has remained singularly effective – an impossibly rare combination – even while serving for nearly two decades on a council dominated by business-friendly nonentities.

Three other friends of mine helped Nick in that original 1997 campaign. He hired each on his staff when he won, and eighteen years later, every single one of them – Lisa Herbold, Newell Aldrich, and Frank Video – remain on his staff, each beloved in their own right in local progressive circles. It’s a measure of how Nick treats people that after 18 years he has retained his entire original staff. That’s also unheard of.

As his statement today says, Nick will remain active in local politics. He’s played a significant behind-the-scenes role in mentoring both O’Brien and Sawant to become more effective council members, and has personally been hugely helpful – as one of the only council members willing to actually talk with and his constituents – to hundreds, if not thousands, of people over the years. That generosity of spirit surely won’t change in his well-earned retirement. And with district elections this fall, Seattle has an unusual opportunity to elect a whole new generation of progressive political leaders.

But I’ll miss Nick in office. I’ll miss the poetry readings, I’ll miss the openness and accessibility, and I’ll miss the sheer decency. Seattle City Council will be a lesser place without him, no matter who gets elected this fall.

For most of my life, I’ve agitated for and written and talked about politics. Most of the news, most of the time, isn’t especially good. It’s easy to get cynical. A lot of people within our political institutions are well-intentioned, but there are very few that I genuinely admire. One of them announced his retirement today.

Seattle’s civic elite likes to name things after its political champions, and Nick doesn’t qualify on that score, which is exactly why he should be honored. Hopefully we’ll name something after him – and it’ll be an institution that helps people. He deserves it.

In the wake of Charlie Hebdo, an old friend from Portland and I have been writing each other discussing thought police, and the tendency of progressives and lefties in the US to display their own brand of rigidity and intolerance. And it’s true. (OK, go ahead with the Portland joke. Get it out of your system now…)

In all the years I’ve been doing public political opinion, the only death threats I’ve ever gotten have been from either 1) seriously mentally ill people (two of whom went to jail for stalking me and others); or 2) people on the left who were angry that I’d rejected one or another piece of dogma. (Right wingers can be verbally abusive, sometimes extremely so, but I’ve never had any urging or threatening my death.) That’s the extreme version of what seems to be a pretty widespread problem. People on the left just aren’t expected (or, in some cases, allowed) to disagree with one another.

“Black bloc” anarchists, those champions of rejecting authority, are in my personal experience the worst at trying to impose this sort of internal authority. Not all, but some. (I guess it goes with expressing one’s rebellion against conformity by wearing identical uniforms. “My tribe is better than your tribe.”) Sectarian Marxists of one or another stripe (again, some are worse than others) are almost as bad. But the problem extends to all sorts of people with whom I broadly agree on values and issues.

I suspect at least part of the problem is that progressives of all types in the US have gotten lazy about having to actually offer coherent justifications of their policy and value preferences – not because such arguments don’t exist, but because more conservative Democrats and especially Republicans are prone to offering up such lazy and/or transparently ludicrous arguments that the overall level of discourse is dismal; and because the questions of what policies actually get enacted, and which candidates elected, in this country have almost nothing to do with issues or ideas anyway. Political power here hinges mostly on money, marketing, personalities, and tribal identification. Whether someone is competent enough to wield power, or whether their ideas make any sense at all, rarely factors into it. (C.f. Congress.)

The “thought police” problem on the left is a function not just of tribalism, but also laziness and (ironically) insecurity. Charlie Hebdo is a good example of an issue that might divide people on the left – not the murder of journalists, of course, but the appropriateness of publishing depictions of the prophet Mohammed. It pits two progressive values against each other: the desire not to offend the deeply held cultural beliefs of a group (and, in this case, a persecuted religious minority to boot) and the right of publications to free speech and free thought, especially (as with the new CH cover) when the depiction has enormous news value and cultural import. There’s no truly “correct” progressive answer – depending on one’s priorities, either can be well argued.

But way too many of the discussions I’ve seen are more like ADD arguments: “Of COURSE people should have free speech!” “Don’t you know that’s OFFENSIVE?” And so on. So it goes for just about any issue where such discussions might arise, either within leftie circle or with other political (or apolitical) family members, friends, co-workers, fellow students, or bar patrons. Let’s set aside for a moment the problem that political arguments rarely change anyone’s mind, since it’s the non-substantive things (personality, tribal identification, money, etc.) that determine so much of American politics. Even if political arguments can change some minds, they’re not going to if we’re making crappy arguments. It’s even less likely if we can’t defend our ideas or tolerate dissension in our own ranks.

You, of course, may disagree. 🙂

France responds to a terrorist wave today with a two-million-person-strong show of unity in the streets. When the US and UK (as well as any number of other countries) experienced seminal attacks, their governments’ primary response instead was to triple down on the security state.

In the US, additionally, the overwhelming (but by no means universal) public response was to demand that “we” bomb someone, and torture the fuck out of any prisoners, even random ones – which the US government was only too happy to do. And, 14 years later, the bombing and torture continue.

The French government has its own atrocities to answer for, but at least in the immediate aftermath of the past week, I like the French response better.

Meanwhile, another Islamic terrorist group, Nigeria’s Boko Haram, apparently slaughtered upwards of two thousand people last weekend in the former town of Baga, on Lake Chad in the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno. And US media didn’t even notice, probably because it’s sub-Saharan Africa, and, you know, “they” are always doing that down there.

Local Media Follies 2014! is here.

National Media Follies 2014! is here.

2014’s Most Over-Hyped International Stories

ISIL Terrorists Gather At Rio Grande: The eager sales job on America’s newest war reached ridiculous heights.

Benghazi!!!!11! The fact that anyone talked about it for any reason at all in 2014 qualifies it as overhyped. For that matter, any story whose premise assumed that Congressional Republicans were reasonable and reality-bsaed qualified as overhyped.

2014’s Most Underreported International Stories:

Israel continues to quietly ensure the impossibility of Palestinian statehood: Palestine can’t have an independent state if it doesn’t have any land. This is why, while the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and (in all but name) Gaza is a legal and human rights atrocity, and Israel launched yet another military “cleansing” of Gaza in 2014 (itself all but ignored by American media), it’s the steady Israeli expansion of its civilian population onto these lands that is far more important long-term, because it guarantees the conflict will be intractable. These land thefts are obediently called “settlements” in American media, as if the land had never belonged to anyone before. Which is exactly what the Israeli government would like you to think – that the additional land it’s continuing to steal is uninhabited, and that Palestinians don’t exist. Palestinians are Asia’s 19th Century Native Americans.

Afghanistan is a total, but forgotten, clusterfuck: The national army of Afghanistan is the Taliban. Green on blue attacks are so frequent now that no one knows who’s a loyal member of the Afghan National Army and who’s a Taliban infiltrator. Meanwhile, aerial drone attacks have alienated most of the countryside, which never supported the corrupt, American-imposed puppet government in Kabul. That government is not likely to last long now that the American military is supposedly in a “non-combat” role.