You know you’ve touched a nerve with progressive activists when they tell you not just that you’re wrong but that you’re on the other side.

Such is the fate of any old-school liberal or mainstream Democrat who deviates from progressive dogma. Having personally been slapped with every label from “conservative” to “Republican” and even, in one loopy rant, “fascist,” I can attest to how disorienting it is given my actual politics, which are pure blue American only when they aren’t center French.

But it’s not just me. New York magazine’s liberal political columnist Jonathan Chait was accused of lending “legitimacy to a reactionary moral panic” for critiquing political correctness. When Nellie Bowles described the excesses of social justice movements in her book “Morning After the Revolution,” a reviewer labeled it a “conservative memoir.” Meghan Daum, a lifelong Democrat, was accused of having fallen into a “right-wing trap” for questioning the progressive doctrine of intersectional oppression.

If this was just about our feelings, these denunciations could be easily brushed aside. But the goal and the effect is to narrow the focus of acceptable discourse by Democrats and their allies. If liberals are denounced for “punching left” when they express a reasonable difference of opinion, potentially winning ideas are banished.

This narcissism of small differences effectively leaves it to Republicans to claim mainstream ideals like patriotism, which Matthew Yglesias (another targeted apostate) argues still holds value for non-MAGA America, and smart politics, like attending to the concerns of the working class, as George Packer (also frequently attacked) points out.

In the run-up to a tight election with a weak Democratic candidate and a terrifying Republican opponent, pushing liberals and centrists out of the conversation not only exacerbates polarization, it’s also spectacularly counterproductive.

Take President Joe Biden’s recent executive order severely limiting asylum. The Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal accused him of trying to “out-Republican the Republicans.” Mother Jones called the action “Trump-like.”

Meanwhile, according to a recent Axios poll, even 42% of Democrats support mass deportations of immigrants in the country illegally. It’s no secret this election will be fought in the swing states and won in the middle, which makes another poll’s finding that 46% of independents in support even more concerning for the party’s electoral prospects.

Consider other liberal political positions that have been denounced by the progressive left: Criminal offenders — even those not named Donald Trump — should go to prison and a well-trained and respected police force provides community safety.

Then look at where voters stand on these issues. According to a recent Pew poll, “a majority of voters (61%) say the criminal justice system is generally ‘not tough enough on criminals’ and “overwhelming majorities of Biden and Trump supporters say it is extremely or very important for police and law enforcement to keep communities safe.”

This also holds true for certain culture-war issues. Contrary to progressive diktat, “a growing share of voters (65%) say that whether a person is a man or woman” is determined by sex.

Yet shunning anyone on the left who insists otherwise has become a progressive strategy. What better way to dismiss or delegitimize the heretics than to smear them as covert members of the opposition?

And labeling people makes it easier to avoid hearing their critiques or dealing with the actual issues in question.

Those on the left who’ve been dumbstruck as Trump has intimidated his most vociferous Republican critics (see: Chris Sununu, Nikki Haley) into falling in line might exert a little more self-awareness of similar moves by the left.

The goal of progressives may be solidarity, but their means of achieving it are by shutting alternative ideas down rather than modeling tolerance. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a co-author of a recent book called “Solidarity,” said those liberals who critique illiberalism on the left are “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”

But liberal people can disagree without being called traitors. Liberals can even agree with conservatives on certain issues because those positions aren’t inherently conservative. Shouldn’t the goal be to decrease polarization rather than egg it on? Shouldn’t Democrats aim for a big tent, especially at a time when registered party members are declining and the number of independents is on the rise?

Those on the Democratic side of the spectrum have traditionally been far better at nuance, complexity and compromise than Republicans. It would be to our detriment if policies on which a broad swath of Americans agree are deliberately tanked by a left wing that has moved as far to the left as Republicans have moved to the right. Those who denounce militant fealty within the Republican Party shouldn’t enforce similar purity tests in their own ranks.

Pamela Paul writes a column for the New York Times.

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Reconnecting with his roots as part of the so-called Greek Weird Wave, director Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest is the three-part anthology film “Kinds of Kindness” — a stumbling victory lap following the Oscar winning success of his more selectively edgy “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.”

It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything. I take it as a heartening sign of nerve that Lanthimos even went into production with this script, co-written with his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou.

As with Lanthimos’ previous works, we learn the rules of societal engagement as we go. In the first fable, Plemons plays a longtime employee of a wealthy man of business (business unspecified), assigned by the boss to execute mysterious and potentially lethal tasks such as ramming someone’s car and killing the driver. This underling has been stripped of all agency, with his employer (Willem Dafoe) dictating his every daily move, requiring him to fornicate with his wife (Hong Chau) at a specific time of day, and laying out a clinically precise nutritional regimen.

Things are even more insidious underneath the surface. The worm turns, eventually. But in Lanthimos’ icily calm depiction of masters, servants and a heartless status quo, there’s basically no wiggle room.

The actors play new characters in fables two and three. In the second one, Plemons is a grieving police officer whose marine biologist wife (Stone) has been shipwrecked and presumed lost. Rescued at last, she returns home in an altered state suggesting cannibalistic appetites, a taste for sexual violence and the possibility that she is a double — a pretender. Is the real marine biologist still at large? En route to a nominally happy ending, and the ironic brand of kindness indicated by the title, husband subjects wife, or wife’s double, to brutal personality tests involving dismemberment, disemboweling and such. Like the Nick Lowe song said: cruel to be kind, in the right measure.

The doppelganger conceit continues with the third fable, in which a purity cult (leader played by Dafoe) sends two of its members (Stone and Plemons) on a search for a messiah who can reanimate the dead. This one takes place in a world ruled by dogs, and where the tears of the cult leaders provide the drinking water for the community. Filmed in and around New Orleans, “Kinds of Kindness” establishes varying baselines of normalcy, though clearly we’re dealing with a species — humans — too numb, and obedient, to realize what’s wrong.

From Lanthimos’ first international success with “Dogtooth” (2009) onward, the filmmaker’s vision of nightmarish family units and institutions make a mockery of free will. One film later, with “Alps” (2011), Lanthimos’ taste for 20th-century absurdism had already become both an asset and a limitation, indebted to Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, Eugene Ionesco’s surreal rebellions and Harold Pinter’s political allegories of fascism. These are fruitful inspirations, and when Lanthimos’ films work, they’re at once elusive, allusive and bracing, as well as actor-friendly.

When they don’t, you get “Kinds of Kindness,” three 20-minute notions taffy-pulled into 164 minutes. I laughed out loud exactly once, which, let’s face it, is one more laugh than some comedies I’ve seen lately. In the second segment, Plemons’ policeman character has his colleague (Mamoudou Athie) and the colleague’s wife (Margaret Qualley) over for a melancholy dinner, with the cop’s wife still missing presumed dead. The cop wants to spend a minute watching some old home-movie footage of he and his wife, in happier days. Reluctantly his guests consent, and what comes next is a perfectly timed sight gag straight out of the director’s debut feature: sharp, quick and brazen.

Precious little of “Kinds of Kindness” manages any one or two of those qualities. Better luck next time.

‘Kinds of Kindness’

1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong/disturbing violent content, strong sexual content, full nudity and language)

Running time: 2:44

How to watch: In theaters June 28

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Early voting starts Friday in Minnesota’s primary elections for U.S. Senate, eight U.S. representative seats, and seats in the state’s House of Representatives and state Secretary of State Steve Simon expects an “intense election year.”

While the primary election is Aug. 13, voters can cast ballots in the 46 days leading up to the primary itself, whether by mail absentee ballots or through in-person early voting.

At a Thursday Capitol press briefing, Simon, the state’s top elections official, said his office expects a busy few months ahead as the Senate, House and legislative races coincide with a presidential election.

Supercharged, highly-polarized era

Simon said his office said it is working to build public trust in the elections system and is positioning itself to combat election misinformation — something Simon says new Minnesota laws put his office in a good position to accomplish.

“I wish for two things over the next 131 days: high turnout and low drama,” he said, looking ahead to the general election on Nov. 5.  “We live in a supercharged, highly-polarized era. But I’m confident that we can overcome those challenges, we have before and 2020 was a good stress test.”

Four years ago, unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud by former President Donald Trump as well as reports of threats to poll workers led to a tumultuous election, and Minnesota’s Legislature in 2023 passed bills aimed at combatting misinformation, such as artificial intelligence-generated “deep fakes,” and intimidation.

Simon said so far there have not been any reports of voting misinformation or any abuse of AI in the leadup to the August primary.

Public testing of ballot machines, review of absentee ballots

The Secretary of State also noted the usual steps his office and local election officials take to ensure election security, including public testing of ballot machines and multiple steps of review for absentee ballots.

More than 30,000 people work as election judges, and there must be an equal number of Democratic-Farmer-Labor and Republican judges at each polling place, Simon said.

Minnesota held its presidential primary in a separate election in March. The only statewide contest in the summer primary is for U.S. Senate.

In that race, DFL-endorsed U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is seeking the party’s nomination for a fourth term. Also appearing on the ballot are Steve Carlson, Ahmad R. Hassan, George H. Kalberer and perennial candidate Ole Savior.

Running for the Republican Senate nomination are John Berman, Joe Fraser, Patrick D. Munro, Christopher Seymore Sr., Raymond D. Petersen, Loner Blue, Royce White and Alycia R. Gruenhagen.

All eight of Minnesota’s Congressional seats are up for election. In the Fourth District, which covers St. Paul and the east metro, 12-term Congresswoman Betty McCollum is running unopposed in the Democratic primary. In the GOP primary, 2022 candidate May Lor Xiong and Gene Rechtzigel are vying for the nomination.

There are also some contested primaries across the state for the state House of Representatives, where all 134 seats are up for election this year.

How to vote, how to track your vote

More information on the ballot for your address can be found on the Secretary of State’s website at myballotmn.sos.state.mn.us/, or by calling 1-877-600-VOTE (8683).

Unlike many other states, Minnesota does not require party registration to participate in a primary. However, voters can only vote in one party’s primary.

Voters have until July 23 to register to vote or can register to vote at the polls on the day of the election.

Those who choose to send in an absentee ballot can “claw back” their ballot if they change their mind on which candidates they want to back, though the deadline to do so is July 25.

Early in-person voting and absentee voting are options until Aug. 12.

Minnesota has an open primary, meaning anyone 18 or older who is a citizen of the U.S. and not currently incarcerated can participate.

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“What are we even talking about when we talk about mothers?” The question, posed by Regina (Sophie Okonedo) in the midst of a drug-hazy cuddle puddle, is the central idea that animates Annie Baker’s verdant, sun-dappled debut feature “Janet Planet.” For our heroine, 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler, in her first film role), it is the East (1991 Northampton, Massachusetts to be exact) and Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is the sun. Lacy’s entire galaxy orbits around her mom, whose gravitational pull draws in a variety of suitors, lovers and friends, all impeding on Lacy’s time and attention from her mother.

In this portrait of a deeply loving and codependent mother-daughter relationship, Baker captures something ineffable about that bond, which is inextricably linked, body and soul, and what it looks like when that connection begins to inevitably fray with age. We open on Lacy making a late-night phone call, begging Janet to pick her up from summer camp. She wants to be at home with her mother, which also means being at home with Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s current boyfriend, who occupies the first chapter of “Janet Planet.” While relationships may come and go, Lacy always remains, ever watchful, observing her mother’s behavior and how she moves between people.

A chapter title dedicated to one person inherently suggests the end of that chapter and the beginning of another, and “Janet Planet” progresses through the peculiar end of their time with Wayne, and onto Regina, an old friend whom Janet and Lacy run into at a whimsical theatrical happening at a local farm/cult. Regina moves in with them, promising adventures to Lacy, but roommate challenges intrude on the friendship. Then there’s Avi (Elias Koteas), the dreamy, philosophical cult leader who seemingly appears out of thin air to pull Janet into his web.

Lacy watches and waits, taking her piano lessons down the road, playing with her troupe of dolls and figurines, eating ice cream, living both her own childhood and her mother’s adult life simultaneously, often bearing witness to or having conversations with her mother far beyond her own understanding, but bringing her own childlike wisdom to bear. Janet confesses to Lacy that she knows she can make any man fall in love with her if she tries, and Lacy asks if she can simply stop trying. It’s a moment of breathtaking clarity that cuts to the quick.

But Janet doesn’t stop trying, and Lacy’s own obsessive love for her mother quietly evolves, as she comes to see her not as the sun around which life revolves, but as a person continually compelled to orbit others, the cycle churning unceasingly. The expression on Ziegler’s face as the epiphany sets in is so utterly heartbreaking — finally seeing your parent as merely a flawed human being is an inescapable, often liberating, but no less bewildering fact of life to which we all must attend.

Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, weaves a sensorial, time-bound spell with “Janet Planet,” which is an utterly transporting cinematic experience and sensual expression of season and setting. She and cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff favor static compositions, then fill the frame with environmental texture captured on wonderfully tactile 16 mm film: lush summer greenery exploding in a riot around a summer dinner eaten on a deck; a moment of stillness as Lacy practices on a keyboard, Janet watching. We are aligned with Lacy’s point of view, snippets of conversations overheard from a perch in a loft, the study of an earring on the floor that becomes a sacred artifact. Often, Baker will let a conversation play out then reveal Lacy just underneath the bottom of the frame, like a jump scare.

Baker sets the scene and then asks us to stay awhile, patient, offering the invitation to concentrate and pay attention in a way that we rarely experience anymore, sustaining awareness to detail. Baker revels in the details in the period-specific costume and production design: every well-loved cotton garment and giant T-shirt; a shampoo bottle that might send the viewer spiraling into memory. You can almost smell the grass and feel the still humid air on your skin.

“Janet Plant” transports us to this time, and this age when all we had to do was just be present, to observe and ruminate on the analog world right in front of us, with the space to ponder the cosmically huge emotional world within us. It’s a bit hard to describe the surprising power of this film, rendered with such granular, minute specificity and fleeting, mysterious emotions. There is no way to predict what will strike a chord, or an arrow into your heart, but one thing is certain: the temporal, emotional, and sensory experience of “Janet Planet” is a uniquely rare gift that needs to be seen and savored.

‘Janet Planet’

4 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for brief strong language, some drug use and thematic elements)

Running time: 1:53

How to watch: In theaters June 28

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