Into the Woods

The last of Platner

Maine woods, photo by George Wuerthner for The Rewilding Institute.

I’ve been sitting on the first paragraphs here for quite a while, not knowing what, if anything, I wanted to do with them, and then came Ezra Klein’s interview with Morris Katz, one of the consultants responsible for the ill-fated Senate candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine, offering his own somewhat self-serving view of what went wrong, and just today Platner’s replacement by an excellent candidate, former logger, labor organizer, and state senate president Troy Jackson.

I just wanted in the first place to say I was against Graham Platner before I was for him, and for some though clearly not all of the right reasons, which I think I can articulate better now than I could earlier: most particularly the way his attractively progressive policy message was getting confounded with a reactionary message that came with his packaging, as the embodiment of a theory of US politics in its current state that is both bad sociology and also lousy politics, as expressed in one way by Moira Donegan at The Guardian early in the campaign, last October:

The notion that the Democratic party is losing because it is too feminized – too dominated by women among its voters, leaders and candidates, or not sufficiently comfortable with the style of masculinity represented by Platner – has been bubbling up among left and liberal commentators with increasing insistence over the past decade. The idea is that in catering too much to women, and in being insufficiently deferential to domineering, gruff, physically imposing and implicitly white, rural men, the party has come to seem hectoring, inauthentic and whiny, and lost the voters they need to most recruit: that is, the working class, imagined here, as they so frequently are, as brusque, bigoted, ignorant, vulgar and male.

Partly because I don’t think a progressive movement should be thinking of the working class with that kind of contempt, to be honest, but also because that’s not what it is, at all. It’s a false picture that skips over the important issues, and it’s also mistaken about where the votes are (which nowadays includes lots of relatively well educated white guys stranded in the gig economy and layoff victims of the AI chaos—they’re proletarians now too). The people struggling with low wages and workplace disrespect, the working class in any decent sociological analysis, are more female, and more nonwhite; the truly brusque, bigoted, and ignorant white males are more typically well-off members of the petite bourgeoisie and resentful about tax expenditures they believe are thrown away on the undeserving poor, and unlikely to abandon the Republican party that has worked so assiduously to get the bigots on board. And I have my own ideas about the kind of masculinity we could be aiming at.

So I didn’t like Platner when I first saw him, with the boomy voice and the aggressive posture, just on a personal basis; he reminded me of big guys from my middle school trying to kill me at dodgeball or, just as likely, being friendly and showing me KKK-style propaganda about the Rothschilds (that kid’s name was Larry Bradish) and filling me with uncomfortable confusion. I didn’t want to dislike Platner, because I liked his issues very much, and certainly think there ought to be and surely are working class white guys supporting those things.

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But then Platner himself was absolutely not of the working class, as we soon began to learn: he was a prep school boy with really terrible impulse control, with a restaurant-owner mother and an attorney father and a genuine celebrity grandfather, the architect and designer Warren Platner, an associate of Eero Saarinen and an “icon” of 20th-century furniture design; even by the the current standards of the DSA, under which practically everybody who isn’t a business owner or rentier is working class: with a job that was basically a hobby, however strenuous, that his petite-bourgeoise mom paid him for, supplying the restaurant with the succulent bivalve that is a symbol of upper class luxury; who had enjoyed terrifying his teachers and fellow students with radical ideas (as I had done in my day) but also probably horrified his parents, I supposed, when he joined the Marines before, or instead of, going to college, during the rightwing travesty of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

I really didn’t like this evidence of pretense as it came out, but I saw it generally the opposite of the way the experts did: I didn’t think the Totenkopf tattoo could show he was a Nazi so much as it showed his Marine friends that he wasn’t different from them, and maybe similar for rhe Reddit evidence; that in spite of his ritzy upbringing he was at heart “working class” according to the prevalent stereotype. He was merely somebody who didn’t mind if his friends thought he was a Nazi and a woman-hater, at least a little more reprehensible than 13-year-old me not telling Larry Bradish I was half-Jewish—I mean, he’d been enjoying the transgressivity of it, probably as much as he had enjoyed bad-mouthing President Bush in high school.

On the other hand it looked as if his campaign was doing really well (if not as well as it looked, as Elliott Morris eventually pointed out to us amateurs)—I noticed in head-to-head polling against Senator Collins he had majority support from women, not men, suggesting that Maine voters didn’t see him as the toxic masculinity candidate at all. And he was going to be the candidate in any case, in a state it was vital for Democrats to win. So I started trying to think of ways to think better of him: it wasn’t his fault he’d been falsely packaged as a representative of the working class, that was surely on the party’s consultants looking not for proletarian content but a proletarian vibe; and he did have his own true compelling story, as a victim in his own right of the Republicans’ Iraq and Afghanistan wars in which he had fought, with a diagnosed severe case of PTSD that had earned him a 100% disability rating, overcoming his victimhood to the point where he could serve in the United States Senate, an American story of redemption; which the campaign indeed started using, until the last accusation, of sexual assault on a girlfriend, was more than his supporters could take.

I was right about the way Platner was recruited, under the brusque bigot approach, on the basis of a theory Katz proposed “at a swanky dinner party in the Manhattan apartment of fashion designer Tory Burch” [Politico]: “We found a model here to win over working-class voters...a guy that looks like he’s a union working-class guy.” (my bold)

They weren’t disturbed by the offensive Reddit posts, when they saw them, I suppose, because they were the kind of thing Trump is never punished for saying. And in the interview with Klein, Katz effectively blames Platner, not his theory:

there was a lot of conversation and thought around how the kind of candidate who could win Maine would be a veteran, they would be someone from outside of the Portland area — ideally, a community in which Trump won — and someone tied to an industry that has a specific resonance in Maine.

There are a lot of incredible people who are not part of the political arena, a lot of incredible working-class Americans across the country, who don’t have those problematic Reddit posts or who don’t have a problematic tattoo or don’t have quite the level of controversy in their past.

But the real problem was their idea of what “looks like” a “union working class guy” was a flawed upper class fantasy. They might have found a less compromised person whose campaign might not have imploded so spectacularly, but what they should have been looking for was pretty much the kind of person (indisputably working class and not too old—58—but with plenty of political experience and a more vettable history and endorsements from Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, and the Democratic Socialists of America—from when he was running for governor, which is why he wasn’t available for the Senate race) that the convention has now found.

Then gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson with then senatorial candidate Graham Platner campaigning last September at a Portland Hearts of Pine socccer match, via Wikipedia.