Platner Discourse Is Weird
If you don’t follow politics, there’s this guy who has a history of “spicy” Reddit opinions, a string of disturbing accusations from exes that don’t rise to the level of sexual abuse but do involve e.g. shoving (don’t shove women, fellows), a removed Nazi tattoo, and a penchant for adultery who is running as a Democrat to replace the dreadful Republican Sen. Susan Collins. I don’t live in Maine so it ultimately doesn’t matter what I think, but then it doesn’t matter what I think about Henry James, either, does it. And yet I write about him, don’t I. So here goes.
The weird thing about the Graham Platner discourse is not that many liberals and leftists wonder where his real loyalties lie. Under the circumstances, that’s a normal reaction. It’s also not that people are arguing that il faut que vote blue no matter who, because that’s a cogent position (indeed I’d argue it’s so cogent that people come up with all sorts of ingenious but futile arguments against it precisely because its cogency is the deathly cogency of “you have two options that suck”). What’s weird is who is making which argument.
I have accepted the logic of “vote blue no matter who” in every general election since 2004. I voted for John Kerry, who wasn’t that bad, and then for Barack Obama, Senator, who seemed great, and then for Barack Obama, President, who had maintained for four years the murderous War on Terror with its huge yearly harvest of the unnecessarily dead. Then, in the 2016 general, I voted for Hillary Clinton, Senator, a supporter of the Iraq War and, as Obama’s Secretary of State, incredibly violent US imperialist. Then I voted for Joe Biden, who I had hated for years because of his support for War on Drug policies and his soft imperialism, and who, according to the discourse rules then in operation within my social circle, was someone who should be presumed a rapist, since nobody (that I can remember) ever really refuted Tara Reade’s accusations beyond playing the old Monica Lewinsky “nutty/slutty” hits. He won and went on to be the least bad president of my lifetime, i.e., still a disaster. We go back to waiting for the Democrat Reagan that wasn’t promised. (Maybe it’ll be Hunter?) In 2024 I voted for Kamala Harris, who—if we just don’t hold the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza against her at all, on the principle that the Vice Presidency isn’t a real job—is still a career prosecutor who made her reputation by being “tough” on e.g. parents of truant children. Kamala is the only person on this list who doesn’t have a body count (meaning dead bodies, not people you’ve slept with) way higher than that of the former mercenary Platner. It’s precisely because I don’t have a separate category of “political sins” vs. “sin sins” that I think all of these people, possibly barring Harris, are worse than he is as of now. They’ve killed more people. Again, for now.
Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to build what will—don’t fool yourself—become, if built, huge death camps, in as many suburbs as possible, while maintaining a lethal and ruinous war in Iran, plus continued support for the genocidal Netanyahu regime, plus they’re trying to starve out the Cubans so we can finally win the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kamala would have done at most one of those things. The vote-blue-no-matter-who argument continues to be as cogent as ever; the don’t-vote-it-only-encourages-them argument continues to be a piece of wishful thinking, a way out of a choice between bad options that consists of closing your eyes and pretending real hard and insisting that this action manifests agency or principles rather than denial. It didn’t when people on the broad left refrained from voting for Kamala because of Gaza, and it won’t if Mainers on the broad left refrain from voting Platner because he’s scary. So it’s weird to see people who still curse the non-voters in, e.g., Dearborn talking as though Platner’s creepiness makes voting for him impossible. If you voted for Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, voting for this guy doesn’t represent an abdication of your previously high standards.
If I lived in Maine, I’d vote for Andrea LaFlamme, and then, if Platner wins the primary, I would vote for him in the general. It is, again, because I don’t have a separate “political sins” vs. “sin sins” category that I think Susan Collins is an even riskier choice than this man. He might be a Nazi fetishist; she definitely is a Republican, a party that has for ten years openly mainstreamed Naziism and whose next standard-bearer, once Trump dies, will almost certainly be Nick Fuentes.
So on the one hand, all that. On the other hand, I am seeing, in addition to defenses of Platner that make me wonder whether some of these writers kiss their mothers with that mouth—the fact that he might’ve put his hands on an ex is proof that he has a groin! It means he’s not an HR lady!—a degree of deference to him as a radical that people no longer even give AOC. We know virtually nothing about how he’ll vote or govern, we know just enough to almost feel safe assuming he’ll vote in the interests of continued human life on this planet more often than Susan Collins would (which is both reason enough to vote for him and not saying much), and a lot of his initial support came not from some string of hilarious-but-inappropriate Chapo appearances but from being talked up by the centrist Pod Save America guys. And yet people are talking about him like he’s Bernie Sanders. Get real. The absolutely shockingly good, eat-my-every-critical-word, so-sorry-I-ever-doubted-you-sir scenario if he wins is that he turns out to be not Bernie Sanders but the guy that Hillary 2016 deadenders have spent the last decade pretending Bernie Sanders is, a sexist jerk who does good things for poor people sometimes. That’s if we’re very lucky.
Haven’t really said anything about The Tattoo. When I first heard about the tattoo, that was actually the easiest thing for me to wave away. When it comes to Nazi iconography, I only know the two or three greatest hits. I don’t know Songs 5 or 6 on the best-of album, let alone the album tracks. I think that this is a perfectly defensible sort of relationship to have to Nazi iconography. I only know what a Totenkampf is because of the Platner controversy, just as I only know what a Sonnenrad is because of Nate Hochman and Ron DeSantis (thanks, assholes). I found it genuinely totally convincing that a guy would get a tattoo with his platoon that features cool-looking skulls, and not know, till somewhere in the recent past, when we have all been forced to broaden our knowledge of the Nazi iconography canon, that those skulls had been arranged Nazily. Turns out I was wrong, though! He apparently knew the whole time, maybe thought it was funny?
So yeah, good luck to Andrea LaFlamme, I guess?
Small correction: Totenkopf, “Death’s Head.” Totenkampf is what I go through every time I encounter a Yankees’ fan online.
The term itself has no specific Nazi meaning, as it is basically just the German equivalent of “skull and crossbones.” The image, moreover, insofar as it has a particular SS connection, is surely something of a deep cut even among Geschichte des Dritten Reiches enthusiasts. I doubt a group of drunk marines stumbling into a tattoo parlor would see it as Nazi iconography.
I wish the man were a more unblemished specimen, both physically and emotionally. Jerks can be reformed, of course, but politics is hardly the best arena for spiritual growth. Still, Collins is hell in high heels.
I am someone who is more receptive to Platner-types, but it has been pretty hard for me to escape the feeling of being hustled into liking him and trying to skate over his grossness too quickly.