It’s the sort of thing that makes an internet jokester say, “I did Nazi that coming.”
Graham Platner, a first-time candidate who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, the moderate Republican from Maine, was revealed to have a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. This was followed by a look into some old posts where he used seemingly violent and homophobic rhetoric online. I’ll leave you to imagine which of these things is most disqualifying in contemporary New England Democratic politics.
Or maybe none of it is disqualifying anymore. Platner is a “candidate with a regrettable tattoo,” is how one prominent progressive commentator put it. “Censorious, hall monitor liberalism that refuses to accept growth in people” is bad for Democrats, opined another. The New Republic ran a piece titled, “Graham Platner is a disaster. Democrats need more candidates like him.” (Though in fairness, the “more” in question is untested neophyte candidates who are not boring and decrepit establishment drones, not people with Nazi imagery on their flesh.)
“This is a guy who served four terms in combat. He was a Marine, four tours of duty,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist who caucuses with the Democrats and has become one of Platner’s biggest boosters. “He saw friends die. He came out of that war, as he has acknowledged, with PTSD, got good treatment at the VA, got his life together.”
Some of these arguments seem… almost reasonable? Has cancel culture finally been canceled itself? As Alex Shephard writes in TNR, “Platner generated a ton of attention online” not by being a Nazi or a shitposter but “by seeming like the kind of candidate Democrats need—an authentic person with a knack for communicating a populist message in the social media era.” (Shepard was responding to a piece of establishment puffery by Jonathan Martin.)
Platner is now shaking up his campaign, though I am not sure this is a personnel problem unless the staffers he is replacing are his tattoo artist and the person managing his Reddit account. A University of New Hampshire poll that was partially conducted after all the negative news broke shows Platner beating Janet Mills, the incumbent governor and Chuck Schumer’s choice for Senate, in a Democratic primary by 34 points. (Noted with the important caveat that the general election polling in the 2020 Maine Senate race bore little resemblance to the actual results.)
Except it is impossible to imagine this kind of grace being extended to Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, a young Donald Trump campaign worker, or really anyone a millimeter to the right of, well, Susan Collins, even in a limited “What a shame that a promising person fell apart once carefully vetted” sort of way. Certainly not in an unabashed, “We all make mistakes when we’re young and this guy has interesting stuff to say about war, the working class, and wokeness” manner.
Which brings us back to the news cycle before the unflattering Platner headlines were tattooed across the nation’s front pages: the leaked racist messages from those we did Nazi entering the Young Republicans’ groupchat. Whether this represents genuine bigotry or bizarre, anti-woke contrarian horseplay, it isn’t healthy and it isn’t bad coalition politics to say so, no matter how low-level those involved might be. Even if a poor attempt to be punk rockish or subversive, it brings to mind the old Kurt Vonnegut quote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
The whole depressing chain of events reminds us how difficult it is to escape political tribalism in such a tribal age, even if one is consciously attempting to do so. I cannot always exempt myself, either, as I watch the meltdown over the White House remodeling project. All this attention to a presidential ballroom in the middle of a government shutdown is probably poor optics, but does it really represent the bulldozing of democracy?
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If you already accept certain anti-Trump priors, the ruins of the East Wing are a perfect illustration of how this president is wrecking the country, demolishing norms and institutions, and erecting a new castle for himself like the king he ostensibly believes he is. But even as a person who is sentimental about old things, as real conservatives should be, I do not share all of these priors, and I find this a bit overwrought. Like the old song says, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a Rose Garden.”
And yet I am self-aware enough to acknowledge that if Barack Obama had done the same thing, I might have reacted as if he had fired a thousand Winston Churchill busts into the sun.
Grace for me and not for thee. We all know who the real bad guys are, and they are surely the people who disagree with us about tax policy. Is that a tattoo of the Laffer Curve you’ve got there?
