So I understood the hype, but I never thought he was a great candidate. The political class who backed him—overwhelmingly white, male progressives—should have been more discerning, especially as one scandal after another emerged. The fact that his sketchy past, like his troubling Reddit posts and Nazi tattoo and “unsettling” behavior toward women didn’t imperil his campaign until a woman came forward with rape allegations on Monday shows how toxic some reaches of the left can be, as willing as the right to dismiss misogyny and other disqualifying offenses when it’s politically inconvenient. In fact, Platner’s checkered history may have been part of his appeal, as some on the left romanticize the working class and think we should cling to an outdated masculine ideal to win them back.
While I’m sympathetic to that broader definition, the bulk of working-class folks who don’t have some amount of family privilege to fall back on might quibble with it. Much of Platner’s adolescence and early adulthood—being expelled from school, working odd jobs, eschewing college, serving in the Marines in Iraq before his mother helped get him into oyster farming—speaks to the kind of privilege someone with a solid middle-class upbringing knows they can rely on, not the kind of panicked effort to find solid ground I witnessed in my working-class upbringing in Arkansas.
As a candidate seeking the je ne sais quoi of authenticity, Platner conveniently eschewed his family history and instead implored voters to consider his experiences as a working-class adult. But at the same time, we were asked to discount some of his other experiences and actions in adulthood. When it was revealed that he had a Totenkopf tattoo, he said he was drunk when he got it and didn’t know its history. I can maybe buy that. But are we also meant to believe that in the intervening 20 years he never learned—from, say, a World War II documentary, a book, or a friend—the truth about his tattoo? That is harder to believe.
Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly journalist, declared it the end of “Dem HR lady politics.” After some backlash, he tried to claim he was making the case against “authoritarian corporate officers.” But it was hard not to envision what he meant in his first post. You can make any case against corporations you want, but the fact is that in most workplaces sexual harassment claims are handled by HR offices—often populated by middle-class women, by the way—and to the extent they still exist, most of us encounter HR officers as the person who makes sure you get your vacation time and sign up for your health insurance and 401(k). Stoller wants us to believe that lurking behind HR is a corporate machine that protects itself from liability by being unfair to men. (The MeToo movement showed how wrong that is, because it took outrageously horrendous examples of sexual assault to bring down powerful men—and even then many of them got a second or even third chance.)
That may seem surprising given how Platner portrayed himself on the campaign trail. But it’s less surprising when you consider that his loudest supporters online were that same demographic. They, at least, were fooled: To lefty college graduates who pay close attention to politics, no matter the month or year, Platner did indeed appear authentically middle-class—or at least close enough not to question it, given that he adopted all of the progressive positions that this online cohort supports. Perhaps Platner’s press photo was modeled on a romance novel after all, because these people swooned over him.
As Platner appears poised to drop out of the race, many progressives are pushing for the Maine Democratic Party to tap Troy Jackson, a former president of the state senate, to take on Collins. It’s easy to see why. He’s a staunch union supporter with a history of fighting for strong labor protections, but he’s also a middle-aged white guy with working-class bona fides: He’s a fifth-generation logger. Let’s hope he’s been a better man than Platner has been.
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