A new poll out of the University of New Hampshire has Graham Platner opening up a giant lead over Gov. Janet Mills (64/25) in the Democratic primary to challenge Maine Senator Susan Collins. Platner also leads Collins by a greater margin than does Mills.
It's a startling show of resiliency from a man whose campaign seemed DOA once it was revealed he had gotten a big ol' Nazi tattoo on his chest. And lest we think that was some sort of one-off, just today Platner boosted the message of a prominent neo-Nazi radio host when the latter identified war with Iran as "the only thing Republicans and Democrats have both given a standing ovation for" (Platner added "As always, there’s one thing that brings Republican and Democratic politicians together: sending other people’s children to die in stupid wars in the Middle East.").
As the possibility of a Platner victory, post-Totenkopf, is sinking in, we're starting to see more folks from what we might call the intelligentsia of the "insurgent" wing of the Democratic Party trying to raise the alarm on him. The line I'm hearing most often is that Platner will become "another Fetterman" -- a politician initially promoted by the populist wing of the party, whose appeal traded significantly on coding as a manly-man to Democrats desperate to shed their elitist, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, left-wing (...) image, who became one of the Democrats most likely to cross party lines and back conservative initiatives.
It's an ironic charge, given that one of Fetterman's chief sins to this clique is that he is among the few diehard Bibi-or-bust Democrats remaining, and Platner is a loud and harsh critic of Israel. To the extent the allegation is that Platner will turn out to be an AIPAC darling, I'm dubious. But if the claim is more broadly that Platner is highly liable to align with conservative populists at the expense of Democratic priorities, it's quite plausible -- and, it must be said, quite compatible with retaining his loud and harsh anti-Israel politics. His fate is not to become Irving Kristol, but to become Tucker Carlson.
As this last-ditch rally against Platner develops, though, I've been thinking about the old "the party decides" line that people thought until too far late in the day would stop Trump from being nominated in 2016. In this case, though, "the party" I have in mind is not the organizational Democratic Party, but rather the aforementioned insurgent intelligentsia that's trying to claw back support for Platner from what is largely their own rank-and-file. They've relentlessly promoted a vision of Democratic politics that is almost entirely front-loaded into a particular aesthetic of being a "fighter", and now they've found it's spiraled out of their control. And in particular, one thing I think they still haven't wrapped their heads around is the real possibility that Platner's antisemitic associations are a selling point for him. They're not something he's had to overcome, they're part of why -- in the context of this particular "I'm a fighter, I'm tackling the powerful, I'm beholden to nobody" aesthetic -- Platner is as popular as he is.
Amanda Marcotte, for instance, uses the fact of Platner's success-notwithstanding-Nazi-ties to complain not about the Democratic branches backing Platner, but of the Democratic establishment that has aligned with Mills. "It really says a lot about how the Democratic establishment is failing to meet the moment that Platner is a contender.... Running Mills was political malpractice." The implication, here, is that Platner is only succeeding because Democrats thirsting for a true "fighter" didn't have another option other than a geriatric old biddy; they're so desperate that they'll even back the Nazi-adjacent dude if the alternatives are so poor.
Problem #1 with this argument is that Platner was not the only alternative to Mills in the race; Marcotte's account doesn't explain why Platner specifically became the popular alternative. Problem #2 is that while Mills is certainly old, there's no evidence that she doesn't take the positions or adversarial attitude towards Republicans that we supposedly want -- her only actual sin is her age, the other problems are just imputed to her by virtue of her date of birth. Platner's ascendence is directly related to this conflation, where a "vibe" of being "fighter-ly" matters more than one's actual record, beliefs, or policies. Can we really be surprised when Platner's support is not dinged by complaints relating to his record, beliefs, and or policies? Folks are reaping what they've sown here.
Much like with conservatives and Trumpism circa 2016, it's clear that there is a substantial cadre of political professionals who thought -- quite sincerely -- that they could play with currents of populist rage but also keep them under control, in part because they assumed that of course people didn't really want overt nativism or White supremacy or antisemitism or what have you. And the problem is, it turns out that a lot of people wanted exactly that. The "party" tried to hit the brakes, and nothing happened. It was a complete misjudgment of where the center of gravity was, alongside a complete misjudgment of how intolerable pure rancid bigotry would be.
We have gone through a long, long period of certain people ranting about the DNC rigging primaries and all incumbents are bought and paid for by special interests and every Democratic leader is a spineless weasel shrinking violet ... etc., etc., onward to infinity. A lot of the "smarter" people who indulged in that rhetoric didn't mean it literally. It was a tool to harness popular rage, which they would deploy with scalpel-like precision to knock out the sclerotic old guard to be replaced by better (but still savvy) operators like themselves. The problem is that when that rhetoric sinks in far enough, it never gets deployed with scalpel-like precision. It can't. It metastasizes quickly and uncontrollably, and any effort to restrain it flops as it is perceived as yet another instance of the Big Bad "Them" trying to assert control over and squelch the true voice of the people.
And at the risk of spiking the football, of course antisemitism would be at the center of this. A central component of antisemitism is how it places Jews, in the public imagination, as the paradigm-case of the small elite class of riggers and cheaters who pull puppet-strings behind the scenes. In this light, Platner being perceived as antisemitic Jewish accentuates, rather than undermines, his appeal as someone who will fearlessly take on ... the elitist class of riggers and cheaters pulling puppet-strings behind the scenes. Couple that with the other central feature of epistemic antisemitism -- this simmering fury that there's so much that "they" won't let you say, that you're Not Allowed To Say, that we all know are true and are secretly thinking but Your Life Will Be Over if you say it -- and there is a frankly orgasmic pleasure in letting that cauldron boil over and pour out all the thoughts they've been suppressing for years that they now feel license to say. That's what we're seeing now, more than anything: an outright ecstasy amongst people who finally, finally, feel free to not care what Jews think when they think about Jews. Maybe that's why we seem to have gone from zero to ninety so fast. Once again, cf. Trump: the reason why Trump's overt bigotry didn't seem to hurt him the polls is that a lot of people wanted more than anything else to be able to say all of those horrible things, things that they'd been told and believed would destroy their lives and careers and marriages and future if they ever said out loud, and for it to be okay. When Trump said it and it didn't spike his political career, the freedom he promised -- the freedom not to care what "they" think -- was absolutely intoxicating.
Again, I absolutely believe that many of the "smart" people who promoted this sort of approach didn't mean for this to happen, and thought quite earnestly that of course they (they personally and they-the-voters) would not conflate "elitist class of cheaters" with "Jews". Nonetheless: that's exactly what happened. They misjudged the center of gravity dramatically. They underestimated the appeal of antisemitism, which they were sure was good and well-buried, and only being dredged up now as a tired refrain of a baiters and hustlers who had no other refrain to offer. They were wrong. The "hustlers" were right. And the "smart" people, once again, found they can't stop the train.
That's why I'm very pessimistic about arresting the currently accelerating antisemitic trends, particularly in a context where progressive politics are moving towards an aesthetic populism questing for whoever can provide an outlet for our seething, incandescent rage. It's not even that the rage isn't understandable -- of course it is -- but when it swallows up every other political instinct it necessarily leads to bad places (a downward spiral I'm familiar with in part because of how I've seen it afflict elements of the Jewish community dealing with Jewish anger).
It's very clear, as Adam Serwer wrote today, that too many people (including left-identified people) are looking for an excuse "to indulge in the transgressive pleasure of public bigotry as a little treat." Platner's Nazi affiliations are exactly that sort of transgressive treat, and until we understand that they are part of his appeal for regular voters -- not Tiki-torch neo-Nazis, but ordinary Americans -- we're not going to wrap our heads around the scope of the actual problem.
