US Politics

A young political outsider with a fairly scant record becomes a sensation in a Democratic primary, capturing hearts and minds with a populist message and a disarming charm that translates well into vertical video. His success surges him to the head of the race, and as election day nears, he seems poised to pull off an upset victory that topples one of his district’s most hated and entrenched political machines.It’s a tale of two primaries: the New York City mayoral race, in which the 33-year-old state assembly member Zohran Mamdani defeated the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, and the Maine Senate race, where the political outsider and oyster farmer Graham Platner attracted national attention with a viral campaign.But one of these races has gone much better than the other. In New York, Mamdani has worked to consolidate citywide support following his landslide primary victory, and though he has become a figure of national controversy as Republicans and some Democrats smear him for his race and religion, he has managed to secure broad buy-in from city stakeholders. Mamdani’s opponents, meanwhile, have struggled to create a sense of outrage and scandal around the mayoral contender: despite millions poured into the race from billionaires intent on keeping the Democratic socialist out of office, opposition research into Mamdani seems to be coming up empty. Recently, the New York Post tried, somewhat feebly, to create a scandal out of the fact that Mamdani referred to an older, female relative as his “aunt”, even though technically, she was a distant cousin.Platner’s case looks different. Earlier this month, after Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, entered the Democratic Senate race with the backing of party leaders, a series of increasingly unflattering revelations about Platner’s past behavior came to light. In a series of since-deleted Reddit posts, some from as recently as 2020, Platner made a series of incendiary comments. He claimed that Black people don’t tip (“I work as a bartender and it always amazes me how true the stereotype is,” he wrote. “Every now and again a black patron will leave a 15-20% tip, but usually it [sic] between 0-5%”) and suggested women who have been sexually assaulted were responsible for their own attacks, writing, according to the Washington Post: “If you’re so worried about it to buy Kevlar underwear you’d think you might not get blacked out f—-d up around people you aren’t comfortable with.” A few days later, he went on Pod Save America, the successful liberal podcast hosted by former Obama staffers, seemingly in an effort to get ahead of another unflattering story: that he had a tattoo of a Totenkopf, widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, for nearly 20 years.Platner’s account of the tattoo goes like this: when he was in his early 20s and enlisted in the marines, he was drunk on shore leave in Croatia, and he and his friends went to get a tattoo. Platner selected a Totenkopf, an angled skull and crossbones image used by the SS; he claims he did not know what it meant, and that he merely thought it looked cool. Platner says that he did not know the significance of his tattoo until recently, and has said he is “not a secret Nazi”.But reporting from outlets such as Jewish Insider and CNN contradicts this, with a source to Jewish Insider claiming that Platner had referred to his tattoo by its German name – as “my Totenkopf” – years before. On Pod Save America, Platner broadcast a video of himself, shirtless and evidently inebriated at his brother’s wedding, with the tattoo on display. As a crowd of partygoers looked on, the half-naked Platner sang an off-key version of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball. He got the tattoo covered up a few days later, appearing shirtless, again, on television to display an odd-looking Celtic knot with a hound motif where the Totenkopf had once been. One wonders how much familiarity with a Senate candidate’s nipples voters are expected to have.Calls accumulated for Platner to drop out of the race. But some, most prominently the Pod Save America hosts themselves, defended Platner, and suggested that the calls for him to step aside were emblematic of what they see as the Democratic party’s core problems: an excessive priggishness and marriage to political correctness. “Only perfect candidates off the harvard law conveyor belt pls,” wrote Jon Lovett sardonically. “Highly disciplined, all boxes checked, well liked and humble, absolutely no spiritual connection to having a physical body except for severe IBS, volunteered at a soup kitchen in high school, signs email ‘cheers,’ etc.” (Lovett did not elaborate on what “spiritual connection to having a physical body” meant in this context.) Ryan Grim, formerly of the Intercept, cast Platner’s rehabilitation in existential terms for the party: “Not to overstate it, but this is a crucial moment for the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “If they decide that normal people with some skeletons in their closet (or inked on their chest) are not welcome, they are finished.” Normal seems to be a flexible term. Ben Burgiss, an adjunct at Rutgers and a columnist at the left-populist magazine Jacobin, put it more bluntly: “I still like Platner a whole lot more than the grim little hall monitors digging up dirt on him,” he wrote on the day that the Totenkopf tattoo story broke. “Sorry.”For his part, Platner was defensive about the need for actions like his to find tolerance and forgiveness in a party that seeks to court male voters. “How do you expect to win young people?” Platner said in an interview with Semafor. “How do you expect to win back men when you go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics?’ Good luck with that. Good luck winning over those demographics.”Mamdani and Platner are clearly men of different temperaments. But the men also represent different paths for the Democratic party’s insurgent left wing, as left-populist candidates ride a wave of voter outrage and base anger at Democratic party leadership to pose serious challenges to the party’s mainstream. In Mamdani, what seems to be a genuine political talent has emerged: his uncommonly disciplined message focuses on affordability issues without shying away from pluralist values or seeming to mimic a more rugged, domineering form of masculinity. But in Platner, some pundits and members of the consultant class seem to have found a vehicle for their own project for the party’s reform, one that is less about policy outcomes than about transforming the Democratic party’s image to embrace men, masculinity and a vision of a rugged, rural whiteness.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.Put aside, for a moment, the misogyny of this assertion: is it true that by becoming too “feminine”, the party will lose the working class? The reality is that the American working class now consists less of the masculine-coded heavy industries like manufacturing and rust-belt steel mills, and more of jobs in the female-dominated service sector. Just under half of American workers are women, but they are the majority of the low-wage workforce. The conflation of the “working class” with maleness is outdated and false, a rhetorical fig leaf that conceals sexism behind a facade of anticapitalist righteousness.One suspects that what is at stake in the pundit defenses of Platner and his masculinity is not so much about electoral outcomes as it is about an idea of what makes power legitimate. When the likes of Lovett, Grim and Burgiss suggest that tolerance for behavior like Platner’s is needed to win elections – an idea that seems to have very little esteem for men and workers, both – they might actually be signaling not so much what they need to do to win, but what kind of victory would be worth having.The infatuation with an idea of a working class that is not represented in the actual numbers is less about a materialist analysis of American politics than it is about a psychic investment in American manhood. The tolerance these pundits are calling for is not an electoral necessity, but a cultural valuation of a certain kind of American over others. It is unfortunate, in the light of Mamdani’s example of how capacious masculinity can be and how needless tolerance for racism and sexism are to an energizing campaign, that these men are choosing to line up behind a man who has displayed, at minimum, some highly questionable judgment.But to many, the Totenkopf-bearing man, shirtless and belting in the video that Platner showed on Pod Save America, is simply more American than others – more authentic, more admirable, more worthy of winning over. Women of color, Jews, rape survivors, Black people, or any of the others that Platner might alienate with this past behavior, meanwhile, seem relatively cheap to them in comparison. This chase for the white male vote as more worthy and important is conspicuous, now, among the liberal pundit class. How are all the other voters supposed to feel about it?

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More