Graham Platner and the Class Politics of Impunity

Graham Platner is now through to the general election in Maine. He has survived another scandal, despite the fact that June is an unlikely time for the final story on him to drop. And his supporters, both in Maine and across the country, appear unwilling to abandon him for any reason. 

I want to argue here that Platner is a beneficiary of two kinds of populist thought, moving from both the bottom up and the top down. The first kind is the traditional sort, the kind that leads to Platner being excused as a hardscrabble everyman with rough edges. The second is an elite driven form of populism, which I will call dilettantism from here on. It’s the sort that underwrites the audacity of a Hotchkiss School dropout turned military adventurist turned oyster farmer to run for a Senate seat with no prior experience and no recognition that a single one of his subsequent scandals could be disqualifying. 

But let’s begin with the bottom-up populism and work our way through. In the wake of Platner’s latest scandal, Ken Klippenstein shared a Fox News segment in which one Maine voter dismissed concerns about Platner, saying, "If we want folks that are representing us from the working class, they're not necessarily going to have a groomed and perfect political record.”

I want to explore the suggestion that the poor treatment of women is to be expected for working class men, but first I want to address a more basic assumption being made here and elsewhere in defense of Platner. There is a sense that “ordinary” or “average” people have an inherent claim on the highest offices in the country. The United States Senate is one of the most prestigious and powerful institutions in the country, and therefore the world. It has only 100 members. Why should we want the people we place into such auspicious positions to be people who lack the serious experience and knowledge to govern the world’s lone superpower? 

Lest you think I’m a snob, I should stress that I believe in an America where anyone can become the sort of person who ends up being elected senator. But that is about creating real opportunities for people to obtain the educational, professional, and service experiences needed to turn them into leaders. It’s not an argument for plucking the Average Joe off the street and putting them in office. Advocates of deliberative democracy argue that, in the aggregate, this lack of experience can be overcome. And neophytes can benefit from both the knowledge of their staffers and more experienced representatives. I accept this to some degree, which is why I would support Platner running for the Maine legislature or even the U.S. House. But the Senate is a small and powerful club, and we’ve been treated to clear examples of how much damage a single unfit member can do. 

Returning to the question of class, it’s important to stress that much of Platner’s working class persona is a mixture of cosplay and cipher. His mother owns a restaurant that Platner supplies oysters from his farm. His father went to Dartmouth and worked as a real estate lawyer. Platner’s grandfather, Warren Platner, was a famous architect and designer. Graham himself briefly attended The Hotchkiss School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut that boasts the co-founder of Morgan Stanley, a Supreme Court justice, and a CIA director among its alumni. He departed with a spotty attendance record after being kicked out. Yes, Platner went on to serve in Iraq. Yes, he farms oysters, sports a burly and bearded figure, and wears Carhartt on the campaign trail. But these things do not make him inherently blue collar, even if that is how he presents to many Americans. 

Nevertheless, the idea that Graham Platner’s behavior is just part of working class life needs to be addressed. If Platner’s past rhetoric about and treatment of women are the natural price of running a working class candidate, isn’t the implication that working class men by nature mistreat the women in their lives? Isn’t the subsequent implication that we are supposed to believe we live in a world where working class women are routinely mistreated and that we are also supposed to accept this as a natural consequence of their station? 

I found myself thinking this week about Sarah Weinman’s book Without Consent, which chronicles the landmark 1978 marital rape case of Greta and John Rideout. A desperately young, desperately poor couple, Greta charged John with rape under a relatively new Oregon statute at a time when most of the country did not even recognize marital rape as a crime at all. She was the first woman to do so while living with her spouse. John’s defense attacked Greta’s reliability and character, repeatedly raising the issues of her infidelity and a past abortion. The jury unanimously acquitted John, who went on to repeat offend. He was finally convicted of first-degree rape in a 2017 retrial of a different assault. At his sentencing, Rideout protested, “The devil had won here today.”

I am not accusing Graham Platner of rape. But the suggestion that the allegations against him reflect the sort of behavior we should expect from “ordinary” or working class men raises some serious questions. What are women in this arrangement? Are they not also working class people deserving of the kind of solidarity some progressives seem determined to extend to Platner in perpetuity? Or, as countless people have said, is the issue that “women are bourgeois” by nature? Are women always already a stand-in for the fun-killing rules and authority that men wish they could flout? In that sense, can only men access class position and solidarity, while women remain fixed as nags and inconveniences? Consider this post from Moira Donegan: 

Poor and working men are meant to have women of their class to abuse and dominate as compensation for the exploitations and humiliations of capital. When you point out that allowing this is a violation of class solidarity [with] working class women, you’re accused of siding with management’s interests.

Of course, it's worth pointing out once again that Platner is more of a working class man as imagined by an elite. There is an extent to which this is a kind of lurid caricature projected onto the lower classes by elites, one that blends misogyny and class prejudice. Academic Catherine Frieman offered this insight on BlueSky: 

My apologies to uk [sic] followers but there something extremely 19th c British about the libidinous way upper/upper middle class American men talk about the sexual transgressiveness of the imagined lower classes

I was glad to see Catherine’s comment because I think that, when it comes to a sort of politics practiced by the privileged, Platner really excels. In fact, as John Ganz has argued, even his military service fits a sort of elite pattern of adventurism we might be more familiar with from the 19th century. And it’s one that follows a dilettantish approach to service, professional life, and politics.

 As John Ganz recently put it at his blog, Unpopular Front:

Do I think Platner is actually a Nazi? No, not really. I think he’s an adventurer type and a bit of a lost soul. Exactly the kind of person who might start in a privileged or, at least, genteel milieu and then seek out more authentic and exciting experiences, like, say, joining the military and going to war. 

I’ve already argued that we should not want “average” and unqualified people in the highest offices of this country. But this applies just as well to privileged failsons with checkered resumes and no discernible gifts. It even applies to successful people who take their achievements in fields wholly unrelated to government to be a mark of their right to rule. 

Dilettantism is a form of absurd, unending entitlement. This is what pushes CEOs to seek governorships and even the White House without any real experience. It’s how wealthy vulgarians like Elon Musk and Jared Kushner end up in charge of government spending and Middle East peace, respectively. Of course, the acceptance of this thinking by the general population has helped sustain Trump’s political career, thanks to his fabricated image as a wily businessman. What Platner represents to me in this dilettantist mode is an immature and spoiled boy—a boy who never took seriously the privilege with which he was born, a boy who went to war because it seemed like fun, a boy who sees consequences as something for other people. 

If these dynamics appear disparate and unlinked, that is not exactly the case. One area where we can more clearly see the fusion of populism and dilettantism around Platner is in the amount of people who have laid the blame for his scandals not on the man himself but on his pro-Israel opponents. Here, Platner doesn’t have moral failings. He’s simply being set up by the Zionists. 

When the latest story broke Cenk Uygur took to X to write, “If you want a handy list of people who work for Israel, look at everyone criticizing Graham Platner now, especially Democrats.”

In Zeteo’s First Draft newsletter, Martin Pengelly made it clear that Platner was only being attacked for one reason: his position on Israel. Here’s Pengelly:

Does anyone really believe that the usually cautious New York Times would have run a piece making similarly incendiary claims against an establishment politician, based almost wholly on the uncorroborated allegations of a single source who just happened to be a long-standing activist from the opposing party? Is it any wonder that so many people online see this article as a hit job against an anti-oligarchy, anti-Israel populist?

This argument is emblematic of how certain kinds of progressives have defended Platner. He is being attacked purely because of his courage speaking out against Israel. In fact, his anti-Zionism makes any allegation against him suspect, especially if any of his accusers are Zionists. 

Are we to believe that it’s pro-Israel activists who are to blame to for the seemingly endless stream of stories about bad behavior and poor judgment on Platner’s part? As I wrote at the time, with a touch of hyperbole, it seems Platner’s own words and actions are a Jewish conspiracy. The U.S. support for the war in Gaza and the Israeli military’s genocidal actions there have heightened hostility to the Israeli regime in both parties, as well as an increase in virulent, paranoid antisemitism. On the left and right, Jews and pro-Israel lobbyists have taken on a cartoonishly villainous role in American politics. Far too often, arguments purporting to be merely anti-Zionist feed off the idea that Jews themselves are at the heart of the problem. 

This conspiratorial logic has long pervaded our politics, from left-wing protest groups to country club lounges. But now it feels supercharged. 

There’s no reason to think Platner is being subjected to special difficulties for his anti-Israel views. No one forced Graham Platner to get a totenkopf tattoo in his youth or to keep it until months into his Senate bid. No one wrote Platner’s misogynistic Reddit posts for him. And the allegations in the New York Times report, which come from women beyond just Fifield, do not have the outlandish quality of false accusations. In fact, Fifield describes disturbing enough behavior while also refusing to accuse Platner of more severe physical abuse or rape—though she has subsequently stated that the Times softened her account. 

Rather than seeing Platner as a victim of persecution, one is left wondering how any typical candidate could survive such a series of revelations. More specifically, it’s clear that no non-white or female candidates would ever be able to weather what Platner has. As Danielle Kurtzleben told Mary Harris on the June 4 episode of Slate’s What Next podcast:

Platner grabbed attention by being something that Democrats don't have a lot of, which is a blue collar man, or at least a picture of a blue collar man that is ready-made to put on a pedestal, and that is why everybody is paying attention to him. Again, I really don't think this would be happening if he were Jill Platner, I don't. I don't think he would have this kind of attention at all.

As should be clear by now, misogyny is really the central point of convergence for all these populist and dilettantist dynamics. Kurtzleben made her comments before the New York Times story broke last weekend, but they are all the more salient now. But policing Platner is mere HR lady politics, a meme my colleague Katherine Cross eloquently skewered yesterday. 

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holds many of the same positions as Graham Platner. She worked as a bartender between her graduation from Boston University and her run for the House. Yet is there any reason to think she could survive a single one of Platner’s scandals? To invert the logic a bit, why haven’t we seen Ocasio-Cortez consumed with controversy over hateful Reddit posts, Nazi-related body art, or harassment of past love interests? Why hasn’t the pro-Israel lobby managed to pin a totenkopf on her? 

The argument that we should give Platner the benefit of the doubt elides the fact that he and men like him have been given this their entire lives. In Platner’s candidacy, the adventurism and entitlement of dilettantism fuses with the American idealization of working class masculinity. Stripping the layers back, we’re left with a cross-class politics that says white men can do as they please, whenever they please, and the real enemy is anyone—women, elites, “smoothgroins,” Jews—who might try and hold them accountable. 

Featured image is Hoisting at Eton, by Sydney P. Hall