No matter how many times Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren vowed to stand by their man, the Graham Platner Good Ship Socialism always seemed to be moments away from springing a leak and sinking like a dilapidated oyster boat. And, as the poll numbers for Sen. Susan Collins began to inch closer to Platner’s, cutting into his once-big lead, it was inevitable that the Democrats would find a way to force him out and to do that, the Democrats returned to their standard play: find someone who would make a sexual assault accusation.
With the Democratic Party establishment pulling the plug on Platner’s campaign (even Sanders called for him to quit), Platner suspended his campaign to give the Democrats time to pick a new candidate. While there remains some drama to be had in this political dog-and-pony show, Platner is now free to be relegated to the political Orwellian Memory Hole—where he belongs.
The Platner campaign is a microcosm of a much larger political crisis in this country, as both Democrats and Republicans are heading for disaster and taking everyone else with them, which is why Platner’s rise and spectacular fall are relevant. Democrats are in the midst of a hostile takeover attempt by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), while the Republicans are being emasculated by Donald Trump and his MAGA true believers. Both parties are on paths that will not end well for them or Americans in general, and while we can feel a small amount of relief that a violence-spewing socialist like Platner won’t be in the US Senate, his saga changes nothing.
Although the Republican version of crony capitalism is helping to drive the DSA movement and give it legitimacy, this article will deal with the Democrats with Platner being the catalyst, since his campaign reflects the entire political spectrum as it pertains to the Democratic Party. This is a saga that combines nearly everything on the Democratic side including issues about sex, domestic violence, and all of the free and price-reduced services that socialists claim they will provide if only the voters will give them a chance.
The Fertile Ground for Socialist Rhetoric
In any election, we might question the results, but it is important to remember who the actual players were. In the case of Zohran Mamdani winning New York’s mayoral election last year, one should remember that the best that “establishment” Democrats could do was to trot out the disgraced Andrew Cuomo, who already had been forced out of his state’s governorship. Nor did Cuomo ever make a case to the voters as to why they should elect him, other than he was a Democrat.
The crony capitalism that has dominated the US economy, especially since the Bill Clinton years, is running aground. Each president after Clinton has added to the burden through regulation and taxation, while the US government spends well beyond its means with the federal government debt topping $40 trillion. Price inflation is at its worst levels since the 1970s and Donald Trump continues to insist that his tariffs some day will bring prosperity.
Not everyone is struggling. Business owners in the high-tech and related industries have capitalized off the bubble economy that the Federal Reserve has produced for more than 30 years, as stock prices continue to rise, thus expanding the paper wealth of these billionaires. One should not be surprised to see politicians capitalizing on this situation, claiming that billionaire wealth itself is the cause of our present economic malaise, and that the only way to “fix” the economy is to seize the wealth of others and spread it around.
In another era, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Occasio-Cortez are irrelevant figures, but in the current political economy, their wealth-destroying rhetoric and proposals appeal to people who see no problem in the destruction of private capital. And no group has more appealing rhetoric to resentful people than does the DSA.
Like all good socialist movements, the DSA leadership insists that it wants to build a new society and new economy for “the workers.” Like their Bolshevik counterparts who announced in 1917 that they had created the “workers’ state” based upon “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Of course, the Bolshevik leaders—much like today’s leaders of the DSA—were educational, social, and economic elites who would never be sharing power with the “workers,” but always loudly proclaimed that was exactly what they were doing.
Thomas B. Edsall of the New York Times calls the DSA “A Worker’s Party Without Many Workers,” writing:
Most of the leadership of the D.S.A. and a majority of voters who back its candidates are in no way working class. Instead, an elite made up of well-educated professionals dominates this insurgency.
The D.S.A.’s agenda, in turn, is packed with policies supported by left-wing liberals, white progressives in particular, but strongly opposed by both white and minority working-class (defined, in pollster shorthand, as non-college-educated) voters.
He continues:
In 2021 the D.S.A. surveyed its members and found that 85 percent were non-Hispanic white (far more than the national population, which was 57.8 percent white in 2020, according to the census); 9 percent were Hispanic, 5 percent Asian American and 4 percent Black.
Indeed, as Edsall points out, the policies that the DSA promotes are policies that would not appeal to actual blue-collar workers for many reasons but do reflect the economic and social interests of higher-income elites. Given that the Democratic Party is already the natural home for most elites, it is no wonder that the DSA is hellbent on dominating that party, as The Nation has already urged them to do.
Moreover, as noted earlier, the Clinton crony capitalist model in which political elites used the system to funnel wealth to themselves has run its course, with Democrats already trying to find new ways to appeal to voters. And that is where a candidate like Graham Platner came into the picture.
Platner: The “Authentic” Proletariat
One of the buzzwords in our therapeutic culture is “authenticity,” and that word has led to people inflicting a lot of damage on themselves and others. Doctors who should know better push young children into destructive “sex change” surgeries so that these children can express their “authentic selves.” Not surprisingly, there is a demand for political figures to demonstrate their “authenticity,” and what better person to fit that role than Graham Platner.
Who would be the better person to passionately promote the socialist agenda than a handsome, hard-drinking, hard-living oysterman from Maine, a US Army veteran, someone who would “fight oligarchy” and tax those billionaires to hell and back? Platner was the hard-working Mainer who would always be kept down by the oligarchs who everyone knows have become rich by stealing from everyone else.
His website said it all:
Maine is becoming unaffordable for thousands and thousands of us. Why? Because we have a government by, of, and for billionaires, building a “billionaire economy” that none of us can afford. I’m not just running against Susan Collins: I’m running against the billionaire class that owns her and owns Washington.
Platner excited the hardcore violent socialists at Jacobin and the white-haired grandmothers who were worried about the future of their grandchildren and believed that Platner was “fighting” for them. Of course, there were some cracks in the façade, as I pointed out in a recent article.
Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, who had started out with a favorable view of Platner, has now writes she has changed her views altogether:
Hopefully, by the time you read this, Graham Platner will have dropped out of the Senate race in Maine. If he hasn’t, he needs to, immediately.
His campaign, which started with such excitement and inspired so many people in Maine, has become a shameful catastrophe. What’s left — besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out what, if anything, can be learned from this debacle.
What changed? A woman’s rape accusations against Platner—earlier ignored by the mainstream media—finally found their way to Politico, where they gained traction:
As you probably know by now, Politico published a story on Monday about a woman, Jenny Racicot, who says that Platner raped her. According to Racicot, they’d been romantically involved, on and off, for more than two years when he showed up at her house drunk and uninvited one night in 2021, let himself in and forced himself on her.
She confided her ordeal to a man she dated after Platner, as well as to her therapist, and showed Politico text messages she sent in 2023 warning an acquaintance away from him. Her account is completely believable and completely devastating.
So, the same NYT that didn’t think her accusations to be important or believable suddenly believes that Graham Platner really did rape a woman. The NYT would never hold back such accusations against a Republican candidate, but, like all other Democrats in the media, they wanted to believe that the “authentic” Platner was the right guy for Maine and, more importantly, he might be able to help flip the US Senate to the Democrats.
Of course, as noted earlier, there were a lot of negative things hurled at Platner, but he always had his supporters. Jacobin insisted that the attacks were “politically motivated” but wouldn’t work:
Opponents went all in on smearing Graham Platner as a Nazi based on a bad tattoo choice. It didn’t work. Maine voters decided they’d rather have universal health care and an end to reckless wars than a polished politician with an unblemished past.
For that matter, even Platner’s oyster business brings in little money (he supplies oysters for his mother’s high-end restaurant), as he lives off a government disability check, which contrasts with his claim that he made his living “off the sea.” So, even his “worker” credentials are in question.
Why did the Democrats withdraw support?
Michelle Goldberg would tell you that this “devastating new report” was the catalyst for change, which is about as believable as Donald Trump claiming there is no algae in the Reflecting Pool. The media was in possession of Jenny Racicot’s claims for months, and also had ignored another woman’s claim of sexual abuse from Platner, just as they knew that Platner’s behavior over the years was that of a drunken psychopath and sexual predator who probably would have been perfectly at home in Washington, DC (which is not a compliment).
What did change, however, were the poll numbers, as Susan Collins was gaining on Platner and her chances of winning had drastically improved from what they had been just a month or two before. Moreover, Politico released a poll that showed Platner would lose crucial support if another scandal tied to him were to break out. A realistic view was that as the campaign went on, the glow around Platner would wear off and the Democrats would be stuck with another loser.
Go back a year ago when the NYT and most of the other media insisted that videos of President Joe Biden stumbling or acting disoriented were “cheapfakes” that didn’t reflect the reality that Biden actually was coherent and in charge. Then came the disastrous debate with Donald Trump.
Suddenly, the NYT did a political 180 and insisted that Biden drop out of the presidential race and be replaced by another Democrat. While the editors at the NYT insisted that the debate debacle was a new development, Joe Biden had been declining for many months. The media had always been in possession of those facts but refused to tell the public what its journalists knew, but when Biden failed in a very public way, what everyone already knew could no longer be hidden.
Conclusion
The Graham Platner debacle didn’t happen because the media suddenly received new and credible information. Given that reporters already had information about the Platner’s alleged rape of Jenny Racicot, they didn’t use it because they didn’t want to damage his “authentic” candidacy, but in the end, the candidate’s declining poll numbers were leading to a probable defeat. Thus, as the media did with Joe Biden two years ago, they decided that driving Platner out of the race and replacing him with a more “respectable” Democrat would give the party a better chance of winning in November.
Media pundits won’t tell us that, of course. Instead, they will insist that reporters acted on the news when they received it. The truth is somewhere else, not in the nation’s newsrooms.
