Thanks in large part to the erratic and often-destructive policies coming from Donald Trump’s White House, the Democrats are favored to win both houses of Congress, as they hope to flip several Republican-held seats in the House and the Senate. One of the most closely-watched races is the Senate campaign in Maine, where upstart Democrat Graham Platner is favored to end Sen. Susan Collins’s long political career.
Platner’s campaign has been deemed controversial mostly because of his unhinged behavior with women, his Nazi tattoo, and social media statements that alone would have disqualified most people even before they could run for office. David French of the New York Times has been a vocal critic of Platner, writing:
I don’t want politicians to be authentic. I want them to be decent. I want them to be honest. I want them to be competent. And if they fail those tests, they don’t redeem themselves by opposing President Trump.
If you’re a conservative watching Democrats talk themselves into supporting Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat who until recently wore what sure looked like a Totenkopf tattoo (he covered it up after it became a political embarrassment), you’re probably experiencing déjà vu. To a lesser but still familiar degree, I’m seeing Democrats engage in the same process of absurd accommodation and justification that Republicans use to excuse their deep love for Trump.
As for Platner’s infamous tattoo, French writes:
Let’s talk about that tattoo first, no matter how sick you are of hearing about it. For those who are not familiar with the Totenkopf, it’s the death’s head insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, one of the three key branches of Hitler’s Waffen-SS, the armed backbone of the Nazi regime. And the SS-Totenkopfverbände arguably was the worst of the SS. Its members were, among other duties, concentration camp guards, the people who were responsible for order in the industrial killing machines of Nazi Germany.
Platner has claimed that he didn’t know what the tattoo meant and that it was the result of a drunken mistake he made when he was in the Marines. If you believe this (and obviously I don’t), he then, by his own account, carried a death’s head tattoo on his body for almost 20 years, apparently without the slightest curiosity as to what it was (though there are reports — which he disputes — that he called his tattoo “my Totenkopf” in 2012).
After news of the tattoo surfaced, Genevieve McDonald, who had recently resigned as Platner’s political director, questioned whether he truly didn’t know what the symbol signified. “He’s not an idiot,” she wrote. “He’s a military history buff.”
When one looks at his personal history, as the New York Times recently did, one sees a man who abuses women and has engaged in both action and speech that Democrats regularly denounce—when the candidate is from the political opposition. The NYT writes:
Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”
One woman he dated told the NYT about what clearly was alleged physical abuse:
. . .she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.
“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”
In previous political cycles, such commentary from the NYT would have been enough to sink any candidate, and especially a Democrat. Yet, Platner not only has thrived in this political season, but he even soundly defeated Maine’s popular Democratic governor, Jane Mills, in the primary. The political world has been turned upside down, but (contrary to what people like French might claim), the political crudeness that has become the hallmark of Trump and his MAGA followers is not the reason that someone as morally compromised as Platner is now the darling of the Democratic Party. Instead, they love Platner because of his unabashed fealty to socialism.
Jacobin—the magazine that proudly takes on the name of the people who invented totalitarianism and political terror—has championed Platner since the start of his campaign:
Platner’s campaign for US Senate represents a unique threat to elite power, and therefore the elite and its media machine are subjecting him to the kind of scrutiny they do not subject themselves or their political puppets to, in an effort to get him to drop out or lose.
Platner, not surprisingly, claims to be running to “fight oligarchy,” which means a campaign against billionaires and, of course, Elon Musk. When word came out about the success of the SpaceX IPO, Platner tweeted on X: “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire. Let’s make sure he’s also the last.”
In fact, Platner’s campaign is obsessed with America’s billionaires, and he is centering his campaign as one long screed against people he claims have too much wealth. His campaign website, not surprisingly, reflects the ignorance that Connor O’Keefe pointed out in his recent piece on Elon Musk. As is the case with socialists, Platner claims in his campaign statements that the US economy is sluggish because billionaires are “hoarding” their wealth:
Over nine hundred Americans are billionaires, up from 66 in 1990. They have accumulated a quarter of America’s GDP. Their wealth has exploded, while the average American worker has moved backward.
They sit on a golden hoard, sucking chunks of the economy into their portfolios. While the real economy withers, their economy has never been stronger. Their economy is a financialized economy, an economy of great wealth built on air, of private equity destroying productive businesses and scavenging them for parts.
One is given the false picture akin to Scrooge McDuck sitting on piles of gold and money in his private vault while everyone else starves. Writes O’Keeffe:
But the implication that the rich are simply “hoarding” trillions of dollars of wealth is useful to them. It feeds the impression that all of our economic problems are, in essence, problems with the distribution of final consumable wealth. That there is already plenty of food, housing, healthcare, sports cars, luxury vacations, and NBA finals tickets for everyone.
But, it’s all being held away by a handful of billionaires, and now one trillionaire, who are simply too greedy to part with money they aren’t even using that would unlock all these goods and services for everyone else. Therefore, the government must come in and move all this wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little.
The problem with this narrative is not merely that it’s egregiously wrong and grounded in a profound misunderstanding or misrepresentation of how economies work. The deeper issue is that these talking points misdirect the public away from the actual culprit behind our economic trouble and, therefore, help preserve the obviously-rigged system we’re forced to live under.
No socialist candidate’s platform would be complete, of course, without a call to nationalize medical care. Declares Platner:
We live in the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth. There is no reason for a doctor shortage, no law of economics that says that universal world-class healthcare is possible in Australia and Taiwan and Sweden but not in America.
He continues:
All of this can be changed if we break the power of the private insurance industry over our government, and join the small but substantial community of nations in which high-quality healthcare is convenient, is a given, is a human right. These policies are straightforward and are completely within our power.
As anyone familiar with government-sponsored healthcare knows, denial of care and doctor and facility shortages are regular features of these systems. In Canada, the government-run system is actively encouraging people to seek doctor-assisted suicide to lessen the pressure on the healthcare system. While there is plenty to criticize about the present healthcare situation in the US, most of the dislocations in the system, as well as the skyrocketing costs, are due to the massive amount of current government intervention. The notion that even more government control will suddenly eliminate shortages and make unlimited healthcare available for all—for free, of course—is the kind of fantasy that only a socialist could promote.
As one can imagine, Platner’s socialist vision will be very costly, but he has a plan to pay for it by taxing fewer than 1,000 people, as well as America’s energy companies, into oblivion. One plan is to bring back the failed Windfall Profits Tax that was repealed 40 years ago, and slap price controls on gasoline, oil, and electricity.
And no socialist’s campaign would be complete without a proposal for a wealth tax that Platner claims would raise $4.4 trillion. That any competent economist will tell you that Platner’s claims are a pipe dream is one thing, but the message that Americans have received from people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, and Platner is that a group of people have gained trillions of dollars that they are hoarding in their vaults, money that was taken directly from the pockets of poorer Americans. Thus, to restore the economy, the government needs to confiscate most of their holdings and give them back to their “rightful” owners. As Connor O’Keeffe points out:
At its core, the problem here is the emphasis on the momentary distribution of previously-generated wealth rather than the more important, and clarifying, factor: the means of acquiring that wealth.
There is an enormous difference between someone who becomes wealthy by discovering a new use of capital goods that consumers value a lot and someone who becomes wealthy by forcibly taking money from people against their will, or getting someone else to take it on their behalf. The former is responsible for making society, as a whole, wealthier. The latter is committing a crime for private gain that makes society as a whole poorer.
At its heart, the Platner campaign is a campaign built on simple envy. He tells his enthusiastic audience that someone out there has more than they have, so the “solution” is to employ government agents to seize someone else’s property and “distribute” it among everyone else. Hilariously, Platner believes that the people whose wealth is confiscated won’t change their behavior and will continue to direct their income and capital indefinitely, providing a tax windfall for everyone else.
Yes, Graham Platner is an immoral person. Anyone who would proudly display a tattoo worn by men carrying out the deeds of the SS is not someone who should be holding public office. But while his behavior and private life have been and are abominable, as Senator Platner, he would actively help to destroy what is left of our economy’s capital base and drive millions of Americans into poverty.
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