I Endorse Graham Platner

Without reservation.

I really wanted to like David French. In fact, I did like David French. I enjoyed listening to him on the Dispatch podcasts — I listen to a lot of podcasts — and now, I have to tell you, I am not quite sure if I continue to like David French. Because what he has done here with Graham Platner makes me question his intellectual honesty.

The column ran in the New York Times this morning, under the title that names the move it is making. French walks the reader through Platner’s deleted Reddit posts, the Marines-era tattoo Platner has covered up, the I am a communist statement, the trolling. He concedes, in passing, that Platner has acknowledged the posts were wrong and deleted them, that the tattoo is covered, that the explanation Platner offered (a difficult period following repeated combat deployments) is the kind of explanation any honest reader would have to take seriously. He concedes, in passing, that Platner has the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He grants the substantive moral framework that would normally apply to a candidate with this kind of biographical record — that people can change, that redemption is real, that we should not define people by their worst moments.

And then he refuses to apply the framework he has just granted. The column’s central argument is that Democrats supporting Platner are doing what Republicans did with Trump — telling themselves the stakes are too high for normal standards, accepting a lesser evil because the greater evil is too terrifying to face honestly, beginning the slide that ends in cult-of-personality politics. The framing requires the reader to accept that Platner’s biographical record places him in the same moral-political category as Trump. The framing requires the reader to forget that French has just spent half the column granting that the biographical record admits of redemption-eligible explanations that the framing depends on disregarding. The framing requires the reader to accept that the lesser of two evils is the right description of what Maine voters are doing when they consider Platner against Susan Collins, on grounds that French presents as if they were obvious rather than as if they were the donor network’s preferred grounds being smuggled into the Times opinion page under the cover of moral-philosophical seriousness.

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What French has done here is laundering. The word is precise.

There is an elite network — friends, family, colleagues, the social-professional infrastructure of the Washington-New York commentariat — whose life interests are intimately connected to the interests that Graham Platner thinks the country should have higher taxes on. The network has spent two million dollars against a single Senate primary candidate through Pine Tree Results and the broader donor apparatus that funds the Susan Collins seat. The network has been pushing the Platner-is-a-Nazi framing into national media for months. The framing has not held at its most extreme version because Platner is so plainly not a Nazi that the extreme version has not been able to escape from the manufactured-controversy register where it was generated. The framing has needed a higher-altitude carrier. French is the carrier the network needed.

French does not, in this column, repeat the Pine Tree Results extreme version. He does something more useful to the network. He grants that Platner is not actually a Nazi, then uses the curated package of biographical material the network assembled to argue that Platner is the kind of person whose character is too compromised for the Senate. The argument is calibrated to land for the Times readership that would dismiss the extreme version on sight. The argument launders the same operation that the extreme version was conducting, at higher altitude, in language the center-left audience will register as moral-philosophical seriousness rather than as partisan attack. The laundering is the function. The function is what the donor network needed to convert the manufactured controversy into the lasting impression that disqualifies the candidate in the minds of voters and donors who would never read Pine Tree Results-style material directly.

And the standards French is applying to Platner are not standards French has demonstrably upheld in comparable cases. The deleted-Reddit-posts standard would disqualify a substantial portion of the elected officials French has defended on character grounds across his career. The tattoo standard would disqualify a substantial portion of the military veterans the conservative movement has celebrated when their service was politically convenient. The I called myself a communist online once standard would disqualify essentially every left-of-center political figure who came of age on the internet. The standards are not standards. They are a curated set of disqualifications that have been assembled to disqualify this specific candidate, in this specific race, against this specific opponent, at this specific moment, on behalf of this specific donor network. French presents the curated set as if it were the application of a universal standard. It is not. It is the application of a selective standard whose selectivity is the point.

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I have reached the point where I simply do not believe these people are representing the moral center of America. They are representing the moral center of a fantasy in which they are the meritocratic elite.

The fantasy is sincere. This matters. The David Frenches of the world are not consciously running cover for an oligarchy. They believe, sincerely, that their position in the commentariat was earned through merit, that the ladder they climbed remains open for others to climb, that the political-economic arrangement that produced their ascent is the arrangement that any serious meritocratic society would maintain. They believe that figures like Platner — who is running on a policy of taxing capital, on the philosophical-political ground that the salaried-rich-versus-capital-rich distinction has produced an indefensible structural unfairness in American taxation — are threatening the ladder itself. They believe that protecting the conditions of their own ascent is therefore a defense of merit, of opportunity, of the American story they tell themselves and tell their children.

They are delusional. Eighty percent of Americans, by varying measures across multiple surveys, do not believe that the ladder is open. They may have different stories about the ways it is not open — the right-coded story names cultural decline, immigration, identity politics, the bureaucratic state; the left-coded story names corporate consolidation, wealth concentration, capture of regulatory bodies, the closure of meaningful labor power — and the difference in stories is what produces the partisan divide. But the supermajority agreement is on the substance. The ladder is mostly closed. The story the meritocratic commentariat is telling, in which the ladder remains open and Platner-style economic policy is the threat to it, is not the story a supermajority of Americans believe. The commentariat is telling itself a story about its own legitimacy that does not survive contact with the polity it claims to be addressing.

The worst part is that some of them have convinced themselves that they represent the American Enlightenment liberal tradition.

I might suggest, as someone who sees himself quite proudly inside that tradition, that they are merely wearing its costume. Underneath the costume is aristocracy and oligarchy. The Enlightenment liberal tradition was the philosophical project of refusing inherited privilege, of insisting that self-government required the people to be capable of governing themselves rather than to be governed by their betters, of grounding political legitimacy in popular sovereignty rather than in the claims of any class to special competence. The commentariat that has been telling itself it is the contemporary carrier of this tradition has been doing the opposite. They have been insisting that the people are not capable of choosing their own representatives without expert curation, that political legitimacy flows through the institutions the commentariat occupies, that the policies the commentariat finds frightening are by definition the policies serious politics must rule out of bounds. The substance is aristocracy. The vocabulary is Enlightenment. The dressing does not change the substance.

The People of these United States must now address this formation within our polity, so that we may resume our path toward a More Perfect Union.

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David French is an asshole for writing this column.

I do not say that lightly. I have read his work. I have respected his work. I have defended his presence in the commentariat to friends who saw earlier than I did what he was becoming. I was wrong. He has surfaced what he is, in this column, in language that does not admit of the charitable readings I have been extending to him. He has used the New York Times opinion page to launder a defamation operation against a candidate whose actual offense is proposing to tax the donor class that funds the operation. He has done it in the moral-philosophical register that requires the audience to absorb the conclusion before they have noticed the donor network’s hand under the prose. He has done it knowing what he was doing, because he has the analytical apparatus to know, because his career has demonstrated he is capable of doing exactly the structural-political work he refused to do in this column.

Graham Platner is just about the most ideal politician that a patriotic American could ask for in this moment. He served his country in two wars. He came home and ran a small business. He developed views about American political economy that survive contact with the lives of the people he is asking to vote for him. He has the courage to name the donor class that has spent two million dollars trying to destroy him. He has the dignity to say what he thinks rather than what consultants want him to say. He has the willingness to acknowledge the things in his past that warrant acknowledgment, to delete what should be deleted, to cover what should be covered, and to keep moving forward into the life he is trying to build for his neighbors. He embodies, what I think, is the core spirit of the American Revolution. That we, the People, shall govern ourselves. And not some fucking king, CEO, or self-anointed opinion-maker or institution.

That includes me. I would reject the crown if given, and I expect the same of my fellow American patriots.

So fuck you all, and damn the torpedoes, I endorse Graham Platner for United States Senator from Maine.

I would be proud to see him as Senator of this Great Republic.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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