We, Socialists

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 08, 2026

 

Melat Kiros, the democratic socialist who won the Democratic nomination for a Colorado congressional seat, is a socialist. But, she assures us, you shouldn’t be put off by the s-word.

 

“We have socialism already,” she recently explained. “It’s in the roads we drive on, the schools we send our kids to, the fire stations we call upon. I’m just asking that we extend that security to our healthcare, to our housing, to our nutritional food, to our higher education so that we’re actually meeting the basic needs of everyday working families in this country.”

 

I could spend a lot of time running through why I think this is, in one aspect or another, ridiculous, wrong, dishonest, or tedious. But I’ll be brief.

 

For starters, outside of a handful of anarcho-capitalists who have never been in political power, there’s never been a capitalist country in which defenders of capitalism argued for the total private ownership of—oh, I dunno—roads. Friedrich Hayek would spit out his Viennese coffee at the suggestion that if you support the public provision and maintenance of roads, you are therefore a supporter of socialism.  

 

Roads are what economists call “public goods.” The idea that all public goods are features of socialism is simply an example of deep and profound ignorance of political theory, political practice, history, facts, economics, and common sense. But beyond that, it’s simply stupid.

 

The idea of public goods goes back a long way, but Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson is widely credited with popularizing the term. He defined them as goods “which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual’s consumption of such a good leads to no subtractions from any other individual’s consumption of that good.” The International Monetary Fund defines public goods as things—spaces, commodities, resources—that “are available to all (‘nonexcludable’) and that can be enjoyed over and over again by anyone without diminishing the benefits they deliver to others (‘nonrival’).”  

 

Check whatever source you might consult for a college term paper on public goods and socialism, and you’ll find that none of them make the connection. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wikipedia, the Economist’s Glossary of Economic Terms, and the IMF explainers on public goods do not mention the word “socialism” because socialism and public goods are different things.

 

Moreover, in America, with very few exceptions, roads aren’t built by the government. They’re paid for by the government, which is another way of saying they’re paid for by taxpayers (and drivers via the gas tax, tolls, etc.). Federal law requires that highway construction be put out for competitive bids among private contractors. If socialism means government ownership of the means of production—including the production of roads—then our roads aren’t “socialist.” I wouldn’t call them “capitalist” either, but competitive bidding puts them closer to capitalism than socialism.

 

The same goes for firehouses. Sure, many firefighters are government employees—local government employees—but the government doesn’t build the fire trucks or the firehouses. And, if we’re going to be sticklers, the majority of firefighters in America are volunteers. If you want to argue this makes them more authentically socialist in the tradition of the kibbutz (probably a problem for DSAers) or Robert Owen’s utopian socialism, knock yourself out. But you’ll sound like the kind of person who gets shushed at the library a lot.

 

The same logic applies to police departments. Sworn officers work for the government—again, mostly local governments—but they don’t build the police stations or squad cars, they don’t sew the uniforms, manufacture the guns, or forge their badges. Of course, Kiros doesn’t mention police departments because, even though by her logic they are socialist, the DSA has a great deal of animosity toward police departments. I guess the spirit of socialism doesn’t extend to the police. (Which would be a bizarre observation in virtually every socialist system ever created. I mean, who are you going to send to prohibit capitalist acts between consenting adults?)

 

I could go on, of course. The idea of making the provision of “nutritional food” a socialist endeavor is not a new idea, nor does it have a great track record given how much famine in the 20^th century can be laid at the feet of this impulse.

 

But I want to make a very different point.

 

Here comes the f-word.

 

If you think Kiros’ statement is defensible because I’m being a pedantic pinhead, that’s fine. But if that’s the case, it’s worth noting that it would be every bit as defensible if we were to replace “we have socialism already” with “we have fascism already.”

 

In Benito Mussolini’s The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, he explains that the state guarantees security and educates its citizens via the institutions it controls. The Fascist “Charter of Labor” mandated health insurance for all Italians and insurance against “involuntary unemployment.” The Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party demanded the state takeover of higher education. It also demanded a living wage: “that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood.” Oh, and here are points 11 through 18, verbatim:

 

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

 

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

 

13. We demand the nationalization of all trusts.

 

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

 

15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

 

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

 

17. We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

 

18. We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

 

Trust me, I could do this all day.

 

My aim here is not to say that Kiros is a fascist. Nor is it to argue—as I have literally at book length—that the differences between socialism and fascism are much smaller than people generally think.

 

(Though I do believe that. Why? Because Fascism and National Socialism—capitalized or not—were variants of socialism. “You hate me today because you love me still,” Mussolini told Italian Socialists when they turned on him for supporting World War I, against the dictates of “international socialism” run out of Moscow. “Whatever happens, you won’t lose me. Twelve years of my life in the party ought to be sufficient guarantee of my socialist faith. Socialism is in my blood.” As Gregor Strasser, one of the founders of Nazism, explained, “We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!”)

 

I simply want to make a humbler observation, or two.

 

When I wrote Liberal Fascism, a common complaint was that I missed the point (or a lot of points, to be fair to my detractors). Looking at Italian fascism and German Nazism (not the same thing, by the way) as forms of political economy, they said, ignored the thing that defines such movements—imperialism, bigotry, genocide, authoritarianism, etc. I don’t think this was a fair criticism, as I acknowledged and condemned these things over and over again in the book. But I do enjoy asking statists of various stripes, “Other than the militarism, genocide, and war, what exactly is it about fascism you don’t like?”

 

Also, contrary to critics I still hear from nearly two decades after publication, I did not claim that American liberals were Nazis and fascists of the sort in power in Germany or Italy (Steve Hayward even criticized me for bending over too far backward to make this point).

 

These criticisms annoyed me for many reasons, not least because in pursuit of leveling these charges against me, many critics ignored the imperialism, bigotry, genocide, and authoritarianism of Stalinism and Maoism. Communism tended to be judged by its (allegedly) lofty intentions—equality! Liberation!—while Nazism and Italian fascism were judged by the results on the ground. Pick a criteria, and judge both systems by it.

 

In my latest LA Times column, I lamented the double standard applied to the DSA and its members compared to the GOP. The DSA is full of people who have heaped glowing praise on Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, et al. The DSA and its various “caucuses” are infested with nakedly pro-communist statements, essays, and discussions. But Democratic politicians, in and out of the DSA, and numerous mainstream journalists routinely insist that the DSA has nothing to do with communism because the DSA says they are “democratic socialists,” and democratic socialism is oh so very different from communism. (It’s amazing how, according to elite progressive opinion, you’re an idiot if you take the “socialism” in National Socialism seriously but if you don’t take the “democratic” in democratic socialism seriously, you’re also an idiot.) Democratic nominee for Congress Darializa Avila Chevalier has a deep social media trail of openly pro-communist statements. But by deleting them and saying she’s not a communist anymore, she’s off the hook.

 

Meanwhile, Republicans and right-wingers who play footsie with Nazism and Nazi language are treated as if no denials or social media scrubbing can remove the stain. No tattoo got more political cover by liberals than Graham Platner’s Totenkopf. If he had a hammer and sickle tattoo (or the Cheka’s “sword and shield” emblem), I’m not sure they would’ve even bothered. But if a Republican had some such tattoo, lord knows the left and much of the media would never let it go.

 

Now, I want to be very clear: I’m fine with that. Such stains should be indelible, absent truly demonstrable and persuasive remorse. What I have a problem with is the benefit of the doubt given to the left. Support for communism, Mao, and Stalin is disqualifying. Support for Hitler and Nazism is also disqualifying. If you want to argue the latter is more disqualifying than the former, that’s fine with me. But if you’re going to argue that stanning for Stalin and Mao isn’t disqualifying at all, we’re going to have beef. Stalin and Mao murdered a lot of people, too.

 

Vibes uber alles.

 

I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole “debate” about communism vs. fascism is suffused with culture war nonsense, in-group virtue signaling, and out-group demonization. I put “debate” in scare quotes, because outside a few comment sections and Reddit forums, there is no debate. It’s a cultural and psychological fault line and little more, especially on the internet. If I tell the denizens of right-wing podcastistan that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris aren’t communists, I receive only mockery and accusations of crypto-communism (and I don’t mean bitcoin). If I tell denizens of left-wing podcastistan that Donald Trump and Mike Johnson aren’t Nazis, I get mockery and accusations crypto-fascism..

 

Meanwhile closer to the center, the more “reasonable” partisans aren’t much better. If I complain about the DSA’s socialism—the admitted, open, know-nothing socialism of the Kiros variety—I get eyerolls and charges of hypocrisy because Donald Trump is taking shares in major corporations and other market-distorting interventions.

 

But I reject those charges of hypocrisy because I think Trump’s economic schemes are mostly outrageous and stupid and have never defended them. Although, I don’t think they actually qualify as socialism so much as corporatism or state capitalism—two things I oppose!—but I can’t be a hypocrite if I condemn the statism of the right while condemning the statism of the left. Not my clowns, not my circus.

 

But this is part of the problem. Either you take the definitions and policies seriously, or you don’t. People on both sides care about the vibes, not the ideas.

 

This is true of many partisan denizens closer to the center. They flit back and forth between taking the technical political economy questions seriously, depending on who they want to label extreme or ignorant. Sensible conservatives will make very sound points—points I agree with—about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s approach to the economy, but will roll their eyes at Vice President J.D. Vance, who shares the same approach. Sensible liberals will nod when I criticize Trump or Vance but shut their eyes and cover their ears when I make the same points about Warren or Sen. Bernie Sanders.

 

I’ve said for years that writing Liberal Fascism made me more libertarian because it helped me appreciate how people have blind spots for the statism they like. Say what you will about libertarians—I’ve said a lot of it—they don’t have this problem.

 

From the libertarian perspective, the left’s socialism, corruption, and corporatism are aimed at rewarding constituencies and punishing enemy factions at the expense of the common good and liberal order. The Trumpist right’s state capitalism, corruption, and corporatism are simply aimed at rewarding different constituencies and punishing different enemies. One needn’t argue that they are morally equivalent or identical, but from the libertarian view, they’re philosophically more similar than different. And the chief similarity is their shared tendency to pretend they’re arguing for principles instead of vibes.

Giorgia Meloni Emerges as a Champion for Western Unity

By Joseph Laconte

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Since the creation of NATO in 1949, the most eloquent defender of the democratic ideals of the West has been the United States. Today, that role arguably belongs to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

 

“When I speak about the West, I don’t speak about the geographical space,” Meloni said during a meeting at the White House last year. “I speak about the civilization. And I want to make that civilization stronger.”

 

No U.S. administration in modern memory, however, has acted with greater indifference to the Western  political alliance than that of Donald Trump. At the conclusion of the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, the president claimed that “there was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity.” Nonsense. Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, his criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and outreach to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, his public tongue-lashing of America’s NATO allies: It is hard to conceive of conduct more disruptive of Western unity — and more welcoming to its enemies.

 

All of this was bound to put Trump on a collision course with Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, who does not suffer fools gladly. Against all odds, she founded a new political party, the Brothers of Italy, and led it to victory in the 2022 general election. Her political skills could make her Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since the end of World War II.

 

“I consider myself as just a person who has an average amount of courage in an environment where courage is lacking,” she writes in her autobiography, I Am Giorgia. She calls herself “a woman who believes that honor is the most important thing that needs safeguarding in a society that prefers to protect values that are much more material.”

 

Thus, when Trump claimed, quite outlandishly, that the Italian prime minister “begged” him for a photo opportunity at the recent G7 Summit in France, she fired back:

 

Donald Trump’s statements are completely fabricated. I am frankly appalled. I don’t know why the President of the United States behaves this way towards his allies; after all, it’s not the first time it’s happened. I can only say it’s a pity that he doesn’t show the same determination with the enemies of the West, with the enemies of the United States, with leaders towards whom he instead proves to be much more accommodating.

 

With a mixture of exasperation and disdain, she addressed Trump directly: “Pero una cosa se la deve ricordare: Io e Italia, non imploriamo mai,” meaning, “But he must remember one thing: Italy and I never beg.” With that, Meloni delivered a singular rebuke, long overdue, to the American president: Infantile outbursts that undermine democratic unity and embolden the world’s malignant forces won’t be tolerated.

 

Meanwhile, Meloni has done much to rebuild Italy’s image as a leading democratic state in Europe. Counter the Trump administration, she has been a strong supporter of Ukraine against Russia’s naked aggression. She initiated “the Italian model” of immigration reform, which seeks to balance humane treatment of migrants with control over national borders. She launched a $6 billion initiative to promote non-predatory energy and infrastructure cooperation with African states. “We must have the courage to tell it like it is,” she told the U.N. General Assembly in a 2023 speech. “Africa is not a poor continent. But it has been often, and still is, an exploited continent.”

 

Most importantly, the Italian prime minister has emerged as the most consequential European advocate for the ideals and institutions that have built Western civilization. “The West is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law,” she said in a 2024 speech accepting the Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council.

 

The enemies of the West, she insists, are not only external but also internal: the progressive “cancel culture,” for example, which has contempt for the historic accomplishments of our civilization. Today’s “liberal and globalist” voices, she writes in her autobiography, have become the counterpart to the dehumanizing policies of the old Soviet Union. “The violent repression of religions has been replaced by the social and cultural demonization of every sacred concept.” If successful, the progressive left would create societies “without freedom, without faith, without history.”

 

Unlike any other European leader, Meloni discerns the civilizational crisis that threatens to overwhelm the West — what English author Douglas Murray calls “the strange death of Europe,” the result of a profound lack of civilizational confidence. Thus, Meloni is arguably the most important champion for Western unity based upon a shared memory of its  political principles, cultural achievements, and religious traditions. “Above all,” she explained in her Atlantic Council speech, “we need to recover awareness of who we are.”

 

Up until recently, the members of NATO could count on the United States to remind the West of its democratic identity in the struggle against the forces of disintegration. That’s simply not true anymore. “It is unclear whether out of intent or ineptitude [Trump] is wrecking the historic relations between the United States and Europe,” Giovanbattista Fazzolari, undersecretary to the Italian prime minister’s office, said in a recent statement. “With his inappropriate outbursts, he has managed no easy feat, to make the United States unpopular across the entire European continent, damaging not only Europe but ⁠above all the ​United States.”

 

European leaders must contend not only with Trump’s self-absorption, personal insults, feckless foreign policy, and repeated criticism of NATO. They also must navigate around his administration’s ignorance of America’s historic debt to European civilization.

 

Enter Giorgia Meloni. No Western leader understands and embraces this cultural inheritance more fully than the Italian prime minister. “As people, as citizens, and as Italians we identify ourselves intimately — and have always done so — as Europeans and Westerners,” she writes. “Because the acknowledgement that we are part of a common myth rooted in tradition and Christianity embraces the people of Europe, but its sphere of influence extends well beyond the Old Continent.”

 

Herein lies what Italians call la forza: the strength — in this case, the source of renewal for a civilization that has lost its moorings. As Dante expressed it: “Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.”

 

It would not be the first time that Italy led the West out of the darkness. Avanti!

Is Gen Z Lazy?

By Caroline Downey

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt recently faced backlash on X after she claimed that young people are flocking to socialism because of a collective sense of entitlement.

 

Asked by Fox  News anchor Jesse Watters about the trend of twentysomethings supporting so-called democratic socialism, Leavitt responded: “This generation — my generation, I hate to say it — Gen Z and those younger than me have been raised with silver spoons in their mouths and everything handed to them.”

 

“That is not the values this country was built on,” she added. “It was built on meritocracy and hard work, pulling up your sleeves, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps and achieving the American dream.”

 

Critics clapped back in the comments, alleging that Leavitt, herself a member of Gen Z, married into money and therefore couldn’t possibly understand the plight of struggling young Americans. Perceived economic insecurity is purportedly a big reason why young people are growing disillusioned with capitalism and fond of a system in which government attempts to equalize everything by taking from the rich. Leavitt’s remarks accurately recognized that many young people take for granted America’s material decadence that is foreign to much of the rest of the world and, as a result, believe that government should do more to support them.

 

This isn’t necessarily new.

 

Despite coming from a comfortable home led by a father who owned a vineyard, communist thinker Karl Marx was deeply resentful toward the economic success of his contemporaries, so he decided to develop an ideology that would prevent them from having it, mollifying his sense of inadequacy.

 

In a hilarious letter that made the rounds on X recently, Marx’s father wrote to his son,

 

Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?

 

This was the spirit of Leavitt’s comments, as many of the most fervent advocates of socialism these days are not working-class minorities but downwardly mobile elite college graduates who haven’t achieved what they thought they would by now. Yes, Gen Z has been saddled with some unique disadvantages in this economy. Most 18–29-year-olds right now likely won’t buy their first home until they’re in their late 30s due to high housing costs. Many took on obscene student loan debt for college degrees that were sold to them as essential credentials, though many of them hardly guarantee a job or job security long-term. Still, when you compare today’s challenges to those of our elders, Gen Z’s gripes seem overstated.

 

Like most things in life, the truth is less emotionally charged than viral X posts blasting retiree and billionaire avarice would suggest.

 

Social media silos have helped stoke the war between Zoomers and Boomers, with algorithms telling the youth that older generations are living lavishly at their expense. The internet depicts Baby Boomers watching their stock portfolios explode, and their paid-off homes appreciate at an exponential rate. Meanwhile, they send their offspring to fend for themselves in an expensive environment made worse by geopolitical turmoil, which to Gen Z is caused by more of the same interventionism that they will foot the bill for, either with boots on the ground or a ballooning national debt.

 

Gen Z believes the “system,” especially housing, has been rigged against them. They’re not entirely wrong — government meddling in mortgages and the Federal Reserve’s easy money era drove up housing demand without addressing supply. The welfare and entitlement state also disproportionately benefits older people.

 

But while endlessly decrying how they got the short end of the stick, members of Gen Z are reluctant to reflect on their own irresponsible lifestyle habits and unrealistic expectations. Yes, rising living costs partially account for young adults’ going into debt, but data also point to “doom spending” — using credit for lavish experiences, vacations, and trends driven by the philosophies of FOMO (fear of missing out) and YOLO (you only live once). Gen Z currently has the highest credit card delinquency rates of any generation, significantly outpacing older groups.

 

Some Gen Zers are consuming themselves into oblivion against a backdrop of nihilism largely manufactured by the internet. They can’t cover their last credit card statement, let alone a down payment on a house, keeping them locked in a vicious cycle of woe-is-me. And few mentors are stopping to say, “Hey, even considering the government abuses and stolen childhoods under Covid as well as the 2008 financial crisis that you watched your parents painfully navigate, it has been so much worse throughout American history.”

 

Affordability? It couldn’t get much more unaffordable than the 9.85 percent average year-over-year inflation under President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, which peaked at more than 14 percent in 1980. Given Zoomer discontent, though, it’s not surprising that so many are enthralled with populism and the latest seductive flavor, so-called Democratic Socialism, on the march in New York and other big cities.

 

To give the kids a break, what is missing from the “Gen Z is lazy” argument is that progressive policies have disenfranchised otherwise ambitious, hardworking young people, especially white men. For the last decade and into the post-woke era, a generation of young men were discriminated against in hiring and academic admissions because of the sins of those who lived a century ago. If corporations didn’t systematically exclude men with DEI quotas, the U.S. government forced them into competition with Indian and Chinese H-1B visa holders, a program that President Trump opposed in his first term but then backtracked on in his second. While the current administration has cracked down on low-skilled illegal immigration and therefore reduced that strain on our nation’s social services, its permissiveness toward importing foreign workers who are purported to be highly skilled but aren’t necessarily so is noticed by many Zoomer men, who once had great affinity for Trump. It is politically imprudent to indict all of Gen Z as petulant pity-partiers given that many young men rejected socialism in voting for Trump.

 

Gen Z is also entrepreneurial, as Leavitt noted, exploring alternatives to the 9–5 corporate career path by starting their own businesses, using new technology to work smarter, not harder, and pursuing careers in the trades.

 

It is true that many young people, especially in deep blue cities, have embraced economic myths that must be vigorously debunked. Tough love should be shown toward those who are young and therefore less wise. History is a good teacher, and Gen Z needs a good schooling on why Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Che Guevara were not in fact freedom fighters to be eulogized in classrooms but monsters whose experiments must never be repeated. Gen Z needs to be taught why the free market works both logically and morally and why top-down dictates that inhibit it, from rent control to high taxation, are wrong and doomed to produce terrible results.

 

Republicans would be wrong to treat all of Gen Z’s concerns with contempt in their understandable frustration with the youngsters’ newfound love for socialism. Some of their fears have merit; some don’t.

Journalistic Negligence in Defense of the Violent Left

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 09, 2026

 

If the Washington Post’s news reporters were capable of shame, they probably would not be sticking with their description of a small-cell left-wing terrorist attack on federal law enforcement last year as a “protest” that went sideways.

 

The Post got plenty of grief last month when it described a July 4, 2025, attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Texas — one of three armed assaults on ICE and CBP facilities that year — as a “protest” that “turned violent.” That characterization was indefensibly misleading. As I wrote of that attack last month:

 

On July 4, federal agents were compelled to rush into the parking lot outside the ICE facility when ten people in “black, military-style clothing began shooting fireworks at the facility.” As the agents investigated the scene, their attackers opened up on them with firearms using overlapping fields of fire. One officer was shot in the neck as dozens of rounds were fired in their direction.

 

Once again, the attackers left no ambiguity about their motives. ICE agents said that, in the attack’s aftermath, they found vehicles graffitied with phrases like “ICE pig” and “traitor.” In addition, their assailants left propagandistic literature behind them, including fliers that read “Fight ICE Terror with Class War” and “Free All Political Prisoners,” and a flag that read “Resist Fascism. Fight Oligarchy.”

 

The agenda that has led the Post’s reporters to stick with downplaying the threat posed by left-wing  political violence in America isn’t hard to discern.

 

The paper’s latest offense against journalistic integrity was a brief aside in an article designed to cast the Trump administration as a bunch of obsessive cranks for attempting to raise awareness around the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.”

 

The paper and its sources are justified in expressing the concern that this initiative could be used by unscrupulous actors in this administration, and future presidencies, to criminalize domestic political activities. Slippery slope arguments have their place. But the article goes to great lengths to imply that the threat the Trump administration is focused on doesn’t exist.

 

The insouciant Europeans with whom the Post’s reporters spoke said as much outright. “Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high-priority threat in our country,” declared one impossibly effete Eurocrat.

 

In April, the New York Times attempted a similar act of evasion by implication. (It cannot say outright that far-left political violence is a negligible phenomenon, because that would be an outright lie.) But the Times downplayed that observable and growing threat too in the effort to convince its readers that the Trump administration’s true targets are his “domestic political opponents.”

 

I’d be more inclined to take that concern seriously if those articulating it could define, or even recognize, left-wing political violence. The Washington Post certainly can’t. Its reporters admitted as much:

 

Analysts say it can be difficult to categorize left-wing violence. (Is the killing of a health care executive over perceived corporate greed — as the suspect Luigi Mangione is alleged to have done — a “left wing” act?) And though there is some upswing of political violence in the United States, “to date left-wing violent extremism has typically been less lethal than other forms of terrorism,” said Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

Left-wing political violence is not hard to categorize. Much of it falls into the category of anarchistic violent extremism (AVE) within the FBI’s universe of domestic violent extremists (DVEs). Luigi Mangione’s anti-capitalist violence is not inscrutable — not to those who oppose his actions or to the ghouls who revel in his act of human sacrifice. Left-wing political violence does tend to produce fewer bodies, as Hoffman notes, but not because it is a less pervasive threat; merely because its targets are often, but by no means exclusively, property or armed officers of the law.

 

This is the sort of thing that readers of my latest book, Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, would already know. But that’s why you’re never going to read a review of that book in a mainstream outlet like the Times or the Post. They will not grapple with its findings and conclusions or the 80 pages of notes that support both. They prefer the myth that left-wing violence is a fabrication of febrile Republican imaginations, and they hope you do too.

Lose the ‘R’ Or Take the ‘L’?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has a reputation for bipartisanship that may actually understate the case: As the Lugar Center runs the numbers, she is the single most bipartisan member of the Senate, meaning the one most likely to cosponsor legislation with members of the opposing party. Bipartisan in this sense is not necessarily a synonym for moderate or centrist—note that Sen. John Cornyn of Texas ranks high on the bipartisanship index, too—but Sen. Collins is hardly a right-wing ideologue or a conservative hardliner: She is typically ranked as the most moderate Republican in the Senate and the most ideologically centrist senator overall.

 

Moderation and centrism are not necessarily virtuous: A man should not be moderately honest or split the difference between virtue and vice. But in the realm of electoral politics—and, especially, in this time of populist demagoguery—bipartisanship and moderation have real practical value. We do not want our elected officials to be easily carried away by ideological enthusiasm and passion—especially in the Senate, which is meant to be a brake to the House’s accelerator. And because we have a big election every two years, the only sure path to creating a stable policy environment (and there are many cases in which an imperfect stable policy is preferable to an improved but unstable policy) is bipartisanship.

 

Sen. Collins also provides a reminder that more than a few supposed conservatives in our time need: To be conservative is not the same thing as to be a right-wing revolutionist. Republican partisans may complain that they would like to see Sen. Collins be more conservative and less moderate (and I repent of having demanded that of Sen. Collins and others over the years) but, properly understood, such moderation is conservative. About that much my radical left-wing friends are correct: The moderating impulse is inherently conservative, necessarily counter-revolutionary. Being a conservative, I do not care for revolutions.

 

“Oh, to hell with that!” Democrats will respond as they shop around for a new challenger to Sen. Collins in the wake of Graham Platner’s spectacular self-immolation. Thus goes the argument: Sen. Collins is a Republican, and, as such, she is a vote for Republican priorities—for the foreseeable future, Donald Trump’s priorities—a vote for Republican leadership in the Senate that will be utterly subservient to Trump’s whimsy and madness, and a vote for Trump’s appointments to the federal bench and other high offices. Sen. Collins voted to impeach Trump in 2021 but voted to acquit him in 2020, and she is not a certain vote to convict him in the impeachment Democrats likely would undertake should they take the House after the midterm elections.

 

If Sen. Collins is returned to the Senate and must vote in a future impeachment of Donald Trump, it probably would be the most consequential vote of her career—and no one knows how she would vote. That probably speaks well of Collins—that we do not know how she would vote in a case in which the facts are unknown and that may involve acts not yet committed; but if your first political priority is banishing Trump from American political life—and there is a case that it should be so—then a Democrat who is committed to voting to convict in any case, whatever facts emerge, would be a more reliable bet and a more irresponsible senator: more reliable because more irresponsible.

 

What a position to be in.

 

If Sen. Collins wished to break definitively with Trump and her party’s leaders, this would be the time to do it. In 1983, U.S. Rep. Phil Gramm, a Texas Democrat, decided his party was going the wrong way and, after a confrontation with Democratic leaders in the House, resigned his seat in order to force a special election, which he successfully contested as a Republican. “I dared to practice in Washington what I preached at home,” Gramm said of his alienation from his party. Gramm was, and is, a man of principle. When it comes to managing the demands of a party, there is a high road—but it can be a lonesome one.

 

Party is not everything. But it is something.

 

As my colleague Jonah Goldberg often points out, Americans vote—and argue—as though we lived under a parliamentary democracy in which the majority party gets its way for the time it is in power and that’s that, making party preference more politically salient than a voter’s private judgment about any individual candidate. Our system is not set up that way: Even where there is a “trifecta”—meaning a single party in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress—those are usually short-lived, and, beyond that, our constitutional order gives the states a say in policymaking, too, and puts hard limits on the government’s ability to do certain things. To take a familiar example: Democrats are very, very keen on limiting Americans’ ability to engage in political speech, but, unless they repeal the First Amendment, no Democratic trifecta in Washington can actually do the thing that so many Democrats want to do.

 

We do not have a parliamentary system. But we do have parties and party-line voting, and, consequently, the character of the parties matters and may be considered independently of the question of the character of the individual candidate. The Democratic case against Sen. Collins is, simply, her membership in the Republican Party: Sen. Collins may be moderate, centrist, bipartisan, etc., but her party is a dangerous and demagogic personality cult mired in corruption. The question Democrats will put before the voters of Maine is whether the Republicans as a group are so depraved that one cannot in good conscience support even the most anodyne individual candidate among them.

 

Democrats will make that argument this year and may have some luck with it. More relevant is the fact that Republicans have been making that argument on Democrats’ behalf since 2016 and are, if anything, much more persuasive in making it. They’ve certainly managed to convince me, and I’m far from a New England moderate swing voter.

 

It may be that Sen. Collins’ real choice is to lose the “R” or take the “L.”

Normal People

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 09, 2026

 

Dignity in politics is rare, and dignity in populism rarer still. But if ever there were a moment when a cheap demagogue might feel compelled to muster a little, one would think the end of Platnermania in Maine was it.

 

The candidate had a rape allegation hanging over his head, the worst of many misdeeds of which he’s been accused. He had embarrassed his party, disappointed progressives who believed in him, and put a must-win Senate seat for Democrats at risk. The decent thing to do was acknowledge that he’d lost the people’s trust and affirm that unseating Sen. Susan Collins was more important than his personal ambition. His own advisers recommended it, according to Politico.

 

Malignant narcissists don’t “do” decency, though.

 

What Platner did instead was deliver a mopey 11-minute monologue that can best be described as the speech Donald Trump would have given if the scummy Republican Party had abandoned him in 2016 or 2021, as it should have. Some of the candidate’s vocabulary may have been left-ish, like his references to “structural” pressure and “large forces” being used to push him out of the race, but the message was pure Trump-ese.

 

The system is rigged. “The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.”

 

Fake news. “I learned about this through press inquiries with no time to truly respond, no time for investigations before a corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and executioner.”

 

They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way. “We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.”

 

Whiny, selfish, deceitful, obsessed with his own victimhood: It was a populist tour de force. Would it surprise you to learn that the only Republican official in the country who sounds even faintly sympathetic to Platner is Trump himself?

 

I was especially taken with his insinuation that he’s emblematic of “normal people.” In what way, exactly? His upbringing wasn’t “normal.” Platner is a child of privilege whose wealthy parents continued to subsidize him into adulthood. His character isn’t “normal” either, unless we’re treating chronically sleazy behavior—up to and including sexual assault, allegedly—as typical of the working class. Which many leftists do.

 

Even his big claim to blue-collar authenticity, his career as an oysterman, appears to be mostly hype.

 

It’s also curious that a political system that’s supposedly “not built for normal people” has failed to block other left-wing champions of the proletariat from winning elections this year. Zohran Mamdani’s socialist candidates went three-for-three in House primaries in New York City. Melat Kiros unseated longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado. Abdul El-Sayed is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s Senate race.

 

Progressive populists who purport to speak for “normal people” are doing just fine electorally. It’s only the guy with a rape claim and a dozen other scandals hanging around his neck, coincidentally, whom the system conspired to destroy.

 

Trump vs. Platner.

 

Still, Platner is right about one thing.

 

The “system”—that is, the Democratic establishment—wanted him out of the race, and in the end the system got its way. The leaders of the Maine Democratic Party publicly called on him to quit and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee vowed not to spend in Maine if he remained as nominee. When he burbled about the establishment moving to “take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign,” that’s what he was burbling about.

 

Which is ironic. After all, our two major parties are weak and are growing weaker by the day, as Jonah Goldberg frequently points out. There’s no better illustration than Maine itself, where the Democratic establishment went all-in on Gov. Janet Mills in this year’s Senate primary and got its clock cleaned by Platner and the blue oyster cult. The system was vanquished!

 

… until this week, when the DSCC threatened to cut Platner off financially after the rape claim and he folded like a cheap suit. Why is that? Why was the Democratic Party “normal” enough to rid itself of Platner when the Republican Party wasn’t “normal” enough to rid itself of Trump?

 

“Because the right has become a cult of authoritarian sociopaths” is too simplistic an answer, however true it might be.

 

One obvious angle in answering the question has to do with the candidates. Trump was a celebrity in 2016, and not just any kind of celebrity. He was known for being brash, louche, and prone to outrageous showmanship simply for the attention it would bring him—a boorish loudmouthed a–hole, in short. Republican voters knew what they were choosing. You may have found his Access Hollywood comments repellent, but you sure didn’t find them surprising.

 

Platner was the opposite of a known quantity, a nobody whose blue-collar job and military service recalled the archetype of working-class American masculinity as stoic, humble, capable, and decent. When he turned out to be one of the biggest chuds under the sun, the implied warranty about his persona was breached in a way that Trump’s never was. (His initial vetting was “expedited” by his progressive handlers, presumably to get him into the race early before competitors began crowding in.) His party’s establishment could rationalize moving against him on grounds that Democratic voters who supported him had been misled. The GOP establishment never had that luxury with Trump, even after January 6.

 

There are also what we might call logistical differences that explain the president’s success and the oysterman’s failure, and I don’t mean the magnitude of their respective sins. As much as I’d like to believe that a credible rape allegation against Donald Trump in July 2016 would have sunk his candidacy, I do not.

 

One “logistical” difference is the posture of the two parties with respect to electability. By 2016, Republicans had seen center-right establishmentarians John McCain and Mitt Romney trounced by Barack Obama, leaving them open to the idea of nominating a loose cannon. That’s less true of Democrats in 2026, whose only presidential victory since Obama came from an establishment dinosaur who ended up getting the most votes of any candidate in American history.

 

“We have nothing to lose by nominating Platner” just isn’t as persuasive to the left as “we have nothing to lose by nominating Trump” was to the right, especially against a formidable centrist Republican like Susan Collins.

 

Another logistical difference is the two candidates’ dependence on campaign cash. Not only could Trump afford to kick in $66 million to his own effort in 2016, he infamously received billions of dollars in earned media from a press corps that couldn’t get enough of his circus act. Hillary Clinton could (and did) outspend him, but she couldn’t drown him out. Compare that with Platner, who has no such freak-show appeal and who ended up with “just $1.3 million in the bank when he exited the race,” less than $100,000 of which was available to spend, per the New York Times.

 

When the DSCC threatened to turn off the tap if he stayed in, he risked losing his financial lifeline. And grassroots donors were unlikely to (fully) pick up the slack when headlines about a rape he allegedly committed are in every newspaper in America.

 

There’s a third logistical difference between Platner and Trump. The modern Democratic coalition is more diverse than its Republican counterpart was in 2016.

 

When conservative white Christians decided that Trump was fine—good, even!—during his first campaign, they had little reason to fear serious pushback from the top. For all intents and purposes, the entire Republican base had spoken. Pro-Platner progressives aren’t the entire Democratic base. They’re one of several factions, like women and African Americans, on which the party heavily relies.

 

A true blue socialist might be willing to rationalize a minor thing like rape in the name of keeping Platnermania going, but how likely were most left-leaning women in Maine to do so? If Platner couldn’t hold the Democratic coalition together, he was going to lose. And it’s hard, even for progressives, to fault party leaders for intervening to avert a likely defeat.

 

Especially given the stakes of this election.

 

The Flight 93 difference.

 

Without a doubt, how Democrats have handled Platner this week is informed by how Republicans have handled Trump.

 

The right has grown so morally depraved in making excuses for the president, and is so deeply despised for it by their opponents, that the rape allegation against Platner became a de facto test of the left’s alleged moral superiority. How far were they willing to go to justify support for a charismatic populist scumbag of their own?

 

Pretty far, it turns out! They spent the first half of the year hemming and hawing over their candidate’s obvious unfitness for office, and almost certainly would have gone on doing so if the rape claim had come a week after Maine’s deadline for Platner to drop out of the race rather than a week before.

 

As it is, it would have been a cataclysmic moral failure to stick with him. How could the party of #MeToo, of women’s rights and feminism, go on sitting in moral judgment of Donald Trump and Republicans if it refused to move against an accused rapist—especially when dumping him would almost certainly improve its chances of winning?

 

Democrats ended up clearing that very low bar. They can reassure themselves today that they’re still somewhat less sociopathic than the right. Give them a cookie.

 

There’s a second way in which Trump and Trumpism influenced their approach to Platner, I suspect. After 10 years, they’ve maneuvered—or been maneuvered—into becoming the bulwark of “norms” in American politics.

 

The postliberal core of Trumpism is the belief that ruthlessness is a political virtue. You shouldn’t want your child to be a selfish cutthroat willing to flout laws and social conventions to get his way, but you should want your representatives in Washington to be that. Politics is an endless fight for power; to win, you need “fighters” who are willing to get dirty.

 

That’s postliberalism, and that’s Graham Platner. If his accuser is to be believed, he’s willing to flout laws and social conventions to get his way even in his relationships with women. He’s just the sort of bold, transgressive figure Democrats need in the Senate if they’re going to muster the will to do something as cutthroat as packing the Supreme Court, no?

 

No. The left is getting there, but it hasn’t quite yet reached the stage of postliberal degeneracy where on-the-record allegations of sexual assault committed by a populist hero are handwaved away because they’re inconvenient to the cause. The “party of norms” remains a bit more reluctant than its opponents to reduce American politics to a death match between malignantly narcissistic psychos. Another cookie.

 

There’s one more echo of Trumpism in l’affaire Platner. As in 2016, this is a “Flight 93 election” for the out-party.

 

I wrote about that last month when things started to go south for Democrats in Maine. The right-wing case for Trump during his first campaign was that, supposedly, America as we know it wouldn’t survive if Hillary Clinton prevailed. To thwart this existential threat, patriotic Republicans leery of supporting an unstable con artist for president would need to hold their noses and turn out for one on Election Day.

 

It worked. (Twice.) The ironic reward for those patriotic Republicans is an America that has not survived as they, and we, knew it.

 

In 2026 the tables have turned on which party is threatening to finish off what’s left of the American experiment. Had Platner’s rape scandal emerged after the withdrawal deadline had passed, there’s no doubt Democrats in Maine would have borrowed the “Flight 93” playbook and rationalized a vote for him in November as a lesser-evil vote against right-wing autocracy.

 

But because the scandal came before the deadline, they’ve effectively grabbed that playbook anyway and simply modified the strategy. Instead of “storming the cockpit” against Trumpist fascism by rallying behind Platner, they’re doing it by rallying against him. They’re dumping a man with whom many progressives had fallen in love with a clear conscience because replacing him in hopes of winning Maine is simply what protecting America requires.

 

Knifing Graham Platner was the patriotic thing to do.

 

And unlike in 2016, in this case the “Flight 93” rationale has the virtue of being true. It was transparent nonsense when offered on Trump’s behalf, not only because putting a mobster in charge of the executive branch plainly wasn’t in America’s interest but because the electoral logic that drove it was inane. If a Hillary Clinton victory was truly an apocalyptic scenario for the country, postliberals should have reluctantly rallied behind the most electable Republican in the race rather than asking conservatives to reluctantly rally behind a long shot like Trump.

 

Remember, the president trailed in nearly every poll taken that year. The Clinton camp wanted to face him in the general election. If not for a last-minute surprise courtesy of FBI Director James Comey, Democrats probably would have won. The “Flight 93” argument for Trump’s candidacy was self-serving garbage pushed by nationalists who were willing to increase the odds of an America-destroying left-wing victory for the sake of having a Republican nominee who shared their chud politics.

 

The “Flight 93” argument this year is honest and straightforward. America has been badly damaged in every way—civically, economically, internationally—by 18 months of Trump’s unrestrained postliberal rampage through the federal government. To limit the damage to come over his final two years in office, Democrats need to play their strongest hand in competitive congressional races. No excuses, no misgivings. Whatever sentimental attachment a faction might have to a certain candidate, the moment it’s clear that he’s dragging the party down, he should be done.

 

Progressives should have understood that months ago about Platner, but I suspect most of them understand it now. Better late than never. Barely.

The Audacity of Cope

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 08, 2026

 

Search for an analogy to what’s happening in Maine, and you’re destined to land on the Biden-Harris switcheroo of 2024.

 

Same basic facts: Something has happened to make the Democratic nominee unelectable, and now party leaders are forced to solve not one but two crises. They need to persuade their candidate to quit the race. And then they need to figure out a way to replace him without pissing off half their voters.

 

And they need to do it fast.

 

But the switcheroo isn’t the only useful analogy for Platnerdämmerung in recent political history. Sniff around and you’ll also detect a whiff of the Access Hollywood fiasco of 2016.

 

Same basic facts: A populist nominee with a cultishly devoted fan base is caught behaving in a disgusting way toward women, seemingly rendering him unelectable. But replacing him on short notice would be difficult and wrenching. The candidate himself plainly doesn’t want to leave the race. And, being a narcissistic anti-establishment “outsider,” he feels no obligation to his party or its leaders to make their lives easier by doing so.

 

It’s not a perfect analogy. 2016 was a presidential election, which raised the stakes for suddenly deposing the nominee. The Access Hollywood scandal arrived a month before the general election, not in the middle of summer, making a last-second replacement logistically more hair-raising. And as loathsome as Donald Trump’s “locker-room talk” about women was, it was talk. (In that case, anyway.) What Platner has been accused of is much worse than that.

 

There’s another distinction. In both the Biden switcheroo and the Access Hollywood episode, there were obvious presumptive break-glass-in-case-of-emergency replacements. Biden and Trump each had running mates, after all. Not so with Platner. Even if Democrats solve the first crisis by convincing him to withdraw before next week’s deadline, there’s no easy fallback option for solving the second crisis before the July 27 ballot deadline in Maine.

 

Fortunately, the ever-helpful Platner campaign has a suggestion: Why not let us solve it?

 

Ransom.

 

On Tuesday the executive director of Maine’s Democratic Party posted a video accusing Team Platner of quietly trying to “put their thumb on the scale” as the party weighs what to do about replacing him.

 

“We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our U.S. Senate nominee, nor in determining what this process looks like,” Devon Murphy-Anderson said, hours after even more allegations of scummy behavior by the candidate dropped.

 

Platner’s camp denied it was trying to meddle in party deliberations and said it had reached out to party officials merely to better understand how his replacement would be chosen. But denying unflattering claims that are almost certainly true is basically force of habit with Platner’s handlers at this point.

 

According to the available reporting, the question is less whether Team Platner is meddling in picking a new nominee than what its goal is in doing so. Per a statement released by the campaign itself, a free and fair democratic succession is its only priority: “While Graham wouldn’t want to be a part of the process, he would want to make sure the voters and volunteers make this decision—not the political establishment.”

 

Sources are whispering to the press that Platnerites’ interest in who inherits the nomination is more substantive than that, however. “Behind the scenes, Platner and his political operation are working to ensure any potential replacement comes from his progressive, anti-establishment wing of the party,” Politico alleged. The New York Post went further: “A source familiar with the campaign discussions said Platner, his campaign and political strategist Morris Katz are deliberating about the Maine Democrat dropping out but only if his replacement shares his left-wing values.”

 

That would explain why the video released by the Maine Democratic Party official had the air of a cop declaring, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” If the Post is correct, Platner has taken his party’s Senate nomination hostage as the walls close in. Because he can’t be forced out of the race, he’s demanding an ideological ransom from Democrats in exchange for quitting before the withdrawal deadline.

 

We’re all used to audacious behavior from populists in the Trump era, but “do as I say or I’ll blow our chance to flip this winnable Senate seat”—in the middle of a rape scandal—is truly next-level. My hat is off to Platner and his apologists in exploring this bold new frontier in political chuddishness.

 

It’s tempting to laugh at his belief that he has any leverage. His choice realistically is either to quit now or lose in a humiliating landslide to Susan Collins and be despised by his party for his selfishness in refusing to stand aside, no? If the Senate were to end up 50-50 next year thanks to Collins’ victory, Platner would be known forevermore as the man who cost the left veto power over Donald Trump’s nominees. Surely, his best option is to skulk away back to the oyster farm.

 

Are we sure he’d lose in a landslide, though? In this era?

 

The Access Hollywood episode is again instructive. Within three weeks of that happening, James Comey announced that he was reopening the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, shifting the public’s focus from Trump’s foibles to hers. Granted, it’s unlikely that any skeletons will tumble out of Susan Collins’ closet that are scary enough to make rape claims against her opponent pale by comparison. But what if gas prices climbed back to $5 per gallon, a scenario that’s back on the table now that our uneasy ceasefire with Iran is “over”? How intense might anti-Republican sentiment become?

 

Even absent some new albatross for the GOP, Collins is unlikely to pull away in a national environment like this one. “Given how negative partisanship works, the left-wing tilt of the state, and the control of the Senate at stake, it’s easy to see Democratic voters talking themselves into the idea that they have to suck it up and support Platner,” Philip Klein argued yesterday at National Review. “If it comes to October and the seat remains crucial to Democrats retaking the Senate, let’s see if the national committees stick to their pledges not to support him.”

 

Brazening it out worked for Trump in 2016. It worked for Virginia Democrat Jay Jones in 2025. Why couldn’t it work for Platner?

 

Some left-wing voters are already shrugging off the new allegations. They’d already gotten in the habit after the last 15 or so Platner scandals, reasoning that what’s good for the Trumpy goose is good for the left-wing gander, and the latest disgrace appears to be no exception. “If it’s true, is it disqualifying historically? Yes,” one Maine Democrat told Politico of the rape allegations. “But since Trump, stuff like this that we used to think of as historically disqualifying isn’t. I’ll still vote for the guy.”

 

Another told the outlet that Platner should drop out “only if he does it in time for another good strong candidate to actually hit the ground really running like hell,” adding, “I do want a fighter.” It’s undeniable from the polling that Democrats would benefit from replacing him, but Trump-haters of every stripe in Maine will eventually reduce this race to a referendum on whether Congress should or shouldn’t remain a toothless Duma for the Putin admirer in the White House. I’d bet good money that Platner would remain within striking distance in polling.

 

Besides, at this point there can’t be many more shoes still to drop for him. No more than 10 new scandals before November, I’m guessing. Twenty, tops.

 

A needless hostage.

 

My best attempt to be fair to his hostage-taking is this: He’s only doing what progressivism compels him to do.

 

As with the Tea Party and the Republican Party 15 years ago, so too with the Mamdani left and the Democratic Party now. The most urgent priority of a radical ideological insurgency is to gain influence over the party to which it belongs, not to defeat the party to which it doesn’t. Insurgents scarcely perceive a difference between the two, in fact, which is why the dopey term “uniparty” is so popular with Trumpists.

 

Platner’s ransom demand is the logical endpoint of that. Democrats can have a new progressive Senate nominee who stands a good chance of winning, or they can be saddled with their current progressive nominee, who stands a poor chance, but he insists that they have a progressive nominee one way or another. Progressivism’s ascendance is the important thing, much more so than maximizing Democrats’ chances of unseating a Republican and breaking a deranged caudillo’s stranglehold over the federal government.

 

So I understand Platner’s audacity of cope—to a point. But then I consider the political dynamic in Maine and the whole ploy seems, well, stupid.

 

The scenario his campaign seems eager to avert is the Democratic establishment imperiously tapping some centrist milquetoast to fill his shoes, crushing the hopes of progressives energized by Platnermania. And to be fair to him again, that’s not unthinkable. If moderate Democrat Rep. Jared Golden were willing to run, he probably would be the party leaders’ choice to take on Collins on pure electability grounds.

 

But Golden isn’t willing. So tell me: Realistically, even absent the hostage-taking, isn’t it likely that replacing Platner ends either with Democratic officials tapping another progressive nominee or opening up the selection process to let grassroots Democrats make the decision?

 

“We are just leery about a new kind of Kamala Harris situation, where we don’t get to choose whatever Democratic candidate will be on the ticket,” one Maine voter told Politico on Tuesday. The switcheroo of 2024 is likely to become a cautionary tale for local party leaders about the risk of foisting a new nominee on voters who might not be enthusiastic about him or her. Better to hold “a pop-up convention or … a statewide caucus to effectively redo the party’s primary election,” per the New York Times, and give grassroots Democrats a say about who should represent them.

 

If that’s what ends up happening, Platner’s hostage play is pointless. Democratic voters will decide whether his replacement should be a progressive, not the Maine Democratic Party.

 

On the other hand, if Democratic officials opt to repeat the switcheroo process by naming a nominee themselves, it seems more likely to me that they’ll pick a leftist in line with Platner’s program than a centrist like Gov. Janet Mills, the 78-year-old landslide loser in this year’s Senate primary.

 

It’s all a question of enthusiasm. Progressive voters already hate the Democratic leadership, are demoralized by Platner’s implosion, and will resent seeing party bigwigs “overturn” a momentous primary win for the left in Maine by swapping in some cookie-cutter moderate as nominee. The only way to placate them is to affirm progressivism’s ascendance by nominating someone in line with Platner’s platform, like failed gubernatorial nominee Troy Jackson.

 

Sure, that will risk alienating centrist voters in Maine. But the far-left Platner was competitive with Collins despite his many scandals, and centrists might plausibly warm to a new Democratic candidate who, despite his progressive preferences, isn’t sidetracked with a new scandal every three hours. And of course the “should or shouldn’t Congress remain a Duma?” question will weigh on them too as they consider whether to support a candidate from the Mamdani wing.

 

In other words, Platner doesn’t need to take hostages to get party officials to choose a leftist as his replacement, if in fact those officials intend to make that decision themselves. They’re probably going to choose a leftist anyway. And if he were less of a narcissist, he’d realize that he’s doing that leftist successor no favors by trying to intervene on his or her behalf: The last thing Troy Jackson wants or needs is for voters to know that he owes his nomination to an accused rapist.

 

No excuses.

 

Ironically, the fact that Platner does stand a good chance of being replaced by a progressive is why he has little choice but to drop out.

 

In a piece today at National Review, Jim Geraghty imagined the candidate’s future if he opted not to withdraw and fought on until November. “Collins will crack Platner like a freshly boiled lobster claw,” he wrote, “but afterwards he’ll be able to go on certain podcasts and claim that the Establishment and oligarchs and AIPAC conspired to defeat him by getting everyone he’s ever known to make false accusations against him.”

 

Platner would certainly want to. But how many of those podcasts would have him?

 

It’s not just a matter of them not wanting to platform an accused rapist, although it would be partly that. Platner is destined to be an unsympathetic figure to Democrats in defeat because he has a clear chance right now to stand aside for someone who shares his politics and can defeat Collins.

 

That’s another important distinction between his scandal and the Access Hollywood episode. Trump apologists could (and did) say that having him withdraw a month out from Election Day would have done Republicans more harm than good. The campaign would have dissolved into chaos into the final weeks; low-propensity voters who had been planning to turn out for Trump would have lost interest; Mike Pence, the likely fill-in nominee, would have offered Reaganism on behalf of a party that had just rejected Reaganism in a primary.

 

There was a good case to be made that a wounded Trump nonetheless remained the GOP’s best chance to defeat Clinton. It is very hard to make a case that Graham Platner remains Democrats’—or progressives’—best chance to defeat Collins.

 

The data doesn’t support it. Like-minded ideologues like Jackson are available and standing by, prepared to take the baton. And Election Day is still four months away. There’s no reason except egotism that a damaged Platner would insist on sticking it out.

 

And the left-wing podcast class would know it. Platner’s antics have already given progressivism a black eye at a moment when the movement has shown electoral strength in places like New York and Colorado; for him to deprive leftists of a strong chance to win a Senate seat in Maine because he stubbornly refused to make way for a less morally degenerate candidate would be unforgivable.

 

I think he’s willing to sabotage his party, as many in his faction are, but I don’t think he’s willing to make himself a villain—or more of one—to the progressives he claims to speak for. He’ll go. And he won’t get any ransom on his way out the door when he does.