By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 03, 2026
I can’t be alone in finding the Graham Platner
conversation exhausting. Though I might be a little isolated for some of the
reasons I find it exhausting. But let’s work through the obvious stuff first.
When the news broke that the married Platner was sexting
with various women, feminist writer Jill Filipovic declared:
The Graham Platner
story is landing because it confirms a bunch of his critics’ prior concerns:
unvetted, history of poor decision-making, the kind of light misogyny that
tends to go along with male bad decision-making. Those are all problems! But
it’s worth asking if they’re problems that should be disqualifying for a senate
seat and I think the answer to that is no.
Cenk Uygur said that the establishment backlash was a symptom of its
contempt for “real people who aren’t corrupted by the system. They never go
after insiders like this, because they’re already good boys and girls who do
exactly as they’re told.”
Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project
dismissed the whole thing, saying
that “nothing that has come out about Graham Platner is scandalous.” The
controversy was just “weirdo
gaslighting from upper class ninnies.”
So, Platner’s “light misogyny” and “history of poor
decision-making” have little bearing on his ability to do the job of being a
senator. I don’t exactly know how to define the job of a senator, but I kind of
feel like “decision-making” is part of it.
I think Uygur is a buffoon, but buffoons sometimes make
plausible observations. I mean, even morons can be correct when they say, “Hey,
that’s a duck!” when they see a duck.
But does anyone actually believe that “they” never go
after “insiders” for their sexual indiscretions? Were Bill Clinton, Donald
Trump, Bob Packwood, Matt Lauer, Bob Livingston, Andrew Cuomo, Dennis Hastert,
Al Franken, Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Mark Foley, David Vitter, John
Edwards, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Sanford,
Anthony Weiner, David Petraeus, Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Les
Moonves, and Harvey Weinstein, all populist anti-establishment outsiders?
Oh, and was the #MeToo thing just “weirdo gaslighting
from upper class ninnies”?
Big, if true.
And then there’s the whole Nazi tattoo thing. Last Sunday
on This Week, Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager, lamely tried to push back on the claim that Platner has a Totenkopf
tattoo—used by the SS—saying it was just a “skull and crossbones” tattoo, “not
a Nazi tattoo.” Never mind that Platner, a “big history buff,” apparently admitted more than once that he knew what it was.
Now, having written a whole book pushing back on argumento ad hitlerum,
you’d think I’d want to go ballistic on this controversy. After all, from the
1930s to five minutes ago, there are innumerable examples of lefties—including
FDR and Harry Truman—who’ve insisted that being a conventional conservative or
a libertarian makes you a Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer, or a patsy for fascism. But
voluntarily having the symbol of the SS drawn over your heart with indelible
ink is essentially meaningless? And finding it worthy of criticism is essentially fascist gaslighting?
But let’s stipulate that Platner’s hypocritical defenders
are hypocrites. He does have non-hypocritical defenders. Their position is that he’s a bad
person who’s made bad decisions, but it’s worth supporting him to defeat Sen.
Susan Collins and possibly win a Democratic Senate majority. I disagree with
that take, but I don’t think it’s outrageous or indefensible.
And just to annoy everybody, I think a lot of Republicans
are equally hypocritical. Trump’s history of sexual impropriety—even if you
reject the worst allegations—is surely as bad as Platner’s, and a great many
Republicans making hay about Platner don’t care. Similarly, our vice president
has passionately argued for a “big tent” that makes room for fans of neo-Nazis
and Nazi cosplayers. And he’s hardly alone.
If you widen out the context to the question of
unacceptably flawed Senate candidates, the case against Texas Republican Senate
candidate Ken Paxton is just as disqualifying as the one against Platner, if
not more so. Platner is just a spoiled, louche loser propped up by his rich
parents, pretending to be a regular Joe to win public office. Paxton has
demonstrably abused his office as Texas Attorney General. Also, while Platner
has only been accused—so far—of saying terrible things and sexting with
women, Paxton actually cheated on his wife.
So spare me any of the selective moral outrage.
There are two arguments for supporting Platner, and Nick
Catoggio lucidly
combines them. What he calls the moral argument is that checking Trump by
voting for a “chud” is worth it. “Six years of Graham Platner in the Senate
would be mortifying,” he concedes, “but two more years of unified GOP control
in Washington would be full-tilt banana republicanism for the United States.
Not all chuds are created equal.”
I find this entirely defensible.
The reason I say there are two arguments is that Nick is
not a partisan Democrat and his interest is not grounded in a desire to see the
Democrats win, but in a reasonable desire to check Donald Trump. He calls this
the “moral argument.”
Now I am sure that virtually every Democrat who supports
Platner from afar or in the voting booth subscribes to this moral argument in
whole or in part. But partisan Democrats and partisan DSA Democrats (not the same
thing) don’t rely solely on this argument. First of all, many of them reject
the idea that Platner’s any kind of chud at all. If they believed that, they
would have rallied around Janet Mills, the normie Democratic governor of Maine
with a better shot at defeating Susan Collins. Platner’s fans think he’s a
heroic, “authentic,” man of the people with great ideas about economics and
foreign policy while Mills is part of the Democratic establishment that
must be toppled. So, for this crowd, the moral argument is just gravy.
These people care about power. I don’t necessarily
mean that in some sinister way. Politics has to be about power to be politics.
The people rallying around Ken Paxton have pretty much the exact same outlook.
If they cared solely about denying Democrats a Texas senate seat, they would
have supported incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
Primaries color everything.
What annoys me is the way the populists demonize and
denounce the “establishment” in the primaries and then, once they win the
intra-party fight, they insist that the establishment must do everything it can
to assure that their populist rabble-rouser wins the general election. Suddenly
the establishment’s resources and expertise are good things, and the victorious
rebels have an unlimited entitlement to them. Internal insurrection for me,
establishmentarian party loyalty for thee. Donald Trump ran against the
Republican Party, but once he won, he demanded absolute party loyalty from
everyone else. Bernie Sanders has been a passionate enemy of the Democratic
Party for his entire career, but if he’d won in 2016, you know all of the
Bernie Bro Jacobins would demand strict partisan unity.
It’s like some Game of Thrones scenario. Launch a
rebellion against the corrupt monarchy and once the rebel chieftain seizes the
Iron Throne, start talking about the divine right of kings and the obligation
to show fealty.
Now, you can argue that this is simply how party politics
works in the era of primaries—and you’d be right! But I think that’s a
very bad thing.
So yeah, it’s normal to have big fights in the primary
and then to hear calls for party unity when “the people” have spoken. But that
normal is fairly new, and it sucks.
I really don’t want to go on another tear about how
terrible the primary system is for democracy. But the simple fact is that “the
people” haven’t spoken, only a tiny sliver of the most rabid
primary voters have spoken. These voters aren’t necessarily bad, or even wrong.
But broadly speaking, they tend to have contempt for their own party, they just
hate the other party more. They tend to vote with more passion than reason. And
in the Trump era, many Republicans simply vote based upon whether the candidate
is supported by Trump, and many Democrats simply vote for whoever hates Trump
the most. That’s a really stupid way to run a country.
The result is that many Democrats and Republicans and
most independents hate the choices they’re presented with in the general
election. As a result, elections become a contest to determine which candidate
represents the lesser evil.
Some will say, “It was ever thus.”
But it really wasn’t. Obviously, it’s true that prior to
the adoption of primaries, people still argued about whether general election
candidates were qualified for the job. But that argument tended to be
comparative: Is candidate A more qualified than candidate B?
That’s because there was a backstop: Party leaders vetted
and ultimately vouched for the candidates. The party establishment’s
decision to nominate a candidate was on the ballot, too. After 1972, that
decision-making process was outsourced to whoever showed up to vote in the
primaries.
Democracy fetishists and populists (not the same thing)
may think that’s exactly how it should work. But I am neither a democracy
fetishist nor a populist. Democracy is what should happen between the parties,
not within them. This is even more the case in an era where campaign finance
reform and partisan media have basically made it impossible for grown-ups in
the party to put their thumbs on the scale for the more responsible or
electable candidate. Parties run by grown-ups would simply say, “Yeah, we’re not
nominating the dude with the Nazi tattoo” or “Paxton is not fit for the
nomination and, besides, we’re obliged to support the incumbent, who is more
electable and upstanding anyway.”
No other significant institution in American life has
been democratized the way the parties have (and no major democratic country
does it the way we do). In fact, I struggle to think of any significant
institution that has been internally democratized at all, certainly not the
Catholic Church, the military, the police, etc. One could argue that much of
the media has been democratized in the sense that so much of it organized
around the imperative to tell audiences what they want to hear. Some also wrestle
with a younger generation of staffers who think they should be able to rebel
against management when “justice” demands it. How has that worked out for us?
There are two problems with supporting the lesser of two
evils. The first is you’re still supporting evil. If the word “evil” triggers
you, feel free to substitute “less bad.” You’re still voting for bad (or
unqualified or dangerous or corrupt).
The second problem is that in an era where all notions of
small-r republican virtue elicit contempt from anyone who finds virtue
inconvenient to their pursuit of power, power becomes the measure of virtue.
How many people who said Trump was the lesser evil a decade ago “evolved” to
believe that Trump was the avatar of all that is good? His bad character was
once a regrettable problem that was outweighed by the need to defeat Hillary
Clinton. In short order, the definition of good character was rewritten to fit
Trump. The same thing is happening before our eyes with Graham Platner, and I’m
sure we’ll get there with Paxton.
I would like to live in a country where institutions,
specifically political parties, do what institutions are supposed to do: take
themselves and their responsibilities seriously. Serious parties screen, vet,
and test candidates for office, just as serious news outlets vet their
reporting and serious businesses vet their products.
When you hear someone say “We’re a republic, not a
democracy,” you should ask them what they mean by that. Because republic is
just a fancy word for “establishment”—a group of leaders who care about what
the people think, but also care about what is right and proper.
Lacking responsible institutions that care about
character and qualifications isn’t an excuse to abandon such concerns. It means
that responsibility falls on voters (and journalists). It was good and valuable
to have parties (and major media outlets) that took their responsibilities
seriously. Just because they have abdicated their responsibilities doesn’t mean
you’re liberated from yours. If a candidate is unqualified, it doesn’t matter
if they have an R or D after their name. I’m not saying you have a moral
requirement to make the perfect the enemy of the good, or that it is
unacceptable to vote for the lesser evil. I am saying that you have a moral
obligation not to lie about it, to yourself or anybody else. Because when you
start saying the lesser evil is objectively good, you’re still calling evil
“good.” And it never is.
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