Fetish Object

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, June 05, 2026

 

The latest New York Times scoop about Graham Platner is the news equivalent of a hand grenade. It’s powerful enough to damage its target but short of the nuclear detonation many were expecting.

 

No wonder partisans from both sides hate it.

 

One can’t read the Times story without sensing that it was inspired by more damning allegations that, for whatever reason, didn’t make the final cut. Last week the Wall Street Journal revealed that Maine’s presumptive Democratic Senate nominee has (or had) a voracious appetite for “sexting” women who aren’t his wife, and that he maintains an account on Kik—a messaging app popular with teenagers—to this day. Which prompted the question: What was he doing on a platform like that?

 

Another rumor circulating was that Platner had behaved badly with some of the women he’d dated, a not-unheard-of development among boorish chuds with Nazi tattoos. Adultery is one thing, sexual assault would be quite another. Is that what the Times was about to drop?

 

On Thursday the paper showed its cards. No underaged sexting, no sexual assault. But.

 

What was in the story was bad enough. According to Lyndsey Fifield, whom Platner dated years ago, he never hit or punched her. But he “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders, sometimes hard enough to leave marks,” once pulled her out of a cab by her wrist forcefully enough to cause pain, and on another occasion “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’”

 

He’s also been lying through his teeth about not knowing the provenance of his tattoo, Fifield alleged. She claims he described it to her as “my Totenkopf” more than a decade ago, and she described it that way herself in a chat group with friends last year—before Platner said he discovered what it was. (That isn’t the only evidence that he’s lying about his ignorance.) How could she have identified it before he supposedly did? When pressed about it last night during an unpersuasive damage-control appearance on MS Now, he had no answer.

 

He denied in the same interview ever getting rough with Fifield or with any other woman, but it’s unclear why anyone should rely on the memory of a brazen liar who admits to having spent much of his adulthood in a drunken stupor.

 

The Times scoop was disappointing to right-wingers—including Fifield, a longtime conservative activist. The Daily Caller claims that the reporters on the piece had spoken to two women “who had credibly accused Platner of sexual assault,” and Fifield herself claimed in a Twitter post that she was moved to speak to the Times only because she believed her story would support those more serious allegations. When the story was published without them, she felt hung out to dry. No wonder something seemed to be missing from the piece.

 

Reaction among progressives was more interesting.

 

They, too, were disappointed by the scoop, but not because of Platner’s behavior toward Fifield. Many seemed annoyed that the Times chose to publish it at all, never mind that Maine’s Democratic primary is days away and the race is a must-win if the party wants to retake the Senate in November. The paper did the left a favor by giving primary voters further reason not to saddle themselves with an unelectable scandal machine in the general election.

 

Why are so many progressives mad about it?

 

A blue-collar ‘fetish.’

 

To believe that Fifield invented all of this to help Susan Collins beat Platner, one needs to ignore the contemporaneous evidence of his misbehavior like her 2016 diary entry (viewed by the Times) describing him as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.”

 

But some erstwhile believe-all-women types are willing to go that extra mile. “NYT published uncorroborated accusations against [Platner] of ‘unsettling’ and ‘toxic’ behavior that came from a Heritage staffer who previously worked for a conservative org that backs Collins,” Krystal Ball complained. Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was also unimpressed. “Seems like a lot of nothing,” he said of the story. “I mean, the only one who had anything to say that seemed ‘unsettling’ was a woman who works for right-wing political operations.”

 

This is the same Sheldon Whitehouse who wrote during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, “Today I stand with women who are brave enough to come forward with their stories of abuse and mistreatment. They deserve to be heard and credible allegations must be investigated. We must believe survivors, not bully them.” Golly, we’re a long way from #MeToo.

 

The easy explanation for progressive denial about Platner’s flaws is that they’re simply protecting their investment. They spent a lot of political—and emotional—capital on cheering him on in Maine as a left-wing insurgent taking on the state’s aged establishmentarian governor, Janet Mills. Those costs are sunk. Now here he is, blowing up on the launch pad on the eve of the general election campaign and at risk of costing Democrats a Senate majority in a national environment in which winning Maine should be a gimme.

 

His boosters would rather save face by downplaying his liabilities than admit their own foolishness, even if that means forging on to November with a badly injured candidate.

 

Certain progressives, like their postliberal Jacobin counterparts on the right, might actually prefer to lose with a nominee who’s to their liking than win with a moderate who isn’t. As with MAGA, their first and most urgent ideological task is to gain control of their party and normalize radicalism as its default mode. If crowding out neoliberalism by elevating socialist candidates requires fumbling away a few winnable races, they’ll pay that price.

 

I think there’s more to left-wing Platnermania than face-saving, though. And I’m not alone.

 

Last week Jill Filipovic, a liberal, accused leftists of overrating Platner “because people fetishize the white working-class man no matter his actual capabilities or biography.” Josh Barro, another Democrat, used the same piquant term in comparing Platner to John Fetterman. Both men are “low-conscientiousness losers,” he argued, in that they grew up privileged and were forced to rely on their parents’ support well into middle age due to their incompetence at handling basic adult responsibilities. “Leftists have fetishized the style of the low-conscientiousness man,” he concluded.

 

Others made similar points without using the F-word. “There's a performative aspect to it I just can't shake, or put my finger on,” Matt Glassman wrote of the left’s Platner infatuation. “Like, he's not even [a] genuine populist loser. He's a D.C. insider’s vision of a loser from their high school playing the part.” Natalie Wynn put it this way: “I feel like this whole Platner situation could’ve been avoided if a bunch of upper-middle-class leftists hadn’t seen the most obvious red flags imaginable and thought, ‘that’s just what rough, salty, Ohio Waffle-House-type working-class people are like.’”

 

They’re all describing a sense, which I share, that progressive apologias for Platner have a dimension beyond policy or partisanship.

 

Any candidate beset by scandal would get an initial benefit of the doubt from members of his own tribe, but the dogged dismissiveness toward evidence of this one’s full-spectrum scumbaggery seems partly due to his persona. No one in left-wing politics (since Fetterman’s apostasy, anyway) looks the part of a relatable blue-collar joe like the white, bearded, burly Marine-turned-oysterman from Maine. Progressives are clearly grading him on a curve because of it. A steep one.

 

“Graham Platner represents a rejection of Dem HR lady politics,” leftist Matt Stoller crowed this morning. Trump fans have been rationalizing the president’s degeneracy in similar terms for 10 years. Progressive journalist Ken Klippenstein’s populist defense of Platner could be reprinted verbatim on any MAGA blog: “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high-school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

 

“Smoothgroins,” huh? Three days after Klippenstein posted that, New York magazine quoted a Democratic strategist as wondering, “Are we going to see pictures of Graham Platner’s penis before this is all over? I think we almost certainly will.” I doubt there’s another candidate in all the land whom the left might defend for sending naked photos of himself on grounds that at least he has a d–k.

 

The nature of a fetish.

 

The vibe I get from many progressives about Platner reminds me of the vibe from right-wingers whenever a celebrity comes out as Republican. They yearn to be loved by that person’s cultural stratum so desperately that having the affection reciprocated validates them in a way that renders that person’s flaws and foibles irrelevant.

 

And by right-wing celebrities, I’m not just thinking of seedy has-beens like Kid Rock. There are worse ways to understand the cultish devotion to the president than as ecstatic gratitude at having a bona fide celebrity take up the crusade against the left.

 

Progressives have no trouble attracting celebrities to their cause. Their trouble is with the working class, an agonizing deficiency for a movement that purports to defend that class against its bourgeois exploiters. In theory, white working-class men should be lining up to support a faction that promises to redistribute wealth to them to improve their lives. In practice, the left is getting the pants beat off of it in that battle for hearts and minds by a freakishly corrupt billionaire game-show host.

 

Even in eras when they were cleaning up with those voters at the polls, many of the Democrats’ greatest political icons were conspicuously and uncomfortably not blue-collar. Franklin Roosevelt was a wealthy aristocrat; the Kennedys were mega-rich playboys; Barack Obama was a cerebral ivory-tower egghead. Even Nancy Pelosi, the party’s most effective legislator in modern times, came from a political dynasty and is a millionaire many times over.

 

The so-called party of the working class would really like to improve its credibility among that class, and not just as a matter of emotional and ideological validation. Shedding blue-collar whites, particularly men, to the GOP has created momentous electoral problems for Democrats. There is no Trump era without hardhats and lunchpail workers choosing to prioritize their cultural differences with the left over their agreements on economic matters.

 

Amid that angst appeared the figure of Graham Platner, a kind of political “celebrity” in how freakishly accurately he resembled the sort of voter whom Democrats covet. Is it really so surprising that progressives would go irrationally wild for him?

 

Platner is a bona fide blue-collar white guy—kind of, in the same way that any screw-up who was born rich and couldn’t get it together in adulthood might end up living paycheck to paycheck. He looks blue-collar. He sounds blue-collar. And he’s ostentatiously masculine for good and for ill, as yesterday’s Times story demonstrates. Lyndsey Fifield claims that Platner was known to say that if anyone broke into his apartment, he would would rape them—but not in “a sexual way, not in a gay way. He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”

 

He’s an almost cartoonishly stereotypical version of a white working-class guy, a culturally alien species to the modern left, and yet he loves leftism. What more validation could progressives want?

 

I suspect they also view Platner as a living, breathing advertisement to other white working-class men that wanting to be an alpha dude who rapes intruders in your home isn’t incompatible with preferring progressive policies. In a party where the most influential progressives are either young nonwhite women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or very old white men like Bernie Sanders, they think they’ve finally found a butch young bro who might plausibly seem relatable to a key demographic that’s gotten away from them.

 

His impressive polling in Maine (well, until this week) also probably convinced them of something that ideologues of every stripe long to believe: There’s nothing wrong with our policies. All we need to win is to find the right “messenger.” That’s another potent form of validation.

 

What makes the left’s attraction to Platner “fetishistic” is that the disgusting elements of his personality seem to enhance his appeal rather than detract from it.

 

His tattoo, his many years of churlish online comments, his (virtual) infidelity, and now his brutishness toward Fifield: Progressives like Stoller and Klippenstein who aren’t willing to stoop to outright denial about his vices seem to regard these things as populist proof of authenticity. This is how “real people” behave! They’re rough around the edges. Platner’s vices may be repellent, but that’s also the thing that makes them relatably politically “sexy.”

 

It’s precisely that attitude that seems to offend Glassman and Wynn. When leftist intellectuals and Democratic “insiders” treat Platner’s proclivity to behave like a chud as evidence of his blue-collar cred, they’re not paying blue-collar people a compliment. You need to hate the working class on some level, or at the very least to look down on it, to think a dissolute, underachieving, compulsive liar is a classic specimen of the form—a weird thing for alleged champions of that class to do.

 

How many working-class people do Platner apologists actually know? What leads them to believe that this shady, below-average wastrel who’s decided he wants to be a senator has an unimpeachable claim to that title?

 

Progressives like Krystal Ball who instead choose to turn a blind eye to his vices are also behaving fetishistically, although in a different way. Their denialism wouldn’t be as determined, I think, if he were a rich progressive in the Tom Steyer mold, even if he favored all of the same policies. Platner’s blue-collar credential creates a talismanic presumption of decency: Because he’s not a professional politician or tainted by the original sin of wealth, it’s harder for some leftists to believe he might be a bad guy. Particularly when he hates all the same people they do.

 

And so, for different reasons, the party is likely to end up stuck with him when Maine goes to vote next Tuesday. Yearning to be validated by the working-class cohort Graham Platner claims to represent, Democratic primary voters will decide that he can’t possibly be a degenerate and/or that he is a degenerate and that’s good. Fetishes are perverse, and political fetishes are no different.