By Seth Mandel
Monday, June 01, 2026
Democratic political operatives and intellectuals should,
in theory, thank their lucky stars for the appearance of Graham Platner.
For there should have been no easier way on earth to
prove that they could still put country over party, that they hadn’t gotten
high on their own supply of negative partisanship, than to have the most easily
condemnable candidate of the entire election cycle be a Democrat and to then
condemn him.
So I am genuinely baffled watching people not only fail
to denounce Graham Platner but become a sort of rapid-response team for an
obviously unfit Senate candidate.
What’s more, Platner is running against Susan Collins, a
moderate Republican who voted to convict Donald Trump. For any political animal
seeking to retain a shred of respectability, Platner is manna from heaven.
Rejecting him, with no obligation even to endorse his Republican opponent, is
the easiest thing you will ever be asked to do. But you can’t seem to do it.
It’s not that I don’t understand what is happening.
Having watched a similar process take place within the GOP, the entire
political world knows exactly what it’s seeing: The base sees every character
flaw in a candidate as a feature not a bug; defeating the other party becomes a
matter of life and death and therefore justifies any behavior; the party’s
institutions get in line.
All of it is inexcusable but uncomplicated to decode.
And so progressives have made Platner the hero of the
hour, a living idol and a human litmus test. Je suis Platner, they seem
desperate to cry out. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ floor leader in the
upper chamber, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jointly announced they’ll
ensure Platner has all necessary resources to bring his Totenkopf to the halls
of the Senate. And professional ex-Republicans fall all over themselves to
prove their loyalty to their new party by saturating the punditry with
anti-anti-Platnerism whose irony is apparently lost on them.
But the truly wild part of all of this is that rejecting
Platner was supposed to be the absolute least that was expected of them.
Platner wasn’t supposed to be the “country over party” test because it was too
easy to mean anything. You weren’t supposed to deserve credit for rejecting
Nazi iconography.
This weekend’s latest
additions to Platner’s long list of scandals is that he was sexting up to a
dozen women while married and had an active account on a singles’ site with a
reported reputation for lax age-limit gatekeeping.
To add this to what we already know—the Nazi tattoo, the
anti-Semitism, the misogyny, the racist postings, the cheering of the killing
of U.S. soldiers, the fascination with violence, and all of the dishonesty
about it—is to realize just how insane the conversation has become. Ideally, a
person who criticizes Platner would prove nothing except that they are still
human. Yet somehow we got to a point at which Platner’s denunciators truly do
deserve praise because Democrats seek the political destruction of these
dissenters. When Rep. Jake Auchincloss had the temerity to say
the Nazi stuff was disqualifying, it was Auchincloss who was put on the
defensive and made to explain himself.
Democrats have legitimate reasons to be concerned about
Republican abuse of power, but it turns out they are far more afraid of what
the progressive left is capable of once in power. That, at least, is the clear
message they are broadcasting.
And so we are left begging for crumbs of decency. Yes, we
say, it is brave to denounce Platner. And it is—because his party has made it
so.
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