Against the “Positive Good” theory of Platner
An absurd cope to avoid wrestling with reality
Most of the people I know are highly partisan Democrats who really hate Donald Trump.
And the vast majority of those people — some of whom are actual registered voters in the state of Maine — are happy to support Graham Platner over Susan Collins. Some of them genuinely like the left-factionalist aspects of his message (Israel is doing genocide, we need to fight the oligarchy) and others really just want to get rid of the woman who provided the decisive vote for Trump’s first tax bill and Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, among other things. I also know several people who say that if you could somehow guarantee Democratic wins in the Senate races in North Carolina, Alaska, Texas, and Ohio (thus giving the party a majority even without Maine), they’d be happy to see Platner fall on his face — but that cannot be guaranteed.
These all strike me as broadly reasonable takes, the merits of which hinge not on your assessment of the details of Platner’s life but actually on how you see various policy issues.
Several people I respect reached out and strongly disagreed with me when I said that evaluations of the tattoo issue are really just about how much weight people put on disagreeing with Platner about Israel. Of course, those people are all more pro-Israel than I am.
But there’s also a rogue doctrine out there that I’m going to call the Positive Good theory of Platnerism. This holds not that Platner’s questionable ink and extramarital sexting and apparent womanizing are forgivable or unimportant, but that these qualities actually make him an above-average Democrat.
Ken Klippenstein says that Platner heralds the end of “smoothgroin politicians,” while Matt Stoller hailed him as “a rejection of Dem H.R. lady politics.”
Stoller, ironically, followed that quip with a lengthy quasi-apology for the sexist joke paired with a detailed sociological theory of the rise and nature of American H.R. practices that bears no relationship whatsoever to any policy analysis that Platner has ever offered.
I think this Positive Good Platnerism is preposterous, but it’s in the neighborhood of something correct and insightful.
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