Graham Platner, ex-Nazi-tattooed alleged rapist, held back in noble quest to save America

The underlying reason Platner has so fascinated me, as a candidate, is that he’s the rare politician whose entire shtick is not being Jewish. The post Graham Platner, ex-Nazi-tattooed alleged rapist, held back in noble quest to save America appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News .

Downward mobility has never had a good name. Which is sad, really, because it is not immoral, but rather the inevitable outcome of a society with mobility. It is not fair, I think, that people who fail to maintain or exceed their born socioeconomic status are discussed as having willfully squandered opportunity.

As lacking in gratitude and overflowing with entitlement. Maybe they just didn’t have it in them! It’s not their fault!

Graham Platner, the cosplay working-man from Maine anointed to save the Democrats, has tested my stance in this area. As news broke that he had allegedly raped a woman—news building upon existing reporting on his realness (cruddiness) towards the ladies—Platner’s senatorial hopes were dashed. Well, prospects, not hopes.

He dropped out with a video in which he blamed a sinister “they” for holding him back. Whether “they” was women or Jews (I have a theory!) or someone else entirely, I cannot say.

The underlying reason Platner has so fascinated me, as a candidate, is that he’s the rare politician whose entire shtick is not being Jewish. This is an impressive feat given that most politicians outside of Israel are non-Jews as well. Most of the planet is gentile.

What would it even mean to be very gentile? But Platner takes being not-Jewish to new heights. It’s not just that he’s anti-Israel, which could be said of plenty of politicians including some Jewish ones.

It’s not even the combination of anti-Israel politics and a big ol’ Nazi tattoo, since obscured, on his chest. Nor is it those two facts combined with the foodstuff he so famously farms: oysters. Delicious, but frowned upon by observant Jews, who are correct about pork but, I regret to inform, missing out on oysters.

No, it’s all of those plus the fact that he is a nepo baby, a rich kid, a pampered son’o’privilege, who, thanks to the happenstance fact of looking the part of Mr. White Working Class, managed to be hailed Maine’s Democratic saviour on the basis of his appearance of authenticity-cred. If he were nerdy, nebbishy, intellectual-seeming, euphemistically New York, and also a fancy boy, no way he’d be claiming this cred, military service or otherwise. If he were a Jewish woman, where oh where to begin.

The Jewish woman who has spent $7 on one particularly frilly latte the one time is called a ‘princess.’ More research has been done on Lena Dunham’s “privilege” than on curing cancer (a slighter exaggeration than you’d think), all because she grew up in New York City; her parents are visual artists astronomically less successful than she is; and her mother helped crowdfund her first important movie. With most politicians, if you imagine what would change if they were otherwise the same as they are, but Jewish, certain things about them might shift, but their entire political purpose wouldn’t crumble.

With Platner, if he were Jewish, there would be zero pretense that he was anything other than bourgeois. Platner is not working-class by usual definitions, which is to say, he’s a downwardly mobile child of a wealthy and well-connected family. But he comes across as a man who doesn’t truck with lattes and arugula but who definitely has a truck.

A good ol’ boy who never left his hometown, where he’s a legend due to wild stuff he got up to in his teenage heyday. A man left beyond by the modern world, with all of its women-authored novels and HR ladies and email jobs. Why, could a man as ruggedly rustic as Graham Platner even send an email, or would that be too effete for a man so butch?

Platner’s appeal, as I have not been alone in picking up on, was how real he seemed to... the sort of people without much experience of ordinary Americans, but who had inaccurate and condescending ideas about what this mystical thing, ordinary America, consisted of. The slimier he revealed himself to be, the better, because real folks are a bit messy m’kay? That Platner was ‘discovered’ by now-27-year-old Morris Katz is a bit too perfect when you learn a bit about Katz.

Here, from his January New York Times profile: “Mr. Katz grew up in a creative milieu centered on his parents’ TriBeCa home, where he would stay up late around the kitchen table listening to his father’s close friends—including Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was Mr. Katz’s godfather—argue about the playwright Tennessee Williams and the avant-garde drama theorist Antonin Artaud. Morris Katz attended the Beacon School, a prestigious public school in Hell’s Kitchen, where he was a Woody Allen-watching, Philip Roth-reading, Bob Dylan-listening occasional truant who dreamed of becoming a screenwriter. He wrote his first screenplay as a freshman.”

I grew up in Manhattan, attended a mix of private and public schools, and I’m salt-of-the-earth compared with what I just read. Famous people coming to dinner to discuss avant-garde arts! I didn’t have a deprived childhood by any means, but ours was more of a spaghetti-and-Cops household.

But it’s the theatricality of it all that jumps out. A mix of aloofness and the will to put on a show. Indeed, the best way to think of Platner is that he was cast.

Cast, and now, cast out, now that he stands credibly accused of rape, this atop previous allegations of crappiness and violence towards women. As Jonathan Chait writes, in the Atlantic, “Donald Trump has described liking his appointees to come right out of “central casting,” by which he means that they look like a Hollywood version of the position they are filling. Katz and [organizer Daniel] Moraff have taken an almost literal approach to this “central casting” criteria, searching for candidates whom the camera loves and then offering them to an adoring progressive fanbase.”

In other words, Platner is exactly what you’d get if you ask someone from a Lena Dunham type of background—but too young to have much experience of the wider world—to cast someone who would be relatable to ‘real Americans.’ This would be the precise way to find a man who ordinary people immediately classify not as a regular dudebro but rather as a strange, cruel failson-type. If Platner had been a member of the Girls cast, playing a ne’er-do-well love interest, I’d have been pro-Platner, because this would have been hilarious.

Instead, he got cast in real life. For a time, it seemed as though the casting choice worked. But there’s mess and there’s mess, and Platner’s now gone too far.

The Democrats faced a choice. Did they want to go all-in on Trumpism, finding their very own orange-tinged sexual abuser to stick it to the woke mob? Or did they want to get votes from the roughly half of the country they might get those from, which can only be done by offering something other than a lite version of the other side’s product?

The moment you cede that ground, the moment what the Democrats are offering is a variation on a Trumpian theme, why not just cast a vote for the original? The policies flow from the values, at least in principle. Chuck the values and what’s left?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is The CJN’s Opinion Editor, and