The curdling of the American man

On Monday, Politico published an account from Maine resident Jenny Racicot accusing Senate candidate Graham Platner of entering her home without permission while he was drunk in 2021 and “having sex with her against her will.” The allegations have thrown his campaign into chaos, yet again. And, as I write this, it seems like he and what’s left of his team are trying to appoint his successor as Maine’s Democratic Senate candidate.

For those trying to keep track, here’s a brief summary of the controversies section of Platner’s Wikipedia page, which has ballooned to a staggering length over the last year. There was his racist and homophobic Reddit history, where he, among other things, argued in 2013 that rape victims should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to.” There was also the matter of his Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, which he claimed he got in Croatia while drunk with other Marines in 2007, unaware of its meaning. CNN found evidence that he did eventually figure out it was a Nazi tattoo and just didn’t get it covered up until the rest of us found out about it. In February, he shared an X post from far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters. In May, multiple outlets reported that Platner was sexting with dozens of women on Kik messenger, an app I haven’t thought since I was investigating sexual predators and cyberbullying cases back in early 2010s. And in May, The New York Times published allegations that Platner had a history of mistreating women, a report that Racicot says inspired her to finally speak up about her own experience with Platner. The Washington Post has published more details this week about his abuse of ex-girlfriends. Platner denies both Racicot’s account and The Post’s subsequent report of misconduct.

Prominent Democrats such as Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Ro Khanna all pulled their endorsements and the DNC stopped running ads for him. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s advisor Morris Katz is reportedly headed to Maine this week to pressure Platner to drop out. And Platner’s volunteer Discord is in full revolt. Some users on the server want former Maine Senator Troy Jackson to replace him. The online personalities at the forefront of the Democratic Tea Party have been a bit more divided though.

Author and pundit Matt Stoller called this a “ratfucking” and a “political attack.” Young Turks host Cenk Uygur called it a political assassination and his co-host Ana Kasparian went after Racicot for not immediately going to law enforcement “if this actually took place.” Streamer Hasan Piker said he believes Racicot and that it’s “curtains” for Platner and has spent the week fighting with mainstream Democrats about his past enthusiasm of Platner’s campaign. (He never officially endorsed or campaigned with Platner.) Journalist Ken Klippenstein, on the other hand, wrote a pretty acid-drenched “Graham Platner Apology” on Substack, saying that Platner should drop out, but that he stands by what he’s previously said about Platner’s campaign and the need to clear out “smoothgroin” hall monitor Democrats. “Dark woke” podcaster Kyle Kulinski hasn’t directly addressed the new allegations yet, but, after the last round of controversy in May, he wrote on X, “Platner could’ve sexted my mom and I’d still vote for him,” which I just don’t think you need to say about anyone tbh.

The infighting among Democrats and Democratic Socialists right now can basically be sorted into three oftentimes-overlapping groups. Groups that are also driving the central conflict at the heart of the current Democratic Tea Party movement. You have women, Jewish people, and people of color across the left and center-left side of the political spectrum who argue that Platner should have dropped out long before this and that everyone who has been cheerleading him were ignoring massive red flags from the start. You have mainstream Democrats who never liked Platner’s aggressively leftist populism (and anti-Israel position) and want to claw back some control over a race they’ve been completely backfooted on for the last year. And you have (mostly white, male) leftists who are desperate for — and confident in — a leftist strongman to unseat an entrenched Republican incumbent like Maine Senator Susan Collins. And it’s this last camp that I want to focus on here because they’re having the hardest time dealing with the Platner situation at the moment.

There has been a growing chorus of mostly men on the left since 2016 who are indignant that Democrats have to care about “purity politics” or “wokeness” or “moderation” while President Donald Trump and the Republicans are allowed to pursue their thousand-year BurgerReich. These men have also come to believe that the only way forward for Democrats is to match aggression with aggression. And, in almost all cases, aggression means masculinity. Writer Yasmin Nair pointed this out in an excellent Current Affairs piece last year, writing, “The left has a masculinity problem, in that most of its men are not the conventionally heroic type, and it tends to swoon when it sees an ex-military dude with muscles and tattoos turned ex-Blackwater operative turned oyster farmer.” Ouch lol. But I’d go even further.

The left’s burning desire for a muscleman of their own isn’t just a masculinity problem. Yes, the curdling of the American man is clearly affecting all men, regardless of whether they’re watching Joe Rogan or Hasan Piker. But the desperation to defend Platner also comes from a bizarre contradiction that has emerged on the left since Trump entered office. There is a deeply-rooted sneering, condescending inability to imagine that working people — and working class men, who always are assumed to be white in these instances — could ever vote for anyone other than a slovenly, alcoholic townie oaf. And there is a borderline pathological insistence that policies like free healthcare, antitrust regulation, student debt relief, and a rebuke of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, if shouted by a white guy in his pickup truck, could somehow, magically fix the social and racial and religious divides that have opened up into yawning chasms during the Trump era. The same leftists cheering for the DSA upset in New York last month — which was led almost entirely by women of color — are completely unable to imagine that anything like that could work in the small town America populated by noble savages they imagine in their heads. Platner, for all his unending messiness, was the easy way out. The choice that meant your favorite podcaster could be anti-Trump, but didn’t have to sound “woke,” or feminine, or whatever.

And I’ll admit that I was excited by Platner when I first noticed his campaign last year. I’m not from Maine, but I’m a New Englander and he reminded me of guys I grew up with. I felt the same twinge of hope that I assume many in Maine felt, seeing a man like him, with a history like his, speaking about politics the way he has. It was a hope that the guys I went to high school with or the men in my family or in my home town might suddenly wake up and realize the Republicans were screwing them over. That there might finally be a way to save all the lost, angry, awful men I know. And I still have that hope, but Platner — and any other leftist strongman that comes along — is the shortcut. And the current implosion of his campaign is exactly what happens when you take shortcuts.

Here’s more on Trump World’s shitposting strategy and why I think it used to work and, crucially, why I don’t think it’s working anymore.