Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a sitting governor who ascended to power as a feminist hero is running for the U.S. Senate. She has a record of service in the interest of shared prosperity, social liberalism, and the environment. As governor, she expanded Medicaid, terminating work requirements for the poor to access healthcare, and easily won reelection. She eliminated tuition at community colleges, making a long-standing goal of Democratic politics, articulated by everyone from Jesse Jackson in the 1980s to Barack Obama in the 2010s, a reality in her state. Meanwhile, her record on climate change earned enough international accolades for her to become the first U.S. governor to address the United Nations General Assembly. During her speech, she delineated a plan to make her state carbon-neutral by 2045. At a moment of crisis when political courage is a necessity, she advocated for transgender rights, challenging Donald Trump, to his face, at the White House on his bigotry and ignorance. She refused to relent even after Trump threatened to freeze federal funding for agricultural projects in her state, eventually winning a court decision to restore those subsidies.
Her opponent is a former Marine, mercenary, and bartender with no political experience, and judging from the way he speaks, a similar vacuity of knowledge. He has admitted to making a series of racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks, even blaming rape victims, if they were drunk, for their own trauma, not as a rebellious teenager, but merely five years ago. On his chest, he has a tattoo of a “Totenkopf”—a “death skull” that became prominent in Nazi iconography. SS guards had the same skull on their uniforms. He claims that he was unaware of the history or meaning of the symbol when he got the tattoo. He was drunk, which, according to his moral philosophy, absolves him of blame, unlike women who are raped, and in his words, “should take responsibility for getting so f**ked up that they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” His campaign manager has resigned, claiming that the candidate was aware of the tattoo’s significance.
Now that I’ve set the stage for the experiment, here is the question: Who do self-identified “progressives” support?
Anyone not suffering from the aftereffects of a severe concussion would assume that any so-called progressive would not only support the first candidate but reject the second with contempt. Health care equity, access to higher education for the poor, combating climate change, LGBTQ+ allyship, and defiance of Donald Trump are supposedly top-tier goals of the progressive left. At the same time, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and the brandishing of Nazi emblems should unite everyone on the left in opposition.
It turns out that the thought experiment is not hypothetical. Instead, it is an actual Senate primary campaign in Maine where the first candidate, Governor Janet Mills, is vying for national office against Graham Platner, an SS-tattooed amateur. Those who believe that we live in a world where words have real meaning, where a rational public evaluates politicians by their record of achievements and failures, and where all prominent progressives demonstrate fidelity to their stated values, would be wrong to assume that leftists are rallying behind Mills. Instead, Senators Bernie Sanders and Martin Heinrich have endorsed Platner, as has Representative Ro Khanna. The United Auto Workers has declared its support for Platner, and so too have popular “progressive” media personalities, such as Emma Vigeland, Cenk Uygur, and Ryan Grim, who chastised objection to Platner’s repeated assertions that Black customers don’t tip, his repeated use of the epithet “faggot,” and the Nazi imagery above his nipple, as “hall monitor BS that makes the Democrats toxic.”
Support for Platner, despite his various embarrassments and humiliations, is likely to grow in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York and the progressive anger over Senate Democrats’ compromise with Republican leadership to end the government shutdown.
The shrinking category of rational political observers might wonder if they’ve fallen into the pages of a Lewis Carroll story. Another author could explain the imbecilic inconsistency of the progressive left. On the opening page of The Society of Spectacle, philosopher Guy Debord writes, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into representation.”
Later, he asserts that the “spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images[…]It is a worldview.”
In the society of spectacle that is the U.S. under the epistemic tyranny of social media, “progressives,” like Sanders and Grim, care about the “working class” and despise “the establishment.” In a society of reality, caring about the working class would mean supporting policies that raise their standard of living and increase their opportunities for upward mobility, such as expanding access to Medicaid and making community college tuition-free. In a society of spectacle, “working class” depends upon the imagery that mediates social (and political) relations, meaning that the invocation of the demographic phrase calls to mind someone like Platner—a gruff, “man’s man” with a military record who works on a farm, with a voice like voiceover from a pickup truck ad—not someone like Mills, an elderly woman with a successful legal career. Women, from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris, and now Janet Mills, cannot register with the working class because in America, “working class” means a man holding a shovel or wearing a hard hat. It certainly doesn’t mean a Latina home health aide or Asian American pre-school teacher, even if, in post-industrialization, women in low-wage service and retail occupations are much more predominant among the proletariat.
Another term that the society of spectacle has emptied of all substance is “establishment.” Mills fought the patriarchal and Republican establishment in her state to earn tangible victories for women, low-income residents, and Maine’s indigenous population, filling a vacancy on the state-tribal commission and passing stricter water quality standards for tribal rivers. But because she is 77 years old, experienced, and a she, her candidacy represents the decadence of the “establishment.” Were Mills suffering from the effects of aging like Joe Biden or Donald Trump, fleeing her candidacy would make sense. But like Sanders himself, she projects well and is, after all, challenging Senator Susan Collins, who will be 73 on Election Day 2026. Rebecca Traister, in a story on the Democratic Party for New York, met with Mills and described her as a “fireplug of a woman,” who “demonstrates none of the frailty of her chronological peers.”
It isn’t hyperbolic to say that Platner, unlike Mills, offers nothing to voters. He is little more than an image—a central casting call in a forgettable blue-collar soap opera. Even his backstory, as reported in the New Yorker, confirms the triumph of spectacle over substance. Labor and progressive advocacy organizations searched for a candidate to run in the Senate race. Instead of finding someone with impressive experience and a reputable background, they reacted to a video featuring Platner that warned against a commercial salmon farm. “They decided that he was exactly what they were looking for,” the New Yorker details, “a working-class guy with a military background.”
An appearance in an online video is now the only prerequisite to becoming one of a hundred United States Senators. This is politics according to the rules of the influencer, and according to the habits of a teenager who spends all day staring at a six-inch screen, confusing political efficacy with what trends on TikTok.
It is not only dumb, but in the case of Platner, destructive. It has left Sanders saying things like, “He’s a great working-class candidate” and “He went through a dark period. I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to go through a dark period.” Yes, but do they all have Nazi tattoos? Sanders also said that Platner said “many stupid things” but that he’s a “brilliant guy” and a “great fighter for the working class.” Mills, evidently, is not a fighter for the working class, despite providing them with healthcare, a cleaner environment, and free community college.
Ro Khanna also boasted of Platner as a “working class candidate,” while denouncing the “politics of personal destruction.” “Working class” appears to function as an abracadabra spell that can make any ethical considerations instantly disappear. It erases all transgressions. But its cynical invocation is also insulting to the millions of working-class Americans who do not make racist remarks, defend rape, or get Hitler-approved imagery carved onto their chests.
As far as the tortured logic of Drop Site’s Grim is concerned, if the real problem with Democrats is their “hall monitor BS,” why not find a Klansman (or, in the case of Drop Site, a terror mouthpiece) willing to shout “Medicare for All” and rebuke the “billionaires,” and run him for office? That would undoubtedly show that Democrats are no longer woke.
Another question: Why did working-class Americans support Brahmins like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy? Could it be that they don’t hold their wealth against them and don’t fetishize their own class the way the wealthier do? Any why do so many voters in the much-vaunted “white working class” revere a man with his name encrusted in gold on planes, golf resorts, and penthouses with the interior decorative stylings of Liberace, even if he is notorious for fleecing employees and contractors? Perhaps Theodor Adorno was correct with his assertion that many low- and middle-income workers do not even conceive of themselves as belonging to a class.
Platner, caught with his shirt off so to speak, is defending himself with pablum about how “this Marine won’t back down from a fight,” the establishment isn’t coming for me, they’re coming for you, etc., etc. Redemption and recovery are admirable, but a U.S. Senate seat is not an AA coin. As my colleague Bill Scher put it before Skullgate broke, Platner could seek a different office, befitting his experience. But with the soft bigotry of low expectations, the consulting class has elevated a bartender into a national figure and convinced him, like Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd, that he’s a leader and redeemer.
It shouldn’t be that surprising that in the Trump era, Democrats would confect their own unqualified, morally obtuse political apprentices. A few of the worst aspects of the Trump-dominated era of American politics are misogyny, stupidity, and the elevation of gimmickry over actual accomplishments. With chauvinistic dismissal of Governor Mills and thoughtless celebration of her unseasoned, unqualified, and odious opponent, progressives have cosigned hateful MAGA nonsense. They’ve also stained the political movement that they claim to champion.
