The election of 2016 might have taught both parties something, but one of them didn't get the message. On the Republican side, Donald Trump, a man with a highly checkered past as a businessman and a man, swept a bevy of establishment Republican candidates aside to take the nomination--an episode without precedent in American politics. On the Democratic side, an unknown professed socialist, Bernie Sanders, nearly won the Iowa caucuses, won the New Hampshire primary, and eventually won 23 primaries or caucuses while Clinton on 34. Trump had the advantage of running against several establishment candidates, while Sanders was running against only one. Despite her loss to Obama in 2008, Clinton had gone into the race as an overwhelming favorite, but Sanders gave her a serious scare. The Democratic National Committee pulled every possible string to help Clinton, and she got the nomination. Then she lost the election, and the US will never be the same again.
Since then the Democratic establishment has lived in terror of the emergence of another Bernie Sanders. The Democratic left itself, to be fair, did its cause enormous harm in 2020 by running two strong candidates, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and neither of them developed any real momentum. Helped by Trump's unpopularity over COVID, the establishment's candidate Joe Biden won the nomination and the election comfortably. Trump however maintained and strengthened his grip over the Republican Party. When Biden in 2024 had to drop out of the race, he and most of the establishment immediately anointed Kamala Harris, who (like Biden) had failed disastrously in her attempts to get the Democratic nomination before she became Vice President. She lost to Trump by a considerably larger margin than Clinton had.
This year another populist Democrat has come on the scene--Graham Platner of Maine. Zohran Mamdani has become a national figure thanks to his victory in New York, but he can never run for president because he was not born a US citizen. Platner, like Sanders, is from a small New England state. He was born to a wealthy family and went to boarding school but his life went in a completely different direction after he joined the military. He is a true economic liberal who wants to do something about the wealth gap and the health care crisis, and he now opposes our bipartisan forever war policy in the Middle East and our support for anything Israel chooses to do. He made such an impression on the voters of Maine that his establishment primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race. And that immediately sent the Democratic establishment, both in Washington and in the media, into a panic.
The attack on Platner initially focused on a skull and crossbones tattoo that he acquired while a Marine. Platner is unreservedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian in connection with the Gaza war, and advocates an end to US military aid to Israel. (In the last few days, remarkably, Prime Minister Netanyahu has also suggested that Israel might be better off without that aid.) That was enough for some elements in the Democratic coalition to regard him as a mortal threat--even though Biden's essentially unremitting support for the Gaza war probably cost him the state of Michigan last time out, where the significant Muslim-American voting bloc turned against him. I must make one point about the tattoo. Contrary to what at least one New York Times columnist has written, the skull and crossbones was not originated by the Nazi SS. It dates from the Middle Ages and was adopted later by pirates, which is how I first saw it watching Disney movies in the 1950s. In any case, the argument that the tattoo disqualifies him from holding public office typifies the new Democratic attitude towards certain kinds of sins. Those who have committed them face immediate and permanent excommunication, regardless of any excuse the sinner can put forward, any contrition he (or she) shows, and no matter how much he or she is contributing to the Democratic cause. That is why Al Franken, who had done essentially nothing, no longer sits in the US Senate. We will return to this attitude in a moment. Platner seemed initially to have survived the tattoo controversy.
Today, another titan of the Democratic establishment, the New York Times, leads with a very long story about Platner's relationships with women. Like so many accomplished politicians from the past, he has had quite a few such relationships, although he is happily married now and his wife is standing with him. The story focuses mainly on one woman with whom he had an unmarried affair in Washington, who has been a career Republican political operative. She accuses him of grabbing her rather aggressively on several occasions, although she adds that he never hit or injured her, and of talking demeaningly at times about women, and says she suffered long-term emotional harm from their relationship. She insists that politics has nothing to do with her coming forward. Other former girlfriends, on the other hand, speak highly of him, clearly do not regret their involvement with him, and do not report anything similar. In addition, it has leaked that Planter was sexting with other women in recent years while he was married. I could be wrong, but I read the Times every day and I think this is the longest story to have appeared this year about any Democratic politician. It is obviously designed to end his political career. I do wonder whether the Times now believes that any presidential candidate deserves such a long and carefully researched story about their romantic history. I don't.
Political parties exist to win elections. If the Democratic Party wants to go on winning enough elections to take power, it needs to face certain facts.
Donald Trump, needless to say, has been repeatedly accused of far worse behavior, behavior for which he has paid a legal price more than once, and bragged about it in a taped conversation. When that tape broke in 2016 we thought it was the end of his candidacy--but it wasn't. Trump has proven that--for better or for worse--a large portion of the electorate does not share the elite establishment's standards for the behavior of public officials and will not follow the instructions of the elite media when it comes time to vote on candidates. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, had actually proved this already during his two campaigns for president, even though the Lewinsky affair, such as it was, did not break until after he had been re-elected. Trump has broader and deeper popularity than any other politician of the 21st century, in my opinion, and one reason is that he has repeatedly defied the establishment and gotten away with it. He has even appointed men like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel to some of the most important positions in government despite questionable episodes in their past that would probably have doomed any Democrat.
I am not excusing Trump or Hegseth for what they have done in the past, nor am I arguing that Platner is a saint. I am simply pointing out that leading Democrats, in an effort to maintain neoliberal orthodoxy in both economics (no Medicare for all) and foreign policy (continuing support for Israel, no matter what), and because of the power of feminist ideology in the Democratic party, are holding candidates to standards much higher than Republicans are held to, and standards that the bulk of the voting population does not share. Since Donald Trump came onto the scene, Democrats have run on not being, or not supporting, Donald Trump. They have not offered any broad solutions to our most important economic problems--which as I have tried to point out many times are NOT directly related to race or gender--or admitted that our Middle Eastern policies might be wrong. They are standing for the status quo, which the country rightly rejects. I'm glad that there is room in the Democratic Party for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, but we need room for Graham Platner as well. If we can't make room for him we will continue to lose the votes of the majority of poorer Americans and uneducated Americans, as we do now. The American people resent the assumption of our educated elite that we know what is best for everyone, and the educated elite has to give that idea up. Rather than nominate a real economic populist like Sanders or Platner, the Democrats think they can prove their moral credentials by nominating someone other than a straight white male. That strategy might work within the Democratic Party but it will not work in the electorate at large.
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