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.

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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.”

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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.

Source/more: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/11/12/the-magical-thinking-behind-graham-platners-rise/