What Explains Graham Platner’s Popularity?

Earlier this week, I spoke to Platner, who told me that his journey into politics began, in high school, when he read work by the historian Howard Zinn. Following graduation, he enlisted in the Marine infantry; after serving for four years, he went to George Washington University, where he discovered the writing of the anarchist scholar David Graeber and the historian Greg Grandin. He did another stint in the military, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and came back to the United States disillusioned with the American project, especially its foreign policy. He started listening to podcasts, most notably “The Majority Report,” hosted by Sam Seder and Michael Brooks. This was around 2016, and while Platner supported Bernie Sanders and his policies, he was in a “time of deep frustration and isolation,” he said, before he returned to Afghanistan, in 2018.

Platner does see his campaign as an extension of Sanders’s, he said—maybe not exactly in terms of its rhetoric so much as in its animating force. He talked with me for a while about the long history of economic-populist political movements in America, and about how they died out after the Vietnam War, as labor lost power during the Reagan Administration and a new type of liberal politics was formed under Bill Clinton. Platner argues that the old momentum did not totally dissipate but merely needed Sanders to kick it back up. “Those underlying problems never got fixed, and so the energy has just remained there,” he said. “The inequality is still there and all the underlying structures are still in place.” His campaign, like that of Sanders, is rooted in “movement politics,” he said, and in “building power through organizing.”

The problem with the dirtbag left wasn’t that it was uncouth or edgy or rude—those were its selling points—but, rather, that it could sometimes feel too intellectual, insider-y, and a bit too close to the élites that it was always criticizing. When populist rabble-rousing comes from fancy professors, writers, and podcasters who went to private school, you don’t take it all that seriously. Sanders had given them a vehicle for political change, but, in the years between his runs for President, much of the online left fell into a blinkered, Noam Chomsky-inspired form of media criticism—at times, it seemed as though they believed that the greatest threats to their socialist-ish, decidedly metropolitan utopia could all be found in the opinion sections of the Times and the feature well of The Atlantic. They flagged bad headlines and dog-piled on clumsy tweets from journalists, accumulating some influence in the process, but mostly among people like me—a left-leaning journalist at a fancy magazine who lives in one of the most expensive cities in America.

Meanwhile, the electoral legacy of the Sanders insurgency had been carried most notably by a trio of women of color: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. Each of these politicians has achieved national prominence, but one could imagine how their identities might place a ceiling on any national ambitions. What was needed, one might conclude, was a rural white guy, perhaps one who had served as a grunt overseas and had an unassailably salt-of-the-earth job—say, an oyster farmer. Someone who could credibly talk to the alienated, broke people of America about economic redistribution.

Platner, it turns out, had even more in common with the enfants terribles of the online left than people initially realized. Like them, he posted a lot online. He did so anonymously, and used offensive language that was meant to provoke a reaction. Having read his Reddit archive, I believe that his posts—which, in addition to homophobic language, include a question about Black people’s tipping habits—were mischaracterized in the early news coverage. He was not some reactionary who is now posing, for whatever reason, as a liberal; in most of his posts, Platner was writing about military stuff, and about being the only lefty in his platoon. He also discussed his disenchantment with the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and spoke out, on several occasions, about racist and violent police practices. Granted, he was not typing out words that might be suitable for an appearance on “Meet the Press.” Platner sounded like someone who had listened to a lot of leftist podcasts.