“The political assassination of Graham Platner.”
The futility of change ‘from within.’
10 JULY—The clearest things said about Graham Platner as he was forced to suspend his triumphantly buoyant campaign for a Maine Senate seat this week came from Graham Platner. Here is a little of what he said into a video camera Wednesday evening, as he announced he was dropping out of the race. His reference, of course, is to the allegations of Jenny Racicot, who has accused Platner, in interviews with two corporate media, Politico and CNN, of raping her one night in 2021, two years into a relationship with him:
This is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen. It’s not real…. We’re not doing it because of the allegations. We’re doing it because of the structures [funding, data, demographic analysis, etc.] that are being taken away from us by those in power….
But exactly. This is not about morality, or accusations of crimes, or abuses of personal power, or the infamous tattoo, or the case of P.T.S.D. Platner brought home from his military service in Iraq and Afghanistan, or whatever happened in his various relationships once he was back in the States and finding his way in civilian life again. Chuck Schumer et al. care nothing about any of this. No, this is about actual power, large power, start to Platner’s shot-out-of-the-sky finish.
Power and how it is exercised by those who have it. Power and the possibility or otherwise of change in our crumbling republic.
I thought I heard Platner’s voice break slightly as he continued speaking into the camera:
I learned about this through press inquiries with no time to truly respond, no time for investigations before a corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and executioner.
I am pleased I am not the only one to note the disgraceful haste with which the mainstream of the Democratic Party and those in media who clerk for them jumped on the Racicot interviews to run Platner clear out of a Senate race he was plainly on the way to winning. These people could hardly contain themselves, as will be evident to anyone following this spectacle with a clear mind. They just couldn’t wait to pronounce the oysterman from Frenchman Bay politically dead—so fearful were they of him and his ability to electrify voters eager on the way to desperate for a new politics and a new national direction.
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I don’t think Platner ever identified as a social democrat, but this is what he is whether or not he says so. Universal health care, affordable housing, poverty and the rampant inequality that causes it, the corporatization of everything, above all the sequestration of those who hold political power: These, fundamental to social democracy the world over, were what Platner stood for or four-square against. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he used to tell reporters covering him. “And the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.”
We have just watched the oligarchy strike back.
No, the oligarchs and the tools who serve them in the Democratic Party never engaged Platner on “the issues,” as people like to say: There was no defeating him by way of his politics, so plain was his appeal. So they hit him below the belt, a phrase I should perhaps reconsider but will leave. Do I think Jenny Racicot lied when she accused Platner of rape five years after the alleged incident? “I just want the truth out there,” she said in the Politico interview. Too flimsy, explains nothing, in my view. There is something left unsaid. There is another room in this house and it is locked. I am left to wonder—and I cannot do more—whether some kind of leverage has been exerted over Jenny Racicot one or another way.
None of the allegations leveled against Platner will ever have to be substantiated. Jenny Racicot will never file charges of rape. There is no need of any of this: The function has been served.
I answer the question just posed this way: I believe Platner when he says—a useful way to put it—“It’s not real.”
Very little is in mainstream American politics, which is a big reason Platner rose so impressively as soon as he entered the contest for a Maine Senate seat.
I followed Platner for much of his campaign, interested to see just how diabolically the party he chose would avoid his politics and manipulate his past—which seemed to me the plan from early on. Here is my surmise as expressed in a piece Consortium News published last September:
Graham Platner was a young, impressionable man with a native sense of justice when he joined the military and acquired, passingly, the attitudes typically found in the armed forces and the ranks of mercenaries. His mixed bag of political and social views during and immediately after those years were those of a twenty-something finding his way while coming to the realization he would have to cut his own path.
I hold to this. So far as I can make out, the Marines turned Platner into just the sort of cretin Pete Hegseth thinks every soldier should be and it took Platner time to get “the warrior ethos,” ridiculous phrase, out of his system. The various allegations various women have made since Platner began his rise in national politics last year—not before, please note—are he-said, she-said matters that, honestly, have been given a place in the national discourse only because those in elite quarters have found them useful.
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The sequestered elite of the Democratic Party is in an evident panic now, as Democratic Socialists take one primary after another away from mainstream candidates. Just what will become of these new arrivals in America’s national political life is anyone’s guess, but those who present true threats to the orthodoxy must consider what was just done to Platner. In his case, it looks as if the Democrats decided they would rather see Susan Collins, the party-line Republican who is now defending the Senate seat she has held for 30 years, win another six-year term than let someone arguing for an authentic politics go on to win.
I have never had much faith in the possibility of genuine change “from within”—the strategy urged by Michael Harrington, who founded the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982. Lately I have none. This is the core truth of Platner’s fate. What needs to be done in America cannot be done by way of the institutions that are supposed to give voice to Americans. They don’t. It can’t be accomplished by way of them as currently constituted. They have been too abused for too long and now stand broken. And there are no limits to what power will do to prevent the kind of change for which Platner stood until this week.
We do not know whether Graham Platner will leave politics behind now and return to his oyster beds. He has not said. As he contemplates his future I offer him this wonderful little story about Tony Benn, the aristocratic Brit who betrayed his class and served as a left-wing Labour MP for nearly half a century until he gave up his seat in 2001. When asked later why he decided to resign from Parliament, the ever-witty Benn replied, “I wanted to spend more time on politics.”
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