Earlier this week, I spoke with Platner, who told me that his path into politics began in high school when he read the work of historian Howard Zinn. After graduation, he enlisted in the Marines; After serving for four years, he attended George Washington University, where he discovered the writings of anarchist scholar David Graeber and historian Greg Grandin. He served more time in the military, including a tour in Afghanistan, and returned 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 although Platner supported Bernie Sanders and his policies, he said he experienced “a time of deep disillusionment and isolation” before returning to Afghanistan in 2018.
Platner does see his campaign as an extension of Sanders', perhaps not so much in its rhetoric but in its animating power, he said. He talked to me for some time about the long history of economic-populist political movements in America and how they died out after the Vietnam War, when Labor lost power during the Reagan administration and a new type of liberal politics emerged under Bill Clinton. Platner argues that the old momentum hasn't completely disappeared, but that Sanders just needed to restore it. “These underlying issues were never addressed, and so the energy just stayed there,” he said. “Inequality still exists and all the underlying structures still exist.” His campaign, like Sanders', is based on “movement politics,” he said, and “building power through organizing.”
The problem with the remaining dirtbag was not that he was boorish, abrasive, or rude (those were his strengths), but rather that he could sometimes seem too intellectual, too insiderish, and too close to the elites he was always criticizing. When populist rabble-rousing comes from fancy professors, writers, and podcasters who went to private school, you don't take any of it seriously. Sanders gave them a vehicle for political change, but in the years between his presidential runs, much of the online left had fallen into a blinkered, Noam Chomsky-inspired form of media criticism—at times seeming to believe that the greatest threats to their socialist, distinctly metropolitan utopia could be found in the opinion sections Time and feature of the well Atlantic. They flagged bad headlines and pounced on journalists' awkward tweets, accumulating some influence in the process, but mostly among people like me, a left-leaning fashion journalist living in one of the most expensive cities in America.
Meanwhile, the electoral legacy of the Sanders insurgency was carried primarily by a trio of women of color: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Each of these politicians has achieved national recognition, but one can imagine how their identity could limit any national ambitions. One could conclude that what was needed was a white guy from the countryside, perhaps someone who had served blacks overseas and had the perfect “salt of the earth”—say, an oyster farmer. Someone who could speak convincingly to the alienated, broken people of America about economic redistribution.
It turns out that Platner had even more in common with the enfants of the horrors of the online leftist community than people initially assumed. Like them, he published a lot on the Internet. He did this anonymously and used offensive language designed to provoke a reaction. Having read his Reddit archive, I believe his posts, which, in addition to homophobic remarks, include a question about black people's tipping habits, were mischaracterized in early news coverage. He was not some reactionary who now, for some reason, poses as a liberal; In most of his posts, Platner wrote about military issues and the fact that he was the only left-hander in his platoon. He also expressed his disappointment with the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and spoke out several times about racist and brutal police practices. Of course, he didn't type words that would be suitable for a Meet the Press speech. Platner spoke as someone who has listened to a lot of left-wing podcasts.
