PATRICK LAWRENCE: My Bigotry Is Better Than Yours

Graham Platner, a combat veteran running a Democratic primary campaign for a Maine seat in the U.S. Senate, is getting hit with caricatures, which is the worst form of bigotry. Let’s look at him in 3-D. 

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News        CN at 30 years

Jiminy Crickets. I hope this guy Graham Platner, who proposes to stand for a Maine U.S. Senate seat come next year’s elections, keeps in mind the Sinatra Principle, as I’ll call it: It doesn’t matter what they say so long as they spell your name right. 

Platner has been taking it from many sides since a podcast made public a couple of weeks ago featured a video of him with a tattoo on his chest that resembles the Totenkopf skull-and-bones favored by the Nazi’s Schutzstaffel, the infamous SS. Bigot, racist, closet Nazi symp: All these epithets and many more now drop atop Platner’s head, as if they were the guano of the seagulls with which he daily lives. 

Platner, you see, is an oysterman — and I defend all oystermen as a matter of principle for the pleasures they provide us — in Ellsworth, a slightly hardscrabble town adjacent to other-than-hardscrabble Bar Harbor along Maine’s upper oceanfront.

But never mind who Platner, a 41–year-old veteran with tours as a Marine and a security contractor in Iraq (three) and Afghanistan (one) may be, or what he has to say for himself, and — certainly not — what he stands for, the planks in his political platform. 

Labels, looks, appearances, long-ago scribbles in social media, any kind of “gotcha” excavated from the past, in Platner’s case a tattoo: These are what count in American politics these days. This is the stuff of our wobbling republic’s discourse.

No wonder Americans wander lost and lonely through the 21st century. No wonder Americans cannot make anything of themselves. No wonder so few can stir themselves even as a genocide is conducted in their names.   

I have long argued that Americans, all but a fine few, are and have always been a fundamentally illiberal people — intolerant, grotesquely conformist, condemning of difference, indifferent to suffering. This goes back to our 17th century beginnings.

De Tocqueville dissected this attribute in Democracy in America 190 years ago. Stephen Hahn ably (if illiberally) documented it just last year in his Illiberal America: A History (Norton, 2024).  

The Illiberalism of Liberals

It is the illiberalism of liberals that gets my goat. This has been especially evident since the Era of Trump began nine years ago. American liberals stand strong and tall for “liberalism,” with quotation marks. But when some turn of events reveals them as they are, they reliably prove to be made of the old chauvinistic stuff. 

So it is in the case of Graham Platner. He plans to run for the Senate as a Democrat. And how curious, case in point, that it is illiberal liberals who emerge as his most vituperative enemies. My bigotry is better than your bigotry, they may as well say. 

Platner dislikes labels, as Austin Ahlman noted in a pretty good profile in The American Prospect last August. This is greatly to his credit, even as his critics desperately plaster labels all over him so as to dispose of him. 

No, he does not come across as a bigot or a racist or a neo–Nazi — not if you listen to him. And no, he does not want to be a liberal or a progressive, and certainly not a “centrist,” as he makes plain whenever the topic arises.

“I’m a waterman who works in the ocean with his hands,” he said when The New York Times interviewed him over the summer. “Even if I tried to put myself into the buckets that we as a society have created, I don’t fit into any of them.”

This is for damn sure. And as Platner seems to understand, once people affix you with a label or drop you in a bucket they don’t have to think about you anymore. This is one reason our public discourse has become so unproductive, not to say juvenile.

Skip the Labels

Let’s skip the labels, then, and see what we can learn about ourselves from the responses to Platner coming from the pols and pundits.

Now that he has drawn so much attention south of Maine, Graham Platner is more or less hopelessly typecast as a working-class white man emblematic of millions of other working-class white men — the old “basket of deplorables” illiberal liberals mark down as bigots, racists, etc. But the Democrats are divided on this point. 

Various mainstream Democrats — Chris Murphy, the Connecticut senator, is an on-the-record case in point — think Platner can help them connect with all those white working-class people, men and women, the party so cavalierly abandoned when it decided it was the party of the Williams–Sonoma set — brattish, unconscious illiberals who cannot understand why anyone anywhere would not want to be just like them. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, stands with this camp, too, while war-mongering neoliberals at the Clinton-Biden end of the party seem to want nothing to do with a man who challenges the orthodox order.

But the party’s “left” and “progressives” — most of these people need quotation marks at every turn — prefer simply to call Platner the same names they use for everyone Platner is supposed to stand for.

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This is wrong first crack out of the box.  

Oystering is hard, grimy work, yes, and Platner looks the part: working man’s beard, baseball cap, dirty T–shirt, legs like telephone poles, and, of course, the tattoos. Now for the 3–D Graham Platner. 

He was born in 1984 in Blue Hill, another of the affluent towns you find along the Maine coast. His father is an attorney, and he is the grandson of Warren Platner, a celebrated modern architect. When it came time for high school, Platner’s parents sent him to Hotchkiss, and it does not get much more exclusive in the New England boarding school scene. He finished up at John Bapst Memorial, a top-tier prep school in Bangor.

On graduating, in 2003, Platner went right into the Marines and deployed in Iraq two years later, joining Bush II’s invasion force. Two more tours followed, and then some undergraduate work at The George Washington University in D.C. By 2018, Platner was deploying in Kabul, this time working for Constellis, the rechristened Blackwater, the mercenary operation whose reputation is so bad it has to keep changing its name. 

It was in 2007 when the 23–year-old Marine got the skull-and-bones tattoo while on shore leave, and schnockered by his own admission, in Croatia (home of the World War II-era Ustasha fascist movement). During the later years of his military service and the first few years after his discharge (with PTSD), Platner started posting things on social media that, having just come to light, also have him in some trouble with his critics. 

There were posts offensive to gays and others that minimized incidents of sexual assault in the military. But there is something very odd about Platner’s social media history. Along with the homophobia and the sexism, there were other posts denouncing racism, ignorance and the police while encouraging — vigorously to put it mildly — mass resistance to the inequality and exploitation long endemic in these United States. “An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice,” one post is reported to have said.

There is something odd altogether about Platner’s youthful record. He enlisted in the Marines but had denounced Bush II’s Iraq adventure even before graduating from high school — where he had also demonstrated in behalf of Kurds, Tibetans and Palestinians.  

A handful of Graham Platner’s old Reddit posts have been cherry-picked to make him look like a far-right reactionary.

A look at the whole archive of his posts shows that it’s the exact opposite: https://t.co/mf9JfmJTyu pic.twitter.com/NK3PelW7ax

— Jacobin (@jacobin) October 27, 2025

Platner was deeply disillusioned with the military-industrial complex by the time he was discharged, having seen it first-hand for many years. It was then he went back to Maine and started oystering, serving as harbormaster, getting married, and getting up to various kinds of local political advocacy. 

And starting a Senate campaign. 

If you have a neat label for this man, please share it in the comment thread. I can’t think of one. 

My surmise: 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. 

One detail in Platner’s story piques my curiosity. That tattoo that has so many people aflame was first videoed a decade ago while Platner was dancing shirtless at his brother’s wedding, lip-syncing some pop-rock song I never heard of. Typical Hotchkiss man, I thought — “wild man on the loose,” to borrow from the old Mose Allison lyric.

Platner was 30 at the time, if I reckon the calendar correctly. I knew a lot of guys like that in my day. They are now physicians, professors, fund managers, (dare I mention it) journalists. And so what?

Platner’s website does not yet present a political platform. From what you can find skating around the web, he is harshly critical of Janet Mills, Maine’s 77-year-old governor and now a Democratic primary  opponent for the Senate seat (who is harshly critical of him). His focus, unlike Mills’, is on the concerns of working Americans—any color, any gender: economic equality, housing people can afford, public-sector investment at home and an end to our wasteful wars of adventure, universal health care. Platner is vehement in his denunciations of the Israelis’ genocide in Gaza.  

“I think it’s silly that thinking people deserve health care, that makes you some kind of lefty,” Platner said in The New York Times interview I cited earlier. “But I do think those working-class policies are necessary.”

There are only two alternatives here. Either Platner has found his way and is walking it, or he is a neo–Nazi-racist-bigot-what-have-you pretending to stand for what any serious pol with principles and guts should stand for at this point in the American story.

Either you take Graham Platner as who he says he is, 3–D, or you obsess on a young man’s (mis)adventurous past and paste a label on him. It beggars belief how many people pretending to intelligence are of the latter persuasion. 

From The New York Times Opinion Page 

An extreme but not untypical case comes to us from the Times’ opinion page, where Tressie McMillan Cottom published a column in Wednesday’s editions under the headline, “A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness.” I honestly had to read this thing three times before recognizing there is no making sense of incoherence of this magnitude. 

This mess starts at the beginning. Here is Cottom’s lead paragraph: 

“All you have to do is take a passing glance at Graham Platner, a progressive candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, to understand why so many Democrats have been frothing at the mouth over his candidacy for months. His beefy tattooed arms and weathered face made him look like a live-action Popeye. He’s often styled in a dirty ball cap and ragged T-shirt, implying a sort of everyman machismo.”

All you have to do is glance at him and you understand? Say whaaa? 

There is more of this later in the piece: 

“I find it hard to imagine that we would be having this conversation at all were Platner anything other than a fit middle-aged white guy who dresses like a stock photo of a ‘real man.’ ”

I find it hard to imagine where the Times comes up with these people. Labels and appearances: This passes as credible comment on the opinion page of the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record. Not one syllable about Platner’s political program, his position on this, that or the other question. Nothing. Name-calling, innuendo, many miles run on the tattoo theme: Cast it in faux-scholarly rhetoric and you’re good to go, as they say in the military. 

Let me try something and we see how it reads to Ms. Cottom. What if I began a piece, “All you have to do is take a passing glance at Tressie McMillan Cottom and you understand why she is an opinion writer at The New York Times?”

I wouldn’t ever want to write such sentence — contemptuous and bigoted as it is — and I would never survive this sentence were I actually to write it. But what thinkest, Ms. Cottom, as you have written it just this way? 

Please don’t make me conclude that bigotry and contempt for others is acceptable in one direction and not in the other. That would reflect very badly on our national “conversation,” as Ms. Cottom puts it. 

I was interested to read, just a week before Tressie McMillan Cottom published her other-than-forthright piece, another on the same page addressing just the sort of questions Cottom raises. “The Rot Creeping Into Our Minds” is an astute account of our pitiful political state from David Brooks, the thinking man’s conservative, if you do not find such a thought too befuddling.

Brooks dilates on the “the cynicism that has penetrated the American mind.” He is writing about politicians, but the thought applies across the board, it seems to me.  

“In a diseased democracy such as ours,” he writes, “all the decent rules and arrangements are destroyed. Anything goes.” There is no longer serious debate, attempts at persuasion, or any such civilized thing, he means to say. Where there was once political discourse we now have name-calling, labeling, “cancel culture,” lunges for power, and all manner of distortion. 

Brooks describes American illiberalism made flesh. This is what we see in the treatment Graham Platner gets from those who oppose him for one or another reason. We can no longer talk to one another in our diseased democracy — or even see one another for what we are. We can no longer manage each other’s complexities. We tend to trade in only caricatures. It is the worst kind of bigotry.  

I do not vote and, so, take no position on Platner the Democratic candidate, other than to say I hope he goes on being Graham Platner, his name the only label that suits him. 

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored. 

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