Set aside, for a moment, that Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner spent years with a Nazi SS Totenkopf tattoo. Set aside that he blamed sexual assault victims for their predicament, that he called rural white Americans stupid racists, that he advocated political violence, that he mocked a wounded Purple Heart recipient, that he joked about the Virgin Mary being a "skank" and that he joined a hookup site while married.

Who among us is a saint, after all?

The more interesting question is why Democrats have shown such loyalty to him.

After hearing so much about Platner's everyman appeal, I went down a rabbit hole, watching his speeches and listening to his interviews. Virtually every one of them is crammed with brain-numbing platitudes and freshman-level socialist sloganeering. His rhetoric makes former Vice President Kamala Harris sound weighty by comparison.

"This is a race about performative politics they're used to," Platner told a crowd recently. "What they don't understand is that this is a race about us."

This kind of banality, and there is a lot of it, calls to mind Lt. Frank Drebin trying to win over the love of his life in "The Naked Gun" by telling her that "maybe the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans ... but this is our hill, and these are our beans."

The late philosopher Daniel Dennett called phrases like this "deepities" – words that create the impression of moral and emotional weight while offering no actual insight.

Obviously, most politicians traffic in deepities to some extent. Platner, however, can spew inane class-war cliches for an hour without wandering anywhere near a deeper thought.

That is because Platner is the embodiment of performative left-wing populism. His cosplay working-man candidacy was created by Faiz Shakir and Ben Wikler, two Ivy League-educated former Bernie Sanders staffers. 

"Part of the thesis here is that people don't want candidates who are grown in a vat," Wikler recently said. "They want people who are real human beings. And they want people who do not look and sound like the people who have been leading this country off a cliff the last century."

In other words, Platner is not a compelling organic candidate. He is a man who can play a part. Democrats have lost working-class voters to Republican populists, so they have become enamored with the idea of running someone who carries the aesthetic qualities of one. That is my thesis.

"If we want folks that are representing us from the working class, they're not necessarily going to have a groomed and perfect political record," a Maine voter recently told Fox News, repeating a common talking point.

But is the progressive impression of working-class "folks" really that they get Nazi tattoos, fantasize about rape and murder, and cheat on their wives? Because that seems like an insulting stereotype. 

As James Kirchick notes, people used to say Donald Trump "was a poor person's idea of a rich person." Platner, he says, "is a rich person's idea of a poor person."

Weirdly, Platner's many controversies may have obscured his political radicalism. Wikler and other Bernie acolytes should be honest and decry not merely the past century but the past 250 years, because progressives detest the constitutional order. 

You can hear it in Platner's appearance on a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist's podcast – "longtime fan," the Maine Senate candidate says – where he derides the American "system" and depicts the United States, the wealthiest country on the planet, as a hellhole.

Now, Platner may well win Maine. Maybe class resentment and Marxism are our future. But his politics – not only "taking back" what was allegedly stolen by the rich but also supporting all the cultural quackery the woke Left has inflicted on the country – are far more closely aligned with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than with the average working-class American.

Even if Platner were a member of the proletariat, would that be enough? 

Millions of working-class Americans successfully navigate the world without being sleazeballs. It would be helpful to bring their perspectives and experiences to Washington. Platner, born into privilege, will not. He bought his house with help from his wealthy father and VA disability benefits. His oyster-farming business may have been created after he decided to run for Senate. Whatever the case, it appears his only real customer is his wealthy mother's restaurant.

And that is fine. There is nothing wrong with relying on family. There is nothing wrong with being rich. There is something wrong with mischaracterizing your life to mislead voters.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, "How To Kill a Republic," available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. 

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