Graham Platner and ‘New Wave left’ detest Western exceptionalism

How many scandals can beset a major party Senate candidate before the party jettisons him or her? How extreme can such a candidate become before he or she is dumped?  

If you’re part of the Democrat party apparatus in Maine, the answer seems to be that nothing is too extreme. Nothing is too scandalous.  

By this point, everyone has heard the sordid stories of Graham Platner. The allegations that he twisted an ex’s arm and yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument (he has denied this). The admittance of sexting women shortly after getting married. The mocking of Purple Heart recipients. Calling army soldiers fat, lazy trash, and seemingly wishing their death. Slandering rural Americans as racist and stupid, and blacks, because they “don’t tip.” The porta-john masturbation cringe musings and much more.   

Candidate Platner writes off all these personal misgivings as trivial foibles and says it’s his politics that count. The mindless groupthink Democrats fall right into line. “Maybe we focus on the issues facing the American people,” squirmed his patron saint, Sen. Bernie Sanders.   

But the real obscenity of Graham Platner is not his personal misdeeds. Rather, it’s his politics.   

He has openly embraced communism, which slaughtered 100 million people in the 20th century while oppressing and impoverishing many more. He sported a tattoo like the ones worn by Hitler’s SS at death camps that killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

Sleepwalking Democrats have leveled charges of fascism so habitually, in such zombie-like fashion, that they don’t even recognize real Nazism when in their midst.  

In short, Platner is part of the New Wave left, making common cause with extremists, socialists, and Islamists. It sports an empty form of political narcissism, the con job of a Robin Hood movement pretending to rescue us from fake oppression scenarios. This so it can moralize its way into office on a platform of failed ideas that build nothing other than race and class resentments and government dependency. The substance of civilizational failure. 

This new left seems to detest Western exceptionalism — an exceptionalism that has enriched and liberated billions of people, more than any civilization ever. Even our poorest today are wealthier than over 90% of the rest of the world.  

Graham Platner would have been dismissed as unacceptable in the Democratic Party just a decade ago. So what does his embrace tell us about modern-day Democrats and where they are headed? 

This tells us that the party has a weak bench. It’s no secret that working-class voters — the core base for Democrats since the New Deal — are abandoning Democrats, as are many other groups. Seven in 10 voters think the party is too extreme and out of touch.  

To rebuild, the party could go back to the center or lunge to the socialist left. Led by its activist class, it’s choosing the latter.  

But very few on the socialist left have ever built a business, or anything else for that matter. AOC was a bartender before her election to Congress in 2018. 

Bernie Sanders is a career politician, suckling on the taxpayer teat nearly all his career. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, the far left knows nothing about creating prosperity; its leaders just think that it somehow exists and that the only interesting question is how to redistribute it. 

This means the New Wave Democrat movement doesn’t really know much about building through discovery, innovation, and growth — the hard stuff that grows the economic pie and secures our future. Many on the left are like nepo-babies, knowing only how to take from government payrolls, government-funded NGOs, and George Soros-like ideological philanthropy.  

First, this is why the new breed Democratic bench will be a thinner one, attracting novices, activists, and extremists like the terrorist-linked Adam Hamawy, who won the Democratic nomination in New Jersey with the backing of Democratic socialists in Congress. This toxicity will deter more serious candidates.  

Second, the Platner conundrum also tells us this New Wave Democrat is myopic. Democrats across the country will be badgered all fall with questions about supporting the Nazi-tattooed, Hamas-supporting, self-described communist. When they try to dodge, as Sen. Chris Murphy clumsily did last Sunday, they will be seen as weak, cowardly, and out of touch by normie voters. 

Third, Platner conveys that Democrats are situational, insincere moralists, whose collective heads exploded at every one of Trump’s transgressions but who stared at their shoelaces when it came to one of their own. 

Finally, the Platner phenomenon tells us of the cowardice of the party’s moderates. When I worked years ago at the House Judiciary Committee alongside Senator Schumer, then a proud centrist, he would always talk about the importance of saying “no” to the hard left. Who would have thought that years later he would be so intimidated by online activists that he would coddle a candidate cheering the genocidal Hamas today.   

Ultimately, it is this cowardice of party leaders who know better that is leading to the party’s decadent decline.  

Julian Epstein has served as chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats and staff director of the House Oversight Committee.