Graham Platner of Maine, the oysterman who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, is in big trouble because of a tattoo that he got while in the Marines that closely resembles the
Totenkopf, a death tattoo favored by Nazis. He also spewed out racist and anti-gay social media rants, for which he has since apologized.
But as our colleague David Dayen has pointed out, Platner is the grandson of celebrity architect and designer Warren Platner, a collaborator of Eero Saarinen. His father, Bronson Platner, is a prominent Maine lawyer. He attended an expensive prep school, the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.
Deciding to pursue an occupation that signals “working class,” such as oysterman, is Platner’s right, but it’s not the same as coming from the working class. When he displays his occupation as a political badge of class, it’s performative.
In Platner’s case, we may even have the worst of both worlds. Earlier in his life, he displayed some of the ugliness associated with working-class rage, and he’s not even working-class.
Some of the greatest working-class champions, beginning with FDR, were well-to-do class traitors. And some people rose up from the working class, such as Vice President JD Vance, who was saved from destitution by New Dealer grandparents and grew up to be a plutocrat whose famous book blamed poverty on low character rather than disparities of power. The real class traitor is Vance, a world-class fake.
Conversely, when Ted Kennedy, one of the great champions of legislation to help working people, first ran for the Senate in 1962, he was 30 years old and was inheriting a seat from his brother Jack that had been kept warm for him by a family retainer until he was old enough to run. Campaigning at a factory gate, Teddy encountered a burly worker coming off the graveyard shift.
Worker: “You’re a rich kid. You’ve probably never worked a day in your life.”
Kennedy: “Ye-es, I guess you could say that.”
Worker: “You ain’t missed a thing.”
There’s another complication with the effort to recruit working-class candidates. As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes in an important recent op-ed, “working class” is often code for white working class. “[T]he working class in this country looks more like a Latino woman who cleans houses than it looks like Platner,” she writes. And she adds, “Racism is not a natural condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people’s political power.”
However, the best of the groups trying to combine working-class with multiracial get that. Working Families Party candidate recruits are a rainbow. Having more working-class people in office, especially in local offices where they have a more realistic chance of getting elected, can help. Yet even Zohran Mamdani, the latest Democratic champion of class politics, is the college-educated son of a filmmaker and a Columbia University professor.
Mamdani understands the frustrations of working families—poor and middle class—as well as anyone in America and has the gift of turning them into compelling politics. And unlike Fetterman, he wears suits and neckties.
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