"A Better American Dream"

“If there is an America on the other side of this, it will have to be a different country, a better one, based on the restoration of hopes….a broader sense of the future, a better American dream.” —Timothy Snyder, 11/22/25

He says it all here, and it seems as if most of us feel that intuitively, and are groping to consider what it can mean. One thing we can say for Trump— he has shown us that radical change IS possible. How he does throw billions around! All intended to harm us. What if we did the same? We’d invest in healthcare, science, reparations to descendants of slaves, ending the racial and gender income gaps.

Another thing we’ve learned from Trump: white male supremacy runs through our culture like a poisoned underground river. We all drink from it—it empowers a few while sickening most, and Trump’s election triggered a flash flood. All the gains Democrats have made over the last 60 years: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights—the simple human right to respect and dignity— are under attack. In an immense backlash, heralded by Charlottesville tiki-torchbearers who bellowed “Jews will not replace us!”, most of us have found ourselves targeted in some way.

Trump tipped us off in the very beginning when he cruelly mocked a disabled reporter. No one will escape unscathed, but some are first in line: from General Charles Q Brown who was fired from the military for his work on DEI initiatives, to Cigi Graham who died of heart failure at 34 because no doctor would treat her for fear of abortion laws, to the men and women hopelessly locked in ICE concentration camps, the dark-skinned are at risk right now. 1

It says something that as I read the stories I’m gathering to link, I could hear in the back of my mind the casual and hateful excuses people would make for Trump, ICE, and doctors who swore to “First, do no harm,” but decided instead to save themselves a lawsuit. A coarseness, a glad willingness to shrug or even laugh at the misery of others, has begun to permeate the culture, feeding the cruelty around us.

The Supreme Court majority is as white supremacist as the KKK, but their destruction of the Voting Rights Act was also very pragmatic: if Black voters aren’t able to make themselves heard, the Democratic Party will never be able to come back into power.

That’s okay with The Left™. They dream of annihilating the “Democratic Establishment” and the “Democratic base”….those phrases are everywhere, held out (amusingly) as a representative of evil. And our punditocracy, our consultants, our intellectuals, like our Left™ , tend to be white men, who live in circles dominated by other white men, who socialize mostly with upper class white people, in white upper class areas. SCOTUS’ Dobbs decision went down easy—their daughters will have their abortions. They know their kids aren’t at risk of death by cop.

And Callais? As Jake Grumbach argued in Slate last month, liberal pundits paved the way. While the right wing was drawing up point by point plans for a white supremacist tyranny and installing the Supreme Court that could carry those plans out, these guys were going about “polarization,” treating racism as a symptom rather than a cause.

We built serious institutions around this diagnosis. Duke opened its Polarization Lab. Princeton launched its Bridging Divides Initiative. No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars. Braver Angels held town halls. The Carnegie Foundation offered prestigious fellowships, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened a blue-ribbon commission. Ezra Klein’s bestselling book didn’t seek to answer why democracy is dying, but Why We’re Polarized.

When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. 2

But an evasion it is, an evasion I can, to some extent, understand. It is hard to talk about the crisis at the center of the American history: we began as slavekeepers and in spite of fighting a Civil War to end that annihilating horror, we have never really been able to look it in the face. It’s easier not to bring it up at all. But, how polarized are we when the right deplores ‘wokism’ while The Left™ deplores ‘identity politics’? They are awfully similar ideas. The right is comfortable shouting its racism while The Left™ insists that if we just ignore racial and gender differences and think only about money, everything will work out fine.

Democrats in the state of Maine have elected a well packaged candidate as their nominee, hoping to overcome Susan Collins’ long reign as Senator by bringing more white people into the fold. (This seems odd given that Maine voted for Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, but that’s the strategy. ) Our Revolution, Bernie Sanders’ organization and its associated PAC, endorsed Platner, over Maine’s Governor, Janet Mills. They also endorsed James Talarico over Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett in Texas’s Senatorial race. Two white men, each with less experience and success than his female, in one case Black female, Democratic rival. I wouldn’t want to commit identity politics by questioning this pattern.

Unlike Talarico, Platner is a big problem, and growing by the day. Here’s Tressie McMillan Cottom in The New York Times, November 2025:

This country is being ruled by a powerful minority that espouses deplorable minority views that polling shows a majority of voters in this country disagree with. That is the big problem.

It is also the same problem as a guy wearing a Nazi tattoo.

I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. [Senators who endorsed Platner in spite of his tattoo.] But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns.

These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.3

A willful blindness. And since November, Cottam’s words have been borne out, as the depth of Platner’s misogyny has become clear. And the outcry from his supporters, as if the women he has abused and demeaned are somehow in the wrong for telling the truth!

As Rebecca Solnit wrote on Facebook:

You either believe in universal human rights or you don't, and if you don't you're really part of the regressive right. That applies very clearly to all the men who think they're torchbearers of the left and also think women and everyone should shut up about violence against women and misogyny and support men who are perpetrators or that women's rights are just not an issue…..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.” Our culture is built to eternally forgive men, generally, and white men of means, especially, for their mistakes. Every single time, they were young and immature and it would be a shame to hold them accountable for anything they did wrong. The rest of us just need to be strong-armed into the forgiving and forgetting portion of the program.

When Democrats overlook the power of a rising Democratic Congresswoman and a Democratic Governor who has fiercely fought Trump, are we doing everything to maximize our hopes in the Senate, or are we pushing aside the people who have already been doing the work? Are we trading our integrity for white male supremacy, just when we most need multiracial, human rights centered leadership? Every single Democrat on the campaign trail this fall will have to answer for Platner—and in the process many will head down the slippery slope of racist, misogynist regression that Trump is leading and the Supreme Court is racing to write into law.

Writing this, I’m bracing for more casually hateful remarks. They’ve been flying fast and furious lately at people who recoil from Nazi symbols and the abuse of women. Ken Klippenstein, once The Nation’s DC Correspondent, wrote about Platner: “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg are his examples of ‘smooth groins’, and he describes Governor Janet Mills in the same piece as “shitting out her dentures”. He’s a creep, and Graham Platner is making him feel proud of being a creep, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the course of one brief essay he made demeaning jokes about a Black man, a gay man, and a woman, all of whom have been working for Democracy their whole lives. 4

We are in this together. When some of us are belittled we all suffer. Our ‘better American Dream’ has to be rooted in universal human rights, or yes, we will all have become part of the regressive right. We can’t evade the truth of racism, not even if we do it in a very intellectual and sophisticated way. We can’t be willfully blind to misogyny even if we’re looking for the misogynist vote. Each of us has to stand our ground and demand integrity from those who would be our leaders, and from ourselves, every day, even when it’s hard. We cannot use this chance at a better American Dream to create white male supremacy 2.0, slap a socialist frill on it, and call it progress.

Share

Leave a comment