Truck Nutz for Democrats

I don’t think you could call Graham Platner a poseur.

His campaign certainly stretched the truth into phoniness; that it’s strange to refer to him as “working class” has been covered pretty comprehensively. As Harjas Sandhu memorably put it, “the whole thing still kind of reeks of stolen oyster farmer valor.” It made me wonder if he was just a loudmouth; his reddit posts are of the 2edgy4u type that you would expect were that the case.

But a poseur is the kind of guy who talks a big game, but who shrinks from the actual arena. To his dis/credit, that’s not who Platner is. He really did live the rough-and-tumble life he posted about and has become known for, from his military service to his alleged assault of multiple women. I basically agree with John Ganz’s assessment:

I think he’s an adventurer type and a bit of a lost soul. Exactly the kind of person who might start in a privileged or, at least, genteel milieu and then seek out more authentic and exciting experiences … There’s an air of buffoonery about the whole thing.

In my experience, these guys are also dealing with a type of insecurity—sometimes the fear that they don’t measure up, but often just in the sense that they’re more reliant on external affirmation than is good for them—and have strong need to prove themselves, often especially to prove their masculinity. They get in the arena on impulse, which reliably causes problems. They’re the guys who will get shitfaced with the boys, get tattoos on a dare, and egg each other on until someone walks home with a Totenkopf. A lot of people are drawn to this apparent confidence. But these guys don’t take responsibility for the messes they make. When they’re confronted with failure, they find a way to angrily blame everyone else, and storm off to the next misadventure. The people drawn to them are caught repeatedly bailing them out.1

This, to me, makes sense of the discourse around his class. He’s the downwardly-mobile son of a couple who do ok for themselves, like some other men I’ve known with a consistent history of acting out and poor decision making. They don’t do well when it comes to investing in their future. They buy fast cars and big trucks.

As Phoebe Maltz Bovy noted, this is not model masculinity for most Americans:

[T]hey are men who seem off in a way that registers. They might be a guy other guys go get a beer with, but he’d be known as, you know, that guy, you know the one.

It’s not that uncommon or necessarily pathological, though in Graham Platner’s case it feels safe to say that something is pretty seriously out of alignment. It’s all just to say that the same way people look at a truck with plastic nuts hanging off the hitch and say, instinctually, “Compensating for something?” a lot of people look at That Guy pulling some nonsense and think, “What’s he trying to prove?”

But ultimately, I’m less worried about his damage than I am about ours.

I think it’s uncontroversial to say that Graham Platner was encouraged to run based on aesthetic appeal. His candidacy was intended to generate excitement over the prospect of a masculine, working class Democrat in an era of insecurity regarding the supposed “feminization” of the party and a realignment of class politics. He looks, as Trump would say, straight out of central casting—and from what I’ve read, his recruiters really did fall over themselves like the director who exclaims, against all better judgement, “it HAS to be him!”2 Ben Krauss, for the Searchlight Institute:

Morris Katz, another strategist behind the Platner campaign, said, “Within, like, five minutes I was thinking, Holy shit, this guy can help save the Democratic Party.” Five minutes isn’t enough to understand someone’s worldview… It’s an admission that you were overly seduced by the political appeal of Platner’s gruff voice and blue-collar aesthetic.

At least since Kennedy mogged Nixon back in 1960, a candidate’s appearance has been an openly-discussed facet of their electoral appeal. I don’t think there’s anything strange or wrong about Moraff’s basic approach—it just runs into problems when instant intoxication with a candidate overrides professional standards and personal judgement. But who can blame him? He was right—Graham Platner was a hit with the party and press, a bona fide Exciting Candidate among political operatives, sympathetic media figures, and the messenger/chattering class. Moira Donegan has noted the connection between Platner’s buzz and “the notion that the Democratic party is losing because it is too feminized,” and must “recast itself in a more macho image” of “unimpeachable heterosexuality.” In a time of anxiety over looking too elitist, too soft, too nagging, the scratchy grizzle of a red-faced American Man was relief incarnate.

Because the New York Times the other day had a piece gesturing back to the hell of the Long 2016, I want to be totally clear—this is not a “Bernie Bro” thing. The party writ large has had this problem for some time now. The hubbub around Gov. Newsom was also driven by the fact that, for Democrats burnt by the Hillary and Kamala campaigns, it’s become common to believe the party can only win if fronted by a Red-Blooded White Man. But like fears of Mexican immigration turning America into a one-party state, or our recurring fixation on Soccer and/or Wine Moms, this argument over manhood says a lot more about those having it than about the broader electorate.

Defenses of Platner as his scandals mounted in particular showcased the gender of it all. Matt Stoller’s “rejection of Dem HR lady politics” was a typical jab. But others would would slip further into this fascinatingly sweaty, libidinal register. I don’t think I’m mistaken in catching a whiff of something strange in Ken Klippenstein celebrating the end of “smoothgroin politicians,” or Jon Lovett’s strangely specific tweet:

Only perfect candidates off the harvard law conveyor belt pls, highly disciplined, all boxes checked, well liked and humble, absolutely no spiritual connection to having a physical body except for severe IBS, volunteered at a soup kitchen in high school, signs email “cheers,” etc.

I think back to the last election, when Tim Walz was discussed as an exemplar of positive masculinity. It was strange, and seems a very long time ago when compared to the performative unwokeness of defending Platner. But the two are closer than they appear—Walz, too, was tokenized in the discourse, shown off as if to say, “See? We can reach men!” already behaving as if we implicitly agreed that the right-wing critics of Democratic feminization had a point. The approach has changed, but in both instances you’re seeing a sort of ideological overcompensation.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy described Platner as, among other things,

the man you think ordinary men would want to have a beer with if you’re a certain sort of man (or woman, maybe!) who never leaves elite-effete-spaces.

and I think that’s basically the crux of it. We know the spaces we’re standing in.

So, if his tattoos and antics were meant to prove his masculinity, Graham Platner was meant to prove ours. The trouble is that, like Truck Nutz swinging off a trailer hitch, tokenizing Platner only highlights how those who did so fail to relate to masculinity in the first place—the overcompensation draws attention to the underlying insecurity.

Back when people were celebrating Walz as a positive message to American men, some of the pushback in progressive spaces was that this message was too patriarchal, as in Jeremy Mohler’s “The problem with praising Tim Walz’s version of masculinity” and Tracy Clark-Flory’s “So, *about* positive masculinity.” This reminds us of the context of all this insecurity—a justified wariness of masculinity, a consensus that old gender scripts are not quite working, and a confusion over what men actually should or could be.

I’ve written before about how I struggled with my gender since puberty. There were plenty of aspects to this, but ideologically, it was characterized by a knee-jerk apprehension toward masculinity, a suspicion that there was “something intrinsic to my masculine nature… that is fundamentally evil,” (Stephen Bradford Long). I absorbed from various angles the message that male sexuality is inherently predatory and requires active suppression, and is, moreover, undesired. When the arguments that we retrospectively call “Woke” came along, I eagerly sought them out. My response to all this was to try way too hard, rigidly policing my behavior and thoughts.

This, of course, did not actually take away my ability to hurt other people. In fact, because my type of insecurity was so much about trying to shape myself into something different, I became worse at honestly recognizing my feelings, opting instead to suppress them, which directly led to mistakes that did hurt others.

It’s only pretty recently that I’ve stopped feeling ambivalence about this stuff, and I’m definitely not your typically functional guy. But the main thing that has helped has been to really prioritize honesty with myself about how I am feeling, and acceptance of it. As I have done that, I have been able to build some confidence in navigating social situations, repairing mistakes rather than refusing to act unless I convince myself I won’t make any.

The defenses of Platner weren’t just an overreaction to be feeling perceived as nebbish by Real America, but also to the often stifling progressive discourse of the last decade. I assume Lovett of Pod Save America remembers how co-host Jon Favreau’s “groping” of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton landed him in some hot water in ‘08, and was relitigated in ‘16 when their Pod was growing. I can see why he might be ready to pop off.

Unfortunately, Graham Platner reminds us that there is a reason people worry about this stuff.

The problem is that that concern—the underlying concern for men as potentially dangerous, the belief that society needs better scripts for men as our role in it changes shape, the fear that this might make other men see us as weird—leads us to treat this way harder than it actually is, acting as if we need to find and celebrate One Good One (who then is perfectly positioned to screw us over). Our collective insecurities lead to weird behaviors trying to fold everything into the right shape and being dishonest with ourselves about it, when there’s really no need.

What’s needed is acceptance, across the board. As explained in Stephen Bradford Long’s piece, men are often dangerous—we shouldn’t run from that fact but recognize that means it’s on us teach each other to be good. Progressives have a lot of ideas about how to do this, but we’re constantly acting like we don’t—internally, afraid to describe anything that sounds too close to a patriarchal honor code or passé chivalry, and externally, as we worry our nagging is scaring the bros.

It’s difficult to get the sort of people who get obsessed with politics to understand, because they are often neurotic control freaks, but people will actually respond more positively to you just being your sometimes off-putting self if you’re willing to work with them. That’s easier to do if you’re not turning yourself into a pretzel over gender discourse. Men agree with these concerns, and want guidance, at least in the weird chattering corners of politics most concerned with the culture war. They’re willing to hash out disagreement. They’re also, mostly, normal guys who are neither squeaky clean Harvard grads nor rapists.

But I hesitate to say, “just recruit normal guys!” The answer is not a specific “kind” of masculinity, whether that’s swinging away from “toxic masculinity” or trying to better emulate “regular guy-ness”; any such prescription repeats the foundational error. The answer is to be the man you are, even if that is a huge dweeb and an honest feminist, even if that is a guy who genuinely finds Truck Nutz super funny. Just try not to be That Guy about it!