Graham Platner is an oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran who’s running for the United States Senate in Maine. He’s trying to knock off Susan Collins, the Republican who has been in office some three decades. He’s presented himself as a common-man candidate who stands against oligarchy, genocide and the oppression of the little guy. 

While he looks good in broad strokes, the details are now in view. He said questionable things about Black people, gay people, and women years ago. Those could have been overcome, but they don’t matter now, as news about his Nazi tattoo has pushed them aside. Here’s the AP:

“He got the skull and crossbones tattoo in 2007, when he was in his 20s and in the Marine Corps. It happened during a night of drinking while he was on leave in Croatia, he said, adding he was unaware until recently that the image has been associated with Nazi police.”

Among the questions is the big one: If he didn’t know the tattoo was a Totenkopf, or Nazi “death’s head,” did he really not understand what it was during the intervening two decades? The Totenkopf is “the specific symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, or SS, which was responsible for the systematic murders of millions of Jews and others in Europe during World War II,” according to the Associated Press. 

No one told him about that? He never bothered to find out for himself about that? He claims to be a student of history, tearing through one book after another as a boy. Yet the symbol of mass death escaped his attention. And if it didn’t, why did he wait until now to cover it up? 

Beyond this, however, is the absence of contrition. Platner broke the news himself. He went to Pod Save America about the tattoo in anticipation of opposition research that was about to come to light. During that interview, however, Platner did not express regret. 

Platner acknowledged that it looked like a Nazi tattoo (no, it is a Nazi tattoo), but instead of accepting responsibility, he offered excuses – that was young and drunk and full of piss when he got it and that he was cleared by national security protocols that ban the symbols of hate, but most preposterously, that no one had ever mentioned it before. (An anonymous source, who knew Platner during his years in Washington, told Jewish Insider that Platner was very much aware of its origins: “He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf.’ He said it in a cutesy little way.”

While Platner was busy deflecting, he missed the fact that Democrats have a deep capacity for forgiving sinners if they ask for forgiveness.

In Platner’s case, there is a veritable desire to forgive, as he presents himself as a warrior prepared to fight the powers-that-be. This is hugely attractive, as normal people are falling farther and farther behind – their rights are being stripped as bare as their wallets – while the Democrats, many of them anyway, seem to be satisfied with appeasing elites who are scamming and looting the rest of us. 

I can’t know what the future would have been, but I’m guessing a goodly number of potential supporters would have been willing, even eager, to overlook Platner’s transgressions, in the service of his anti-establishment politics, if he had expressed a measure of regret. 

As is it, he’s giving anti-establishment politics a bad name. He’s forcing allies to embrace absurdities. Here’s The Majority Report’s Emma Vigeland*: “Censorious, hall monitor liberalism that refuses to accept growth in people — unless you’re a corporate centrist and all is forgiven, just ask Cuomo supporters — is far more of a threat to the Democratic Party’s chances in the future than anything dug up on Graham Platner.”

But growth requires humility and there’s no sign of that.

In another earlier post, Emma Vigeland said: “How many people get tattoos that they thought looked cool, but didn’t understand the meaning of? How many vets took mercenary work for a period because the US doesn’t support them? How many young men have shitposted online? Do we want an authentic working-class party or not?”

I don’t know why she’s choosing to indirectly smear working-class folks as ignorant, violent or profane, but let’s focus on that last part, the implied argument that supporting a working-class candidate will attract more working-class Americans to expand the Democratic Party to a national majority sizable enough to defeat the powers-that-be.

Because it’s funny. 

As far as I can tell, Graham Platner hasn’t said outright that “I am Joe Sixpack – vote for me.” But he has performed the part impressively. He has allowed media allies as diverse as The Majority Report and Pod Save America to believe he is. And that’s where the problem begins. (In launching his campaign, he said: “I’m a veteran, oysterman, and working-class Mainer who’s seen this state become unlivable for working people. And that makes me deeply angry.”) 

He’s not working class. 

His mom is an entrepreneur. His dad is an attorney. His grandpa was the modernist architect and furniture designer Warren Platner, who worked with the firm that, among other things, designed Dulles International Airport and a college at Yale. (There are chairs, literal chairs, named after him.) Graham Platner started up his oyster farm with the family’s financial assistance. And that’s not even the best part. 

For my money, the best part is that Graham Platner attended a “private, independent college preparatory high school” in Bangor, Maine, according to Wikipedia, called John Bapst Memorial. While it’s apparently true that genuinely working-class kids can afford the tuition at Bapst thanks to public support, it’s also true that no credible definition of “working class” includes access to an elite institution for the son of an attorney, who is the son of an eminent architect, who left his mark on an elite institution (Yale), arguably America’s most elite. 

(I’m going out on a limb here with my definition of “working class.” For now, I’m asking you to go on faith. I grew up in a trailer. My dad was a truck driver. My mom was a homemaker. We had enough, but they didn’t know lawyers. They sure as hell didn’t know architects. Those people were untouchable. And my high school is so small and rural and working class that no one has bothered writing a Wiki entry about it.) 

None of this is to say that a decent man of integrity from a respectable bourgeois background cannot be a champion of the masses. Solidarity against the ruling oligarchy does not require warriors for the working class to be of the working class. After all, Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t. 

Solidarity requires trust, though, which brings me back to the tattoo.

Why are some progressives – the kind who listen to The Majority Report and Pod Save America – so willing to deny, overlook or rationalize the fact of it? Even US Senator Bernie Sanders, whose roots are truly working class, said: “There’s a young man who served his country in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he went through some really difficult experiences seeing friends of his killed or whatever, and in spite of all of that he had the courage to run … I’m going to support him.”

The answer is not that Graham Platner is working class, because he is not. However, he is something. He has something. It’s so powerful that it can force otherwise intelligent people of good faith who long for economic justice to see nothing especially wrong with getting the symbol of systematic murder memorialized on one’s body. It’s so valuable that none of them is blushing with shame after Platner made the Totenkopf seem no more hateful or homicidal than a Jolly Roger.

“Years ago I got a skull and crossbones tattoo with my buddies in the Marine Corps,” Platner said yesterday. “I was appalled to learn it closely resembled a Nazi symbol. I altered it yesterday, into something that isn’t deeply offensive to my core beliefs. I am very sorry to all of you who had to contemplate a symbol of hate over the past 48 hours.”

What he has is the power to overwhelm the truth in the service of his goals. That doesn’t come from being a working-class man. It comes from being a white man. He is not invoking the solidarity of class.

He’s invoking the solidarity of race.

This is Maine we’re talking about. Centering whiteness may not be any more detrimental to Graham Platner there than it is to Bernie Sanders in Vermont. Success probably depends on voters accepting implicitly that “working class” means white – and that whiteness holds the promise of liberation from the oppression of class in America. 

That’s why Platner isn’t apologizing for his tattoo. That’s why he’s covering it up and never speaking of it again. He must put race in the background, especially the race of those he’s courting. If there’s one thing most candidates avoid, it’s reminding white voters they’re white.

*Correction: I originally wrote that Vigeland works for The Young Turks. She doesn’t. She works for The Majority Report. I regret the error.