Leftist Men Can Be Dirtbags Too

Checking Our Instincts About Defending Graham Platner

Graham Platner faces serious allegations of assault, among a slew of other controversies. Photo: Politico

This was supposed to be a slightly different essay about Graham Platner.

It was supposed to be about my reluctance to get behind his brand of politics despite seeing the desperate need for the electoral Left to embrace working class white men in order to form a winning coalition.

It was also going to be about how I had finally overcome that reluctance.

As it turns out, my reluctance may have been warranted all along.

Graham Platner stands credibly accused of sexual assault. He denies the allegations. In the end, he may be proven innocent.

But even if he is, that would not change how alarmed I have been to see the speed with which some Leftists have rushed to defend him, or to dismiss the allegations outright as nothing more than conveniently timed political libel.

I think it is time to re-open the conversation about Leftist men, and how they behave towards women.

On Chuds

The way I see it, its high time for Leftists to be willing to pay the Chud Tax.

Not everyone who joins our coalition is going to have a squeaky clean political or personal record. Nor should we necessarily hope for that. The Left is a place a lot of people end up after seeing the error of their previous thinking, and we should always be ready to hold the door open for them, rather than slamming it in their face.

After all, the Right is always looking for converts, while the Left is looking for traitors.

They’re Gonna Call You Antifa Anyway

We cannot claim to be a working class movement while applying purity tests better suited to the rarified air of academia and corporate HR departments than the political stump.

If we continue to do so, we will limit our efficacy to the scale of a Bushwick reading circle, rather than an international movement for the liberation of working people.

Graham Platner is a veteran. I have rubbed shoulders with hundreds of veterans from dozens of countries in the last few years. I generally like them a lot, and get a long well with them.

They also tend to be pretty broken people. They tend to be processing a great deal of trauma, guilt, and shame. The reason that I get along with them is that I find that they usually are, or at least were, looking for the same two things that have defined the last decade and a half of my own journey: purpose, and community.

I find them usually through my work in disaster relief, which veterans are drawn to because it offers them–you guessed it–purpose and community.

Disaster Communism

Given my long intimacy with veterans, I find it wholly unsurprising that some 22-year-old chud from the imperial periphery would drunkenly tattoo a Totenkopf on his chest in a Czech bar for no other reason than that he thought it looked really fucking sick at the time.

In the 1960’s, young Americans in the Vietnam war strapped to their tanks and Jeeps the Nazi flags that their fathers had taken as spoils of war from the foxholes of Normandy and the Ardennes and rode into battle.

They did this not because they were secret Nazis, nor because they wanted to provide future Leftist commentators with on-the-nose metaphors about the Cold War transformation of the United States into the Fourth Reich, but because they were chuds.

The handwringing over the Totenkopf tattoo always felt a little silly to people who are familiar with chud behavior. If you’ve never had chud friends, you won’t understand chud behavior, because chud behavior is something rarely experienced in a Bushwick reading circle.

But if you’re from the South, joined the military, or grew up playing sports or really participated in conventionally masculine activities of any kind, then you know chuds.

I also find it wholly unsurprising that, after a few years of being weaponized by the empire in far away places for inexplicable reasons, that same 22-year-old chud would grow up to hate the empire that used his body as a blunt instrument for his best years, and left him a physical and emotional wreck.

I can see how that man would grow embittered at the hollow lip-service this country pays to the men and women it sends to fight our wars while refusing to adequately the treat the physical and psychological wounds those wars leave behind.

I can see how that man might become a Leftist.

You see, we can work with chuds.

We can carve a place for them in the new Left, no matter how much it might exasperate those who grate at the sight of chud behavior.

But we cannot work with evil men.

Good Men Who Do Nothing

Edmund Burke, the 18th Century Irish philosopher who was hardly known as much of a Leftist luminary, once wrote:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

The phrase was popularized by John F. Kennedy, and has become a timeless warning against moral complacency.

Evil men can have good ideas. Graham Platner has some good ideas.

But if Graham Platner is an evil man, then he is not worthy of our support. Because we cannot build good governance with evil men.

I no longer that fear Graham Platner is a chud. I fear he may be an evil man. A man who abuses women. A man who allows his personal pain and shame and anguish alchemize into sexual violence.

I hope this is not true. I am willing to entertain the idea that it is not true.

But knowing the unbelievably high bar women have to meet in order to be believed in their stories about sexual assault, I feel compelled to side with them when they lay what seem like credible allegations at the feet of a prominent progressive.

As for now, that is what this Politico article appears to me to contain.

I don’t care if the timing of the allegations is politically convenient. I don’t care if dropping Platner hurts the Left’s chances of flipping a senate seat. If the allegations are true, none of that matters.

We cannot be the political faction that decries a rapist in the White House while inviting one into our own house.

We cannot be the political faction that turns a blind eye to credible allegations of sexual assault. We have been criticizing the fascist Right for a decade for doing precisely this.

Men, particularly Leftist men, need to fucking do better.

It is why I still cling to the notion, now out-of-fashion on the Left, that any liberation worth the name must place patriarchy, and not merely capitalism, in its sights.

We cannot hope to liberate ourselves while remaining conspicuous in our oppression of women. That is a contradiction that has plagued the Left since before the First International.

Boys Will Be Boys?

I’m really tired of finding out men I’m supposed to agree with are sexual predators who coerce and abuse women. I find it even more heartbreaking when they boast openly about having Leftist politics.

My work as a Leftist writer and content creator has brought me into contact with a tight but growing circle of prominent Leftist female friends. I am grateful that these women feel safe with me, are eager to confide in me, and I hope that I never do anything to make them question that trust.

As a man who came of age during the #MeToo movement, the aftermath of that scandal left an indelible impression on me, and I was grateful that at the time I was still so inexperienced with dating that I had basically avoided falling prey to many the disastrous cultural messages that most men were bombarded with growing up in the United States.

Nevertheless, those cultural messages were still influential on my thinking, and it took the implosion of Hollywood and media in the wake of the Weinstein scandal to drive home just how dangerous those messages truly were.

I will never forget holding the girl I was dating at the time in my arms as she wept recounting the experience of being assaulted by a man in her industry whom she should have been able to trust. She told me she had never felt like she could go public about it, because he was highly regarded in the industry. It would be years before I realized what a ubiquitous experience this was for most women.

That understanding has only grown with time, and with it, my empathy for them and indeed my shame for my fellow men. It is always jarring to have a female friend confide in me that someone whom I’ve mentioned offhand in a conversation or expressed wanting to work with has behaved badly towards them.

And when I say badly, I do not mean fumbling, poorly executed attempts at flirtation that might easily be misinterpreted as creepy or weird. No, I am not referring to ‘icks’ that often amount to social faux pas rather than sexual transgressions.

I mean stalking, harassment, manipulation, abuse. I’m talking about midnight visits and restraining orders and coercive behavior. It boggles the mind to understand what the average woman is subjected to by representatives of our gender. It is even more soul-crushing to find out that this behavior tends not to discriminate by political affiliation.

There is a meme that goes around feminist circles that Right Wing men view women as private property, while Left Wing men view them as public property.

If there was not some truth to this statement, it would not resonate so deeply with the experiences of Leftist women.

Lest you think this a tidy bit of moralizing and tut-tutting–Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone–understand that I feel ashamed of my fellow men, and I feel ashamed of myself. Not merely for any idle words or flippant actions that may have unwittingly contributed to making women feel less seen and less safe than they already feel around men, but also for not personally rushing to call out these behaviors in others when I hear about them. Especially when no women are even present, and ‘boyish’ conversations turn to the subject of women in their absence.

Now, I really do understand that, in the absence of outdated religious prohibitions and social mores to go by, our culture in general and the Left in particular is trying to fashion a healthy sexual ethic that makes sense and is (more or less) universally applicable.

I understand that this is a fraught and complicated process, and that many people whom I respect disagree with each other on how best to implement such an ethic. Is sex work liberatory or demeaning? Is pornography empowering or degrading? Is there ever really such a thing as ‘implied consent,’ or would it be better for everyone involved to establish a universal standard for it that we never deviate from? Should the Left take universal positions on such questions, or positions that are particular to the cultural and religious sensibilities of people we consider allies?

Satisfactory answers to these questions will not come easily.

But that is all besides the point.

The point is that by any stretch of the imagination, it appears that if the allegations against Graham Platner are true, then he certainly violated that ethic by leaps and bounds.

As such, I believe he is deserving of the Left’s condemnation until he is able to prove unworthy of it. Even if it costs us a Senate seat. Even if it sets our movement back.

I understand if there are people who disagree with me. I understand if some people, men and women alike, want to see more evidence before making a final judgement.

But I am a straight Leftist white man, and Graham Platner is a straight Leftist white man, and I do not feel like now is the time to close ranks with straight Leftist white men, but rather with the women who are made to feel perpetually unsafe by the actions of straight, Leftist white men.

I’m sorry if that sounds too IDPOL mid-2010’s wokeslop for you. I’m sorry if that means I’m ‘playing into’ the hands of Republicans or Zionists or capitalists or whatever.

I just believe that there comes a time when Leftists have to drop political expediency and speak with moral clarity, even if it costs us.

This is one of those times.

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