Rebecca Solnit has a grand unified theory about Graham Platner and I more or less agree with her. As a candidate, Platner benefited greatly from misogyny in the political system.
The substance of his personal narrative, particularly the claim of redemption after much youthful indiscretion* [see endnote], resembles an ask. That we look past his misogyny for the good of the party. The kind of ask voters are constantly asked. Including asks to overlook genocide or membership in a different political party.
And here is where I start to break from Solnit’s grand unified theory. Because she seems to suggest that most men did. That they overlooked his past for the sake of the party. And I do not remember that happening.
I remember the Democratic establishment rejecting this very prospect, in fact. We saw numerous publications, particularly The Atlantic, New York Times, and Washington Post obsess over his vibes and unsuitability. Maine seemed to be the one place he was popular. At least, until he won the primary. Then the question of electability started to turn.
In her essay, “Pod Save Patriarchy (or Whatever That Sorry Platner Spectacle Was),” Solnit depicts a political climate that is obsessed with catering to a white male working class. (I also wrote about this conept 2019). Her observations are keen and suspiciously smooth. Too smooth, in fact. Not because her theory is wrong. It’s not. It is too smooth because the precision of her evidence is far rougher and ill-fitting than she makes it sound. It is something akin to being right for the wrong reasons, which is also a hard thing to communicate.
I repeat here, again, how right I think the thrust of Solnit’s argument is. I worry that we might take the wrong things from it for the right reasons.
We need more clarity.
Yes, misogyny plays a role here. And yes, the political obsession with masculinity is unhealthy and dangerous. But the Venn diagram of who supported Platner before this week and who on the wider left is obsessed with making a more masculine Democratic Party is perhaps closer to a sliver or a chunk than it is to a single circle.
Solinit’s response (and others, like this one from Julie DiCaro) want to establish that Platner himself represents a bigger problem of Misogyny, which isn’t difficult to assert, let alone prove.
This is where Solnit’s examination of the particular begins to fail her, however. Her use of the word progressive offers little clarity to who exactly she is referring to. Is this the MSNBC-watching replacement for the L-word crowd or is it the Nation-reading, Paul Wellstone-following movement types? The word carries different cachet depending on the situation and I can’t tell which she means because if it’s the former group, then it is useless and if it is the latter, then she is coming to a wrong conclusion.
And honestly, her constellation of examples doesn’t make it any easier to discern.
Origins of the White Working Class Myth
There are actually two engines pushing the wider left to adopt a mythical white working class strategy that see eye-to-eye on very little: on the one side is normie establishment liberals looking to expand the base through greater neoliberal compromise on issues the right cares about like abortion and trans participation in privileges like going to the bathroom and on the other, populists offering a class conscious vision that understands that poverty can be colorblind, but still picks favorites.
Of these two sets, it is the leftists who are more inclined to protect intersectionality and the democratic process and it is the centrists who are looking to sell, say, abortion rights down the river for a few more votes. And further, it is the leftists that were more inclined to get excited about Platner while the establishment liberals, pushing the need for a “Joe Rogan of the Left,” who were the most reluctant to throw in their support.
There is reason to see the way these groups overlap, but that isn’t what Solnit’s piece does. It relies on the particularity of people and groups that don’t completely add up.
Who exactly is at fault?
As I read her piece, I kept thinking the same thing. “No, that’s an Abundance Politics thing” and “People have been talking about that since 2016” and “How is this any different than Vote Blue No Matter Who?” and “Weren’t we told to overlook the candidate who shut down young women standing up for Palestinians saying ‘I’m speaking.’?” In fact, didn’t I see people selling shirts with that very phrase across the chest? Yes, this is a whataboutism—but I want us to clarify who exactly is pushing what in the narrative.
Solnit’s thesis is built on the sexism at the heart of the support for Platner, but it seems that, while he is a great vessel for outrage, the utter collapse of support makes him a poor vessel for the wider argument. Precisely because the arguments don’t line up well with where the support was coming from.
And perhaps this gets at what causes me the most consternation. Because I’m not sure what the takeaway of her piece is supposed to be other than “Patriarchy Bad.” I’m usually here for that, but because this is a whole thing, I want more.
We need more
Here, I think, we might note what Solnit doesn’t directly articulate. She quotes various journalists and media figures, like Ken Klippenstein and Matt Stoller, the novelists, Sebastian Junger and Stephen King, “The Pod Save America guys” and some dude on BlueSky.
What we don’t see included in her piece are the countless articles, essays, and books from the past decade articulating the myth of the white working class as a predominately male issue. And one that led the political center to do deep research into the “heartland” to “discover” what “those people” who voted for Trump really think. Books and articles that people ate up, mythologizing the “real America” in Appalachia, the south, and the wonderfully condescending “rustbelt.”
We also don’t see in her piece the words of politicians and DNC officials who edged the Democratic Party toward this desired demographic group with the promise of giving preference to silicon valley startups and pro-life politicians as an appeal to the values of certain voters. This is where the real political gravity has been outside of a few months in 2020. It is the context that pulled the party toward this moment. To me, he statements she cited all read as part of a decade-long dialogue within the Democratic Party.
The Media shares responsibility
In articulating who is pushing the narrative, we might provide more substantial response to the power of patriarchy. Because it should be lost on no one that a journalist would be writing about a phenomenon that is primarily centered in journalism itself as much as it is found in our shared reality. Her examples are all media comments, which brings me to an enduring truth about the media: journalists rarely acknowledge their own power in directing the public narrative.
At the root of it, Solnit is trying to reframe the public narrative. Which is her job.
But rather than dig into the essentialism at the root of the masculinity conversation so that we can see how desperate and damaging this practice is, thereby inviting us into the complex reality of politics so as to inform us of the problem at the heart of the masculine stereotype, particularly the aspects which encourage violence and antisocial behaviors as not only the nature of men, but as prime examples of manhood and whose embodiment of said construct is more or less required of many men to find work, family, and fulfillment, often reinforced by the women in their lives, we instead get a critique of political pandering.
It’s like a cheap tweet: do better.
Let’s talk about men.
If the problem is the stereotype, let’s actually talk about the stereotype.
“We need more men to articulate how they benefit from feminism, aka from living in a world of equality rather than inequality, and to move the conversation forward into how men are oppressed and distorted by patriarchy – granted unequal power, but at what cost to their psyches?”
Solnit concludes the penultimate paragraph of her essay about the scourge of public misogyny by finally saying, to the effect, hey, maybe people should talk about misogyny. And note, too, that it is men who should talk about it. No off-ramp or on-ramp for us. Just It sucks and you should talk about it.
There is nothing more enduring in politics (and in journalism) than needing to learn the right lesson from an experience. And then, instead, when the heat is on, falling back on the most convenient. And least complicated. It’s a man problem. Fix yourselves.
Some Thoughts On Masculinity
There is no question that misogyny exists. Much of Solnit’s essay (and broader work) is about highlighting its relative place within the conversation of equality and diversity.
Three things worth further reflection and study for those wanting a robust conversation about masculinity and gender in the public sphere are these:
1. Certain strains in the feminist tradition veer toward gender essentialism.
This is most commonly seen in the TERF response to the inclusion of trans women in the gender category of woman, but it is also often found in a wider response to masculinity. One of the places we see this is in relationship to sexual assault, where some take to the data like gender eugenicists. Many feminists undermine a vision of gender equity by not interrogating gender itself. And how it guides outcomes in the data. (e.g. “man or bear,” custody, assault)
2. Traditional characteristics of masculinity are deeply antisocial.
Early studies of masculinity from the mid-to-late-20th century defined men by traits like aggression, dominance, and willingness to commit violence. Much of the gendered stereotype for masculinity reflect tendencies we punish in children and situationally valorize in adults. Working together, they also create a ratchet effect toward behaviors that are antithetical to community building, caring for others, or even being an effective team player. They also compound, encouraging greater “success” at “being a man” the more we embody the stereotypes.
3. We don’t have a common affirming concept for masculinity.
While much of the gender study of the last half century has brought a greater sense of equity, with regards to men, it has most often focused on the ways many men don’t fit the gender stereotypes or the ways masculinity restricts all men. It has little capacity to offer a positive vision of masculinity as a worthwhile gender container for men, however, precisely because the roots of its modern understanding are socially destructive or lead to the reinforcement of systems of oppression. It’s like asking a fascist dictator to be a less murderous authoritarian.
Because of gender essentialism, the primary project for most men is to embody a flawed masculinity.
These things are why hot takes on social media about sexism in politics can be so damaging and why the “Sorry Platner Spectacle” exists at all. Not because people want to make excuses for mediocre men, but because it also is never just that.
The Left and Right both use masculinity as a political prop
The liberal response in 2015 to the rise of MAGA was instinctively to engage with those people Democrats had lost. And the arguments they heard back involved the loss of status. This wasn’t the fringe looking to fringe. It was a normal and appropriate response to the moment.
The problem was not what they found, but how they interpreted it. So many have come to a false conclusion, as I argued in this piece. Anthropologists and politicians kept arguing that the disaffected are a certain way and that they represent a way of being that is to be treated like they had always been that way. But they aren’t, it isn’t, and they haven’t. They are people who changed their minds because circumstances around them changed.
And almost always that change has been for the worse. People who lost jobs, spouses, children, often to deaths of despair or to the decades decline of the working class itself. As Nicholas Kristof chronicles in Tightrope, the space between a family who can scrape out a living in poverty and those who lose everything in one generation is inches and the outcome is epidemic and predictable.
The flaw of perception around what has made this moment, believing that this is personal, permanent, and worthy of shunning, has persisted in the logic of the public’s vision of masculinity and the myth of the white working class for a decade.
If we are to have a robust conversation about gender today that actually includes the people we claim to value, it must start in the most essential truth of it all. That gender is a construct. It is not essential. The women’s movement has spent more than a century freeing girls and women from it. Many of us have a head start on the rest.
* NOTE — Youthful Indiscretions
The phrase “youthful indiscretion” remains inseparable from Pres. George W. Bush, whose indiscretions of drug and alcohol abuse lasted into his forties. Consider also, his redemption arc: from abuse to public life, then from financial indiscretions to the White House and then from war crimes and the Great Recession to retired artist and the kind of Republican president one might miss compared to the current one.
There is something dangerous, too, in rejecting the redemption narrative. Particularly in this case, even as it makes it far more complex than we’d like.
The cult of purity and litmus tests is always around the corner, of course. And the difference between the party not being able to deal with people who aren’t in alignment with its goals and the idea that all people who do ____ must be cancelled forever can feel microscopic to some, but it is a chasm.
That space, friends, also holds much value.
What we risk in all of these conversations is to wipe our own slates clean, neglecting to give people an off-ramp from the bad and an on-ramp to the good. And we all know this is actually what many of the people Solnit criticizes actually think they are doing. They think they are expanding the base. But rejecting their mistake isn’t that same as building an expansive infrastructure either.
Distrust, Disbelief, and Erasure
In so many of the comments I’ve read by people who want to erase Platner completely, what I hear is distrust. Distrust in his personal change and disbelief in any change. And yet, I have not read a single story or heard a single comment from a person wanting to look at how right-wing ideologies are on the rise in the military. How they have grown since the start of the War on Terror. And how racist and supremacist tattoos are used to build community. Particularly among young men in the military.
These environments which foster depictions of people using the language of conquest, control, and bodycount reinforce a malignant masculinity. A form that is exploited to recruit and foster a right-wing ideological framework.
By making it about Platner and his excuses, we ignore what his past exposed and the long, destructive course that followed in escaping it.
Platner, the Past, and Redemption
None of this changes the question of Platner the candidate. But we now have a massive system in the US military that has proven to be a prolific recruiter of white and Christian supremacy.
(Please recognize the difference here. Joining the military does not leads to white supremacy. But the military has a documented history of this occurring within its ranks.)
And yet, despite all this, focus and skepticism is reserved for the individual who has publicly rejected it.
Platner’s redemption arc was captivating to so many, because it offers hope. It isn’t a stereotypical manliness as performance, but representation. And not of a kind of person, but a person with a particular experience. Someone from inside the inferno.
This, too, is why representation matters. Not for the whiteness, but the experience that informs the present and changes one white man from violent past to a (potentially) less violent future. We want to see people grow so they can hear and believe the message we value.
We also like leaders that buy their own groceries and Supreme Court justices who have ever used email. Experience humbles us. Therefore there is value in fighting fascists alongside people who know what fascists are thinking.
The danger in gleefully confirming our priors, disbelieving this redemption story, is also to reinforce a position that seems utterly antithetical to feminism and the wider liberal democracy project. It would also mean that no man can lose the straitjacket of misogyny. And we are therefore all doomed to the roles we were born into.
And that may be the least feminist belief of them all.