annashay 
It’s the kind of look that suggests Platner could be the Democratic Party’s new great white hope — a working-class white man who can speak to class antagonism in an economically unequal electorate.
There’s just one teensy-weensy problem. It turns out that friend-of-the-white-working-class had a Nazi tattoo.
The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, a well-known symbol of official Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent and people who just think that Nazi iconography is tough. The gist is that Platner got the tattoo in 2007 in Croatia when he was on leave with his fellow Marines. Platner has said that he didn’t know the symbol’s semiotics. He only knew that Marines get “terrifying-looking” tattoos.
(It’s worth stating that Platner’s former political director has questioned his claim of ignorance. The campaign said the director’s allegation was a “a lie from a disgruntled former employee.”)
Platner’s campaign has been busy handling the fallout from the tattoo and his Reddit comment history, which was sometimes racist, misogynistic and homophobic and sometimes anti-fascist and anti-racist. It’s the kind of messiness the internet inculcates. No one with a social media history is pure. After 18 years sporting what may or may not have been a symbol of the SS, Platner announced last week that he had the tattoo covered up. We are far enough away from his Democratic primary next June that all this should end up as just another weird little political story in an extraordinary political moment in American history.Or it would, except over the weekend, several prominent Democrats took time out of their remaining days on God’s green earth to lecture Democratic voters on learning to forgive.Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Platner sounds like a mistake-making human being who was, like so many soldiers, going through a “difficult time.” The tattoo, his words implied, shouldn’t worry us too much. Platner is a man who can speak to “working-class concerns,” and that is what the party must prioritize.
Bernie Sanders, the longtime senator from Vermont, also had plenty to say. He had endorsed Platner early in his campaign. After the tattoo debacle, Sanders did not revoke his endorsement, saying that there are “more important issues” worth our focus.
Bernie’s got us there. There are more important issues. A gilded, would-be emperor is sitting atop the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world. How did he get there? A cosplay of economic populism that elevated a fixture of the tabloid press to the captain’s chair of Western democracy. It was turbocharged by his willingness to cozy up to radical right-wing racists, promising them legal, political and cultural clemency for their racist deeds.
Now, Republican politicians are free to steep themselves in white Christian nationalism to play to the base that Donald Trump built for them. 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. 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.
It is an old argument. History will tell you that negotiating with racism or fascism or authoritarianism never ends well.
It is also a cop-out that can sound like political pragmatism: the idea that we simply must learn to overlook bad behavior as mere human foibles. Who among us, it is implied, has not said or done or etched a hateful symbol of exclusion and oppression into our minds or bodies? If Democrats are to win back the “working class” that they have lost to Trump, they have to look beyond silly things like Nazi iconography or a little casual racism or a soupçon of sexism and anything else that the “woke” left of the party cares about.
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.
That is how you get to the place I found myself this week, reading apologia for a hateful symbol pretending to be sound, hard-nosed political analysis.
Now, I know for a fact that the working class in this country looks more like a Latino woman who cleans houses than it looks like Platner, a former defense contractor turned oyster farmer with some leftist political beliefs.
I also know a lot of actual poor white people. The kind of poor white people who don’t even make enough or have enough to be counted among the working class. The people who rely on SNAP benefits for their meals and emergency rooms for their health care.
Sometimes they subsist on a diet of racist notions to explain why their lives are as hard as they are. Sometimes those poor white people even have racist tattoos. I live in the South. There is no shortage of Confederate flags and “Don’t tread on me” tags on display in hot, humid months.
Once, at a meeting with tenant organizers in the center of white American poverty in Appalachia, a young white guy showed up to a meeting with his Stars and Bars tattoo on display. The poor white rural women and working-class Black women who run those meetings took this guy to task. They told him (colorfully) to get himself together. And the next week they all protested their landlord together.
Their coalition-building wasn’t the kind of kumbaya that Platner apologists are talking about, where a room full of people were expected to swallow their outrage to preserve one man’s feelings. There was accountability. There was education. And there was meaningful action. There was not a college degree or a political donor among them, and yet, somehow, actual poor people figured out how to handle racist iconography without scapegoating minorities or making excuses for a white man’s mistakes.
Here’s the thing. The Democratic Party has a problem. The party’s leaders think they have a problem with Trump voters. Some polling says white men without college degrees don’t like them, don’t trust them and won’t vote for them, so they think the only logical way forward is to pander. Their polling addiction ignores more complex political instruments telling them that the working class isn’t just white men and that centrism isn’t enough to bring white voters back into the fold.
It is going to take hard politics. The kind that shows up in communities between elections and solves problems that don’t sound glamorous on television talk shows. It looks like facing down the Klan in a trailer park, not complaining about racism while doing far too little to avert it. It means believing that racism is not a natural condition of poverty but a political weapon that rich men use to constrain poor people’s political power. And — most critically — it looks like not wanting, even for a second, to be confused with the people who would do that. You don’t wear a red hat as a joke. You don’t fly the ironic flag of historical hate to get a rise out of people. You don’t wear the cool tattoo for over a decade that maybe, kind of, possibly, probably looks like something horrible and hateful.
It is a remarkably low bar to clear. And a white working-class aesthetic is not nearly enough to clear it. Real working-class politics does not assume the worst of working-class people’s impulses. It does not launder their concerns for political points. It certainly does not argue, directly or indirectly, that a little racism is a good thing for reaching them.
I don’t particularly care about the symbols people use to signal their membership in a group. Maybe you do need a terrifying tattoo to be a real Marine. And maybe sometimes that terrifying tattoo might resemble Nazi iconography. If you are willing to accept that from a distance, as many Democrats say they are, a person may not be able to tell the real symbol of hate from its doppelgänger, that is for you to live with.
But, I do care about the political trade-offs we will ask people to make in the name of pragmatism. If the Democratic future requires us to exchange our discomfort with casual Nazism to advance a political agenda, I am not interested. Maybe other voters are — some polling suggests that young voters still support Platner. And maybe Platner will find a way to redeem himself. No one owes him that chance, but there is still a way forward. It’s called doing the work.
But don’t tell me that excusing that tattoo is good politics. It is the exact same politics that the right is selling, in a different outfit.
Poor people can be self-determined. They prove it every day, mostly by surviving while being poor in a country that is mean and nasty and hostile to them. There is a rich history of multiracial, cross-class organizing in this country, even in the South, where so many people pretend racism is just too strident for working-class politics to thrive.
If that history exists and if that culture still thrives in the poorest corners of our country, why do so many people feel the need to work so hard to redeem a man who had a Nazi tattoo?
That’s a question for Democrats.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
