politics

Not for nothing, but the Nazi Party adopted a progressive, worker-first, anti-capitalist, populist aesthetic to rise to power. It's not enough to put up a web page that says "this is my platform, isn't it great". That's aesthetics. He actually needs to DO something. And what he's done is self-isolate as an oyster farmer and get involved in local politics around the economics of oyster farming. That's it. He hasn't done anything progressive. He just says progressive things. We've seen that before.

Do you know what sheepdogging is? It's the use of an aesthetically anti-establishment candidate to attract the attention and energy of the disaffected, the alienated, and the oppositional for the explicit purpose of bringing that energy back into the fold of the mainstream power structure. That's exactly what's happening here. The Democrats don't care if Collins or Platner win. They are super happy with the controversy because it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing - getting Democrats fighting about which Democrat to vote for instead of letting them become disaffected with the party and seek to actually challenge its power.

Platner's a sheepdog. He may not know it himself, but that's his role. It's obvious he has no interest in class analysis. He's a petite bourgeois liberal who wants to maintain the status quo that allows him to own and run a small luxury food farm. He's basically Biden 50 years ago, or maybe Fetterman or Sinema. He's never going to turn against the military. AOC campaigned on the same positions of not expanding the military and getting out of forever wars, and yet, she has voted to expand military spending at least twice. Not because she's evil or because she was fooling us this whole time, but because that's the reality of the US government and the Democrat party isn't interested, as a party, in changing it. And the evidence is right there. Not only do your favored candidates constantly have to compromise with the actual power structure, the history of progressive politicians shows that they slide right every term. There's no way to build a progressive bulwark voting in people one at a time over decades when you have things like Biden getting elected on his opposition to the Vietnam war only to then to architect the Crime Bill and unrelentingly support Israel's genocide of the Palestinians.

Platner MIGHT actually have a spine for a couple terms and vote the way he said he would - most of the time, anyway. But even if he does it won't matter in the short term because of the power structure of the US. But once he's in, all the evidence says he's just gonna keep sliding right, and voting in someone so obviously tainted by incredibly bad decision making is just a signal to EVERYONE in the Democrat party that we'll eat shit as long they tell us it's chocolate.