“Keep in mind that if you're defending Platner at this point you're signing up for 5 more months of defending an obvious pathological liar.”
– Writer Nate Silver on X, June 4th
Sign me up, said prominent Senate Democrats five weeks ago after Graham Platner lied to their faces about the extent of his abusiveness.
Sign us up, said an all-star array of left-wing political groups like the Bernie Sanders spinoff Our Revolution. He “represents the kind of working-class leadership Our Revolution was built to support,” they wrote in their November endorsement, “authentic, service-driven, and unafraid to take on the powerful.” Edit:…a grotesquely inauthentic, self-absorbed candidate eager to exploit and mislead others. Fixed it.
Sign us up too, said 156,084 Maine Democrats and independents on primary day. Let’s be generous and say two-thirds of them were so eager to take out Susan Collins and so underwhelmed by the underwhelming Janet Mills they tossed the dice on Platner.
Snake eyes. He has them, they rolled them.
That leaves 51,507 adults proving Hannah Arendt’s observation in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that due to a “mixture of gullibility and cynicism,” the victims of mass propaganda “did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
Every statement a lie. Clear the shelves of those red hats with the broken “Make America Great Again” promise to make room for the new king slogan!
Lying in politics is not a new thing. But it used to carry at least a whiff of stigma.
Honesty-branded Gov. Michael Dukakis took heat in the 1980s for a top aide’s shameless deployment of “situational ethics” e.g., lying to the public. Henry Kissinger “is a liar and everyone in the Mideast knows he lies,” former President Jimmy Carter said in 1981. Back then, that was considered a potent insult; Carter was elected president in 1976 largely on his promise to “never lie to you,” by contrast with caught-out liar Richard Nixon.
But those were the happy pre-internet days. Now, lying pays, the bigger the lies the better. The perpetual ooze of intentional falsehood from every laptop and smartphone that helped Trump get elected is now the default strategy of Trump wannabes like J.D. Vance, who happily copped to fabricating lies about his Haitian-born constituents in Ohio stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. Vance’s justification, offered with a straight face: to force the media to “pay attention to the suffering of the American people.”
Vance and Platner — separated at birth?
Let’s be honest, pardon the expression: this is bad news for all of us. Who likes to be lied to? Tolerance for excessive political b.s. is understandably low. Trump and his mini-mes may struggle to win a majority this fall, but they understand how much lie-ridden pandering their base needs to stay loyal, per Arendt.
And all it takes to win a party primary is an aroused base.
“Democrats” like the Bernie-brats who foisted Platner on gullible Mainers may have thought they had cleverly co-opted Trump’s successful tactics. But when it comes to lying about sexual abuse, which party is better at closing ranks against the truth?
For now, it’s still a free country. Activists and voters are free to slurp up all the fresh, hot lies they can swallow and sign up for the “movements” that spew them.
We’d like to claim that the good news here is Platner’s fall, not his rise. That voters will inevitably tire of all the lies and start demanding truth. That politicians will be forced to cool it with the sloppy sloganeering and populist pandering and be honest about problems, theirs and ours.
We’d like to tell you all that is true.
But that would be a lie
