A few thoughts on means and ends
This is still not a piece about him specifically. Because it's so much more than Platner. But since I began this piece, his flameout has been educational. It came just a week or two after Zohran Mamdani-endorsed DSA candidates won their primaries. And now we have Abdul el-Sayed, running for the Democratic nomination the Michigan Senate race, coming under increasing scrutiny once Mallory McMorrow dropped out and gave her support to Haley Stevens in an effort to stave off an el-Sayed win, which would hand the seat to the GOP.
The lunatic Parker Molloy encapsulates the feeling among the left right now. Ends are all that matter. As long as a candidate says the magic words she and her ilk want to hear they will overlook any flaw, any crime, any malfeasance.
It used to be that how one plays the game was just as important, or even more so, than the outcome. Good sportsmanship was something drilled into us from our earliest days at school. "Winning isn't everything" was the common refrain. Losing wasn't a stain as long as you gave it your all and comported yourself with honor.
This attitude was increasingly rare on the right. But it still obtained on the liberal left.
However, for many on the left, that, too, is an old way of thinking. It saw an absolutely unfit man become president not once, but twice, by being as awful and disgusting as he could be, and be rewarded for it. A light clicked on in them: rules, agreements, civility were all yesterday's values. What mattered was power, and only power. Its attainment was its own justification, and justified any means so utilized.
Bernie Sanders was the first to break long-standing rules of the road. His scorched-earth campaign in 2015/16, which saw him drag out a nomination which was lost, which saw him disparage the ultimate victor in that contest to such a degree that it was taken up by her Republican opponent in the general election, was the bomb which blew open the Democratic tent. He refused to release his taxes—which gave Donald Trump license to do the same. He cast Hillary Clinton as evil incarnate, convincing his followers that she would actually be worse than the New York real estate developer. He "campaigned" for her, but really campaigned for himself, more concerned with his book deal than holding onto the White House and preventing the disaster which a Trump presidency would bring.
And now his acolytes, ten years later, have learned well from him. They scapegoat Jews. They scapegoat Black folks. They throw calumnies at anyone not in the cult. They are as fetid as anyone from MAGA. Because, indeed, they are MAGA's mirror image. They see MAGA and want to replicate it in the Democratic Party. They want to capture the party and remake it in their image, turning a center-left coalition into a hard-left ideological party. They want Democrats to go as far to the left as the GOP has gone to the right. Disgustingly, they talk about a "Democratic Tea Party", a term no Democrat should use, as the original Tea Party from 2010 was a white racist formation to bring down the nation's first Black president. They are tired of the party's most reliable voters, Jews and Black women, and want to remake it into a leftwing paradise for louche white males. Graham Platner was the poster-boy for this movement away from the base and in pursuit of the mythical white male vote. (By the time he dropped out, polling in Maine showed that Platner was in fact losing the demographic he was created in a lab to court.)
The fact of the matter is this: The ends for which the left is working are not what they state. Not Medicare4All. Not support for Hamas. Not free healthcare, childcare, education. No, none of these are the ends. The ultimate end for which they are working, as with their cousins on the right, is dominance. It is power. Not to do good. Not to make people's lives better. Like the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the goal of power is power. And once power is attained, keeping it by whatever means.
But once you jettison all morality, all restraint, all humanity, what are you left with? Power? For what purpose? Because the fruit of a diseased tree will be rotten and poisonous. Any lofty ideals and goals are blackened with dirt by the means used to achieve them. Power becomes its own aim. Those lofty ideals and goals will eventually become secondary, and then expendable. Much like in Animal Farm, they will become indistinguishable from those they said they were fighting.
Means are essential, because they tell one what one believes. One can believe in providing all those good things we all want. But if the means by which we pursue those aims have no decency in them, then the goals will be equally diminished. One acts with honor because that is the only way to have a chance at honorable ends. And that's something which partisans of left and right have decided is no longer important.