The Platner Fallacy
I Was Wrong About the Maine Candidate. It's Time to Cut Him Loose.
Graham Platner should step aside and let Maine Democrats find a new candidate.
I don’t say this lightly. I supported Platner’s candidacy as a direct rebuke to the corporate wing of the party, and his rhetoric around populist economic issues like single-payer healthcare and wages.
I was supportive — I obviously don’t have a vote in Maine — despite the obvious issues that were raised about his candidacy: the tattoo, his social media history, the sexting, even the reports last month in The New York Times about his “’unsettling’ behavior” with women.
The Politico story that ran over the weekend, however, is a bridge to far, as the saying goes. Steve Phillips’ mea culpa in The Nation is a good overview of my own thinking. We’ve moved from Platner as imperfect, even unsavory, but right on the issues. We’ve moved from a flawed past that has resulted in a more perfect future to sexual assault.
Simply, I no longer am able to explain away the behavior as youthful indescretion, or the result of PTSD caused by his military service. Perhaps I never should have attempted to explain away his past. Perhaps I should’ve been more skeptical of him.
Platner is innocent until proven guilty, of course. He says accusations of non-consensual behavior are lies. This — along with his progressive vision, and the importance of the Maine Senate seat to the Democrats’ hope to take the Senate — is enough for many of my friends on the left to stick with Platner. Hell, I still find him a compelling speaker and salesman for the kinds of economic and defense policies we need. That’s what drew me to him in the first place.
But I’m troubled by some of the arguments in his defense today, arguments that sound far too much like the old, discredited rape defenses of the past, the “she was asking for it” blather that flips cause and effect on its head.
In this case, the arguments focus on timing, on “why now,” with some going so far as to accuse the victim of sending “signals” to Platner that might be exculpatory. (I get that this might be seen as a “strawman” argument, but I can assure my readers these arguments are real points being made on Facebook by people with whom I normally agree.)
The “she was asking for it” argument has a long history — even beign critiqued in two episodes of All In The Family — and is part of a broader cultural effort to silence women, an effort not consigned to the past. Things have changed in this regard, but not as much as we think (see Trump, President Donald J.).
Rebecca Solnit linked yesterday on Facebook to a September 2025 column she wrote calling rape “a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights.”
That column dealt with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims and the ways in which Republican leadership has sought to silence them. “Most rapists,” she writes, “operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally.” The system, she says, is rigged. It “discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them.”
Rape, she continues,
is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.
This is what Platner is accused of in The Politico piece. This is why we have to take these allegations seriously, and arguments about “timing” and “signals” miss the point.
Defenders of Platner are correct that Trump has changed the rules. But we cannot defeat Trump by playing by these new rules, by rules that silence women. Trump’s fascistic cult is built on a hypermasculinity, on male power. For us to continue to ignore this because “our guys” are being accused is not just hypocritical. It will guarantee our defeat.