The first time I remember being told that our two major parties had “few major differences,” I was seated next to Ralph Nader on a plane for a story I was doing on him just ahead of the 2000 presidential election. He was the Green Party alternative to Al Gore and George W. Bush that year.
“A bumbling Texas governor would galvanize the environmental community as never before,” he said of Bush. “The Sierra Club doubled its membership under James Watt.”
Welp, we know how that turned out.
Our current president has repeatedly pushed another false equivalency – that our country is morally no better than any other. “We have a lot of killers; you think our country is so innocent?” Trump once said in defense of Vladimir Putin, after Bill O’Reilly stated the simple fact that “Putin is a killer.” As I’ve said before, Trump has since then worked hard to make that slur a reality, and has made us less innocent in ways I would not have thought possible.
In recent years, whenever I’ve heard someone say all politicians are fundamentally bad people, I’ve a) known I was talking to a Trump supporter and b) thought this was just another way he’d convinced his America that standards are for losers.
Well, the cancer has spread.
I’ve already written that I found evidence of Democratic Maine Senate nominee’s Graham Platner’s disrespect for women disqualifying. The way that was defended or actually seen as a selling point – hey, let’s win back some of those young woman-haters – even worse.
Charlotte Clymer, who wrote that she doesn’t trust or believe Platner, said she would still have voted for him if necessary. And of the many non-Republicans who disagreed with me about him, it was her argument I found most compelling, even though it did not change my mind:
I wouldn’t like it, but I’d do it. I would choose the candidate who could do the least harm in that seat, and I know Senator Collins doesn’t give a damn about holding Trump accountable. This is the same reasoning so many of us gave those annoying folks on the far left who decided to sit out the 2024 presidential election. They didn’t like Vice President Harris because of their anger at the Biden administration over Gaza and other issues, and they claimed both parties were the same and both candidates were repulsive.
So, they didn’t vote. But both parties aren’t the same and elections do matter, which is why we told them that, whatever their most important issues, Trump would be a thousand times worse and that’s why voting for Vice President Harris was essential. They didn’t listen. They were wrong. Trump did, in fact, turn out to be a thousand times worse on every issue.
Did they not know what was at stake?
I heard all of that, because those who sat out ’24 had galled and bewildered me, too. Did they not know what was at stake? Did those whose chief issue was Gaza not see that Trump would make them even sorrier?
Yet if I lived in Maine instead of Missouri, I could not have supported Platner.
So let’s just say that with his overwhelming win in Tuesday’s Maine primary, I have a new understanding of those “annoying folks on the far left” who made the decision they did two years ago. Maybe because it was the only one they could make.
Some friends who think control of the Senate has got to come first, second, and third right now – yes, of course I understand – do in turn know why I just can’t do otherwise: I told a couple I hardly ever get to see and had dinner with in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week that if one more person used that go-to sexist phrase “pearl-clutching” as a synonym for an unhappy reaction over this, I might lose it. “What classist bullshit; I have no pearls,” one of these women said, and made me laugh.
Yet others told me that if I really cared about women, then I’d see the bigger picture and would as a consequence support someone who doesn’t seem to. Well, I’ve been hearing that argument since the Clinton administration and still don’t see that working for us.
So as of now, I no longer want to hear from Ro Khanna about how much he cares about the Epstein victims. A Silicon Valley bundler told Politico that Khanna was “enjoying being forward with his support in a time of need” for Platner. How lovely for him and his future presidential run.
The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was right when he said you can either care or not about the treatment of women, but:
What ought to stop is what we have now: inconsistent standards selectively applied according to our political bias.
“Seems like a lot of nothing,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who once thundered over the meaning of the word “ralph” in [Brett] Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook. Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also been notably agnostic when it comes to the charges against their Maine favorite. What ever happened to #BelieveWomen?
The term for this is “double standard,” if not outright hypocrisy, and among the consequences is that it merely fuels the pervasive national cynicism about any moral judgments made about any political leader. If Platner can pass muster among Democratic primary voters, then the differences between him and Donald Trump are mainly of degree, not of kind.
Misogyny rewarded
Yes. So please do not write to inform me that Trump is worse. On every imaginable level this is true, and yet it cannot make me unsee what I see, which is misogyny rewarded.
Not all Democrats are becoming what they hate; Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran I’ve long admired from my home state of Illinois, said Platner “has to account for his own actions.”
But I never understood my Republican friends who ignored the dozens of women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct long before he was in politics, so why would I want to do likewise? “He’s not perfect,” they said in his defense.
Yet now, this completely meaningless answer to all questions is the template: “We’re not looking for perfection,” a Maine Democrat told MS NOW, when asked how she was processing all she’d learned about Platner. “Nobody’s perfect,” another Mainer told Fox News.
No one is perfect, of course. No one. But to see Democrats adopting this who-cares language about character, integrity, and basic respect has made me realize how few really do, or ever did, care about how women are treated.
#MeToo was such a long time coming and has not only slipped away, but has left behind few traces. This is not our post-Reconstruction, no, but the pushback to long overdue gains has still been swift and painful. I can’t see that the way out is voting for the new guy who is so much like the old guy. Who, by the way, called Platner a “thug” and an “outright pig” on Wednesday.
I spent part of last week in a silent Ignatian retreat in Gloucester, Massachusetts, thinking about Psalm 42:7, which says about human suffering that “Deep calls to deep.” But if all like calls to like, then I can’t say I’m surprised that Trump recognizes his blue MAGA brother in Platner.
