Judge Platner’s Character by How He Fights the Oligarchs

CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) was asked whether all the controversies surrounding US Senate candidate Graham Platner mean he doesn’t “pass the character test.” Murphy offered a subtly radical answer: “Character involves standing up to people who are bankrupting and corrupting this country.” It was an echo of Rep. Ro Khanna, who credited Platner with “having the character to stand up against the war in Iran, against genocide, and against an unfair & lopsided economy.”

What’s radical here is that Murphy and Khanna are suggesting the possibility of a new political reality, one that I think the affluent class of New York and DC media and political elites literally cannot process: A reality in which many voters are so economically pulverized and politically disillusioned that they now define “character” in a politician solely as whether or not they are single-mindedly focused on destroying oligarchy and ending corruption.

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After all, if the last few depressing decades have led you to the understandable conclusion that almost everyone in politics is corrupt and disgusting, then come election time, you are going to be more likely to support whichever politicians you think will most blow up the entire system in the way you want it blown up — regardless of whether you think they are “good” or “bad” people on an individual level.

^ Centrists and the general consultant class of the DNC are violently unable to believe this is how the majority feels to the point that they handed power over to outright fascists in order to prevent progressives winning on a platform that messaged to this sentiment in a visionary, positive way. It would have publicly proved what we already know, they are irrelevant and terminally obsessed with a vision of the past that does not exist any longer if it ever did.