What Job Is A Guy With A Nazi Tattoo Qualified For?

The man that my wife and I found ourselves talking to at the bar of a restaurant in Rockland, Maine in the summer of 2019 had arrived in town as your fancier visitors do, which is by boat. He told us that he worked in Democratic politics, and because my wife and I care about both politics and the state where she grew up, it was both intriguing and a bit strange to learn from this man that a candidate had already been chosen to run against Maine's reliably Deeply Concerned and long-tenured Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the fall of 2020. A good candidate, he seemed to think: the speaker of the state's House of Representatives, whom a quick web search later revealed to be a woman named Sara Gideon. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee endorsed Gideon before what wound up being a walkover of a primary, and oversaw her general election campaign against Collins.

It didn't go well. Gideon raised and spent many millions of dollars, much of it from out of state; the campaign was still sending fundraising emails on Election Day, and Mainers talked about Gideon campaign mailers arriving in their inboxes daily, in duplicate or triplicate. In the end, Gideon spent $62.9 million, more than twice what Collins spent, and lost the election by nearly 9 percentage points. After the end, Gideon's campaign still had $14.8 million on hand. It was the sort of experience that does not so much lead to recriminations as demand them; duffing what had seemed like a winnable election, and one in which Gideon led in most reputable public polls for much of the way, fit into a long, broader story of abstracted, consultant-scented, one-size-fits-all national-level Democratic campaign incompetence. Amanda Litman, co-founder of the progressive organization Run For Something, told The 19th News after Gideon's loss that the DSCC's tendency to run qualified and cautious races built around national issues and argued almost entirely through advertising was indicative of the party's longstanding disregard for state political cultures and the realities of retail politics. "A sustained campaign of year-round contact is far more effective than $100 million spent on ads,” Litman said. “You don’t believe an ad; you believe a person."

Maine really is different, just in general and also in its politics, but Litman's point is even more convincing in 2025 than it was in 2020. Traditional media channels have never been more warped or occluded or co-opted; every screen is a sheer surface of scams and derangement and idiotic noise; what solidarity or even basic coherence can be reclaimed from this onslaught will necessarily come from and be made by people being and working together. The rest of it, everything else, is just too hard to trust.

The oyster farmer and novice politician Graham Platner's campaign for the Democratic nomination to run against Collins in 2026 began with a buzzy long-form online ad; it centered his military service and small business bona fides in the ways that campaign ads do, but in place of Gideon's sunny blobules about middle-class families and Kitchen Table Values, Platner spoke in specific and pointed terms about the hardship that working people face in Maine and elsewhere, and about the oligarchs and absent political elites who oversee that annihilating status quo. Among the other upstarts pursuing the nomination, Platner was instantly and impressively unique in his ability to bring out and command crowds, even in the most conservative reaches of the state. By the time the state's outgoing governor, Janet Mills, entered the race last week, Platner's campaign reported that it had raised $4 million and signed up thousands of volunteers; Sen. Bernie Sanders gave Platner his endorsement. Maine is a big and extremely strange place that I love a lot; many people I care about live there, but I know that I do not understand its politics and am certain that no one else ever really will, either. I couldn't trust my own instincts, really, but I was intrigued. I took a rooting interest.

Mills is 77, which is old on the merits but not necessarily by Mainer standards; she has been a popular and decently effective governor. That she was transparently and instantaneously the choice of the DSCC in this race was both easy enough to understand given her moderate politics and record of state-wide success, and not necessarily a point in her favor. "DC's choice has lost to Susan Collins five times in a row," Platner posted. "We can't afford a sixth."

That is the sort of thing a candidate in a competitive primary would say about another candidate in that primary, and while that contest was not quite as simple as a binary choice between Platner and Mills—I mean that literally: the primary is a ranked-choice election with nine candidates in the mix—it seemed set up to become one. In the abstract, that was the system working more or less as designed. "Primaries aren’t necessarily divisive," Paul Waldman wrote, "and a campaign that spends its money well won’t be wasting it; if a candidate is organizing voters and persuading them that he or she is worthy of support, it should be an investment in the general election." In this understanding, which seems correct enough to me, the primary campaign would serve as both a test of Platner's political gifts and a highly public real-time vetting of his suitability as a candidate.

About that: In the week since Mills entered the race, years of posts that Platner made on Reddit surfaced in a report on CNN, years of moderately to extremely distressed online popping off that ranged from standard edgy bullshit to actively ill-considered to actually offensive. This was the vetting, and Platner's campaign moved to respond, qualifying some of it—the candidate allowed that, contra his earlier statements, he does not believe that all cops are bastards and is not really "a communist"—and explaining others; he very pointedly refused to apologize for telling Ted Nugent to eat shit. On Monday, in an interview with Pod Save America, whose hosts have supported his campaign, Platner said that "there is nothing that I can remotely think of that is out there that is any worse, or really any different, than what has come out."

That same interview afforded Platner the chance to address another bit of opposition research, which was video of him at his brother's wedding. He is shirtless and serenading his new sister-in-law with Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball," with a Nazi totenkopf visibly tattooed on his chest. Host Tommy Vietor gave Platner a chance to deny that he was "a secret Nazi," and he did. Platner then explained that he got the tattoo when he was in the Marines, while drunk and on leave in Croatia, in 2007. The tattoo parlor had the totenkopf available as flash art, and Platner "chose it off the wall." At no previous point in his life, Platner said, had anyone ever remarked upon it as a Nazi symbol. The impression, which had a convincing but not necessarily exonerating ring of truth about it, was that of someone who hadn't really thought about any of it very hard. On Tuesday, Platner said that he would get the tattoo removed.

Vietor, who is both an operator and a pundit, offered up his influential show as a safe space for Platner at least in part because doing so would help him and his podcast shed any remaining associations with the discredited party elites that briefly stepped off their yachts to anoint Sara Gideon in 2020. Instead of asking Platner any pointed or even potentially revealing questions about the Nazi tattoo, Vietor goofed around with Platner about his choice of song and let the candidate hit his marks. The broader conversation surrounding it fishtailed hopelessly into abstraction—how normal or acceptable the tattoo actually was or obviously wasn't, the practicality of drawing these kinds of lines and the specifics of those lines' brightness and position, what kind of signal was this all sending to Our Men.

There is a lot to think about in all this, and not a lot to like—questions about how much straight-up Nazi poison is latent in the cultural groundwater, and the sort of ideological journey a person can have over the course of a moderately engaged lifetime, and what is and isn't disqualifying at this present national moment of political humiliation. Platner seemed authentically contrite in his response, and will have the rest of his life to either make good on that sense or disprove it; I also don't think I could vote for someone with a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, or a candidate deluded or arrogant enough to believe that he might somehow be sworn in as a senator without ever having to reckon with it. I would have some questions about how much I could trust their judgment, for starters. But I don't live or vote in Maine, and so can choose to work through as much or as little of all that as I wish on my own time, secure in the knowledge that it doesn't matter at all. I could also just think about something else.

But I had taken an interest, less in some specific fandom around a particular candidate—as a practical matter, I've found that to be a bad idea—than in the hope that this decade of national crisis and fracture might create space for new types of leaders to say and do new things. The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, as the man said, but while that interregnum is chaotic and patently unsustainable, it is also incomplete. The old world may be dying, but at the moment it is mostly just elderly and weirdly without urgency; the new one speaks with real feeling about universality and solidarity with a SS skull leering out from under its shirt. The systems and structures persist but degrade all the while; they become perverse and revengeful against their original purpose, or collapse into abstraction and cynicism. The last bit of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks observation about the dying old world and the new one struggling into the light is: "now is the time of monsters."

The political humiliation of this moment is not limited to the president nodding off or crashing out on camera, or to the slapstick sadism of the secret police B-teamers that his team of scheming viziers have spun up and sicced on every aspect of American life. It also manifests through this sort of degrading choice, and in the rituals of abasement forced upon voters who are eager to reject the regime in the most effective way possible and instead must negotiate with themselves on behalf of candidates who can't be bothered to do it. Do you want a candidate who supports genocide or one with a Nazi tattoo on his chest? is not only a question that will continue to be asked earnestly by people who previously rejected demands for such compromises, but one that cannot be answered without submitting to some amount of humiliation. All of it, in the end, becomes a question of what you will settle for, and how much you are willing to bear in exchange for a chance at making things less unbearable.

But in a time of monsters, you can at least respect yourself. In a system that worked, a politician would not be an object of fandom; they could not afford to be this entitled or this reckless. They would just be applicants for a job, and do those jobs in a way that suggested they understood that they would have to defend their work when it came time to reapply for the position. Dragging that relationship back into balance—replacing the demeaning and utterly backwards relationship between the people and the public servants we are told we must abase ourselves to serve, making the Democratic Party or whatever replaces it work for its voters instead of conscripting them into an endless series of humiliations and compromises made less in the service of those goals than of the party itself—will be difficult. There is an unconscionable industry built around making people decide how much less than what they deserve they are willing to accept. Rejecting that as the false choice that it is, and insisting that the people vying to do the public's work take it seriously, seems like a reasonable place to start.