Someone needs to inform Jay Caspian Kang of the New Yorker that "dirtbag" is considered to be a pejorative, not a positive. Yet, Kang seems to think that he is somehow helping to restore the sinking candidacy of Democrat Graham Platner for the U.S. Senate from Maine by repeatedly referring to him as the "embodiment of the dirtbag left" as he did on Friday with "What Explains Graham Platner’s Popularity?"
And Kang weirdly does his worst to help Graham's supposed popularity by emphasizing Platner as a "dirtbag" starting with the subtitle: "The U.S. Senate candidate from Maine seems like the embodiment of the dirtbag left. But there’s another way to understand his appeal."
...The dirtbag left, as it became known, mostly revolved, at its start, around the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” the Democratic Socialists of America, and a few scattered high-follower social-media accounts. Its adherents were largely disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters who believed that the populist movement behind their candidate had been upended and diverted by a cabal of soulless careerists in both politics and, perhaps more pointedly, in the political media. Among the targets of the dirtbag left were Neera Tanden, a Hillary Clinton operative; Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones; and various reporters and editors at the Times, the Washington Post, and so on. The accusation was simple and alluring: by torpedoing the Sanders campaign and running an unelectable cipher in Clinton, these blinkered establishmentarians were responsible for Donald Trump’s victory. The dirtbag left’s job was to never let them forget it.
That's a "dirtbag" count of three in just the second paragraph. Does Kang get paid based on "dirtbag" piece work frequency? And now to up the game with a couple more "dirtbags" in the next paragraph:
I’ve been thinking about that era in online politics while observing the campaign of Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate hopeful from Maine. In some ways, he looks like an updated version of the ideal dirtbag-left candidate. Here is a working-class veteran who has talked about America’s “new Gilded Age,” called out the “billionaire economy,” and explicitly avoided the sort of “neoliberal” identity talk that seems to exist primarily to mediate disputes between well-off, highly educated people. Lately, Platner has fallen under intense scrutiny for a trove of old Reddit posts that included homophobic comments and a Nazi tattoo that he has since covered up. (He has said that he was not aware until recently of the tattoo’s Nazi associations.) This was surprising, although, for some skeptics, it might have fallen right in line with the image of the dirtbag left, who were often criticized as misogynistic and narrowly focused on the feelings of white men.
Unfortunately for Kang, the credibility of his beloved "dirtbag," Platner, has been strongly questioned by a CNN report that revealed Platner knew full well the meaning of his tattoo to the extent of even using the German word for the SS symbol:
His campaign has since fielded questions about whether Platner was aware of the tattoo’s resemblance earlier than he has said. Jewish Insider first reported about the former acquaintance, who recalled Platner referring to the image as “my Totenkopf” in a joking way more than a decade ago. CNN spoke with that same acquaintance, who reiterated the recollection.
As to Kang's description of "dirtbag" Platner's background as "working class," that might come as a surprise to his grandfather, Warren Platner, who "was a world-famous architect." Platner's father also kept up the family tradition of not being working class: "Bronson Platner, served as an assistant district attorney in Maine, ran unsuccessfully for state senate, and operated his own law practice for more than 30 years."
Time for a reality check:
Platner himself attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., in 1999, the Washington Free Beacon reported. It's considered America's number one boarding school and boasts extracurricular offerings like a 287-acre farm, a 220,000-square-foot "state-of-the-art" athletic facility featuring squash courts and two ice skating rinks, and study abroad opportunities in France, Italy, Spain, and the Bahamas. Its alumni include a Supreme Court justice and a CIA director. Tuition and fees for boarding students sit at $77,240 a year.
Kang's "Dirtbag" Elegy continues on and on for many more paragraphs desperately attempting to convince the reader that "working class" Graham Platner "is probably the closest thing we have to the id of the mainstream Democratic voter in 2025."
Sorry Kang, but if Platner is the "id of the mainstream Democratic voter" then that party is in much worse shape than we had imagined. However, at least they are much wealthier than we had thought.
