The Graham Platner controversy is an instructively stupid one. It’s a little bit like the Katie Hill controversy of yesteryear, but even dumber.

Platner is accused of saying and doing some problematic things, mostly many years ago. The accusations fall into two categories. Either the facts are contested, or not. In the most serious cases, the facts are not only contested but essentially unknowable, which raises the suspicion that many of the allegations are either exaggerations, false memories, or lies. In the uncontested cases, what is alleged is simply not serious enough to be disqualfying. Much of the “scandal” turns on the widespread inability to grasp or acknowledge the fact that people often say things in anger or through thoughtlessness that they don’t really mean. These claims often don’t tell us very much in the first instance except that the person lacks a certain kind of self-control. Once the problematic claim comes out, it’s out, but if sincerely apologized for, much of the problem is, often enough, resolved. 

Which, in my view, is what’s happened. The most serious charge is that Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo is a Nazi symbol that reflects his commitment to or admiration of Nazism. This charge has, in my view, conclusively been refuted by Michelle Goldberg in a well-argued column in The New York Times. I won’t rehearse her arguments here; you’ll just have to read the column. If you have trouble, just remember to “#believewomen,” and remember that Goldberg is a woman, and you’ll be fine. The obvious explanation for the whole tattoo affair is that Platner was drunk and didn’t realize that he was getting a Nazi tattoo, or one that resembled a Nazi symbol. He may later have realized his mistake, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. Once it became a political liability, he covered it up.

Nothing about this sequence of events, and nothing else in the universe, suggests that Platner is a Nazi, or indicates any moral failing beyond drunken indiscretion. I don’t drink alcohol, but considering how many people in this country think nothing of drinking-and-driving, I’m not sure how Platner’s indiscretion is so much worse than theirs. The philosopher Bonnie Steinbock, a woman, has argued that drinking-and-driving is in many instances morally analogous to attempted murder. So again, #believewomen. If Platner is a problem, so are those who drink and drive. If they are, so is much of the country. I mean, someone’s got to govern this nation of assholes, so who better than a fellow asshole to do it?

More to the point, nothing about Platner’s stated views or politics suggests Nazism. There is nothing Nazi about his rhetoric, his appeal, his demographic, or his policy prescriptions. If you want to see a real-live Nazi problem, take a cold, hard look at the centrist liberals’ pet cause, Ukraine. The Ukrainian military, which they support, has a real Nazi problem–real Nazis with real weapons that the pious liberals are supplying them, who want to create a real Nazi regime in Ukraine. The same people who want to arm these Nazis want us to be worried about a covered-up, apologized-for tattoo somewhere on Graham Platner’s body. And they have the nerve to clam that Platner’s defenders are “in denial.”

The attacks on Platner’s “Nazism” are about at the level of the people who used to argue that heavy metal bands like AC/DC, Motorhead, and Rammstein were Nazi because they had adopted Nazi-looking symbolism into their marketing profiles or aesthetic. We were told for decades that AC/DC is a Nazi band because the thunderbolt in AC/DC’s logo looks like an SS symbol; that Motorhead was a Nazi band because Lemmy wore an Iron Cross necklace and collected Nazi memorabilia; and that Rammstein is Nazi because “Links 1-2-3” has a Nazi vibe to it (and the band itself is full of Nazi-like rage). If you don’t get those allusions, you’re missing out on some great music, but don’t worry about it. If you do get them, ask yourself in all seriousness whether any of these accusations panned out over the decades that these bands have been in existence. Is it really plausible to believe that AC/DC, Motorhead, Rammstein, or Graham Platner are Nazis, but that the Azov Brigade is not? What is Nazi about the former that isn’t much more obviously, literally Nazi about the latter?

That’s why the controversy is stupid. Why is it instructive? 

Any AC/DC fans in our government? Time for a Night of the Long Knives?

Consider the one ethical liability Graham Platner actually has. He volunteered to join the Marines, then went to Iraq, and helped facilitate the conquest and occupation of that country. What is instructive is that almost no one seems to regard any of this as an ethical liability. And yet the facts are totally clear. No one, not even Platner, disputes that he joined the Marines and went to Iraq. No one can dispute that Iraq was invaded. No one can dispute that it was conquered and occupied. No one can dispute that doing so required huge amounts of killing and huge amounts of destruction (see Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror). No one can dispute that among the people killed and maimed were the liberals’ now favorite demographic, women. The same liberals from NOW who express outrage about Platner’s contested physical threats and “toxic behavior” from after his military service discreetly avoid mentioning the service itself. Why is that? It can’t be because threats of violence are worse than participation in conquest, occupation, or mass slaughter. So what is it?

It’s because these liberals have no problem with invasion, conquest, occupation, or mass slaughter. They’re happy to see thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people killed or maimed, and their countries destroyed, as long as they, the good little American liberals, can get what they want at home. The entire shtick is to focus on the goodness of the goodies we might get through government largesse while ignoring the fact that this same government is a murder-and-pillage machine. It seems to escape them that this is arguably what the Nazis did. Maybe every accusation really is a confession.

The subtext to the Platner contoversy is that centrist liberals now see themselves as outflanked on the left by pro-Palestine, anti-war semi-leftists: Zohran Mamdani, Analilia Mejia, and now Adam Hamawy, among others. They can’t let that happen. These victories, however tepid or equivocal, are for them, the stuff of nightmares. What if they’re forced to re-consider their support for Israel? What if they have to end the war in Ukraine? What if they have to consider the possibility that the world isn’t a free-fire zone for their infantile imperialist fantasies?

That’s too much to handle. So they do what they do best: they dig up dirt, they defame, and they change the subject. What matters is always someone else’s supposedly toxic behavior in the distant past, never their own obvious imperial depredations right now. Because if participation in warfare was ethically disqualifying, the entire Establishment of the country, its Millsian power elite, would be ethically disqualified. This one test would gut both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as the leadership of the entire corporate sector, for-profit, not-for-profit, academic. You can see why it bothers them.  

Should you vote for Graham Platner? I really don’t care. Judging from my analytics, most of my readers don’t live in Maine anyway, so they can’t. What you should be doing is rejecting liberal centrism, or more specifically, the imperialist ethos behind it (which obviously extends beyond that one category). The axiom of liberal centrism is that liberal values at home are compatible with, or even realized by, imperialism abroad. Put another way: we are surrounded by bad, primitive, evil illiberal people whom we must subjugate or destroy to enjoy the fruits of liberalism at home. We owe this idea largely to a mythical conception of Rome, meaning both the Republic and the Empire, which is blindly venerated, largely by conservatives, but whose veneration is tacitly accepted by centrist liberals. 

The essential point, however, can be grasped independently of that particular historical allusion. Warfare is only justifiable in self-defense. But “self-defense” is not an elastic concept, or a blank check for perpetual warfare. When it becomes that, as it has since about 1945, it becomes time to stop and take a look around. America’s centrist liberals have proven themselves incapable of that. That they need to be voted out of office is too obvious to belabor. The real question is what’s to be done with them after that.