The Great Leftist Ignorance Scam

The new left movement in America is taking off mostly with the very wealthy, which isn't an accident

I almost died laughing when I read that Graham Platner, the “progressive warrior poet” running for Senate in Maine, went to school at Hotchkiss, one of a handful of prep schools in the Northeast more precious and exclusive than my own Concord Academy. The original comic appeal of the Platner story was in watching the legacy press mouthpieces who denounced Pete Hegseth’s “Crusader Cross” pec-tattoo rally to the defense of Platner’s Nazi Death’s Head tat, which he got in Split, Croatia, while he was so wasted. That’s been hilarious, but the Free Beacon story about the “warrior poet” with accidental Nazi ink who went to a $75,000 high school describes a political scam of chef’s kiss perfection.

He fooled even me, and I basically am Graham Platner: a northeasterner of means who went to high school with sons and daughters of rock stars and CIA chiefs, but also has a few Oyster-shucking scars. It would never have occurred to me to market myself as “working class,” but Platner obviously doesn’t suffer pangs of conscience on that score, describing himself in a launch video as a “working-class Mainer” who can stand a post and chop his own goddamned firewood:

Even more incredible is how far and wide the humble origins tag has flown, with everyone from The New Yorker to the Washington Post to Bernie Sanders and Politico selling him as a “candidate from the working class” taking on the big, bad establishment. It should have been a major red flag that even Bon Appétit ran a gullible feature on Platner’s journey from “working class fisherman to Maine’s Zohran Mamdani,” but I still didn’t catch it, underestimating the sheer stones behind this marketing gambit:

In Bon Appétit

Platner will do well, since his glass-chewing voice and military chops will provide enough on-camera verisimilitude for voters to forgive his salesmanship indiscretions. He’ll be forgiven, unlike Gavin Newsom, already being savaged for his recent effort to rebrand himself as an ex-street waif forced to live off crusts of Wonder Bread. It’s all hilarious until you read other parts of the Platner story, which include hanging out on a Socialist reddit under the name “P-Hustle,” describing himself as a communist and “antifa super-soldier,” and suggesting violence is necessary for social change. An old Bangor Daily News editorial he wrote contained the following passage:

In post-9/11 America, every terrorist is portrayed as evil. We seem to have forgotten the old adage: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

Understanding the motives of terrorists is one thing, but the really concerning theme in Platner’s writing, and in the rhetoric of lefty superstar and New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, zooms past trying to understand certain violent movements into something like sympathy for their underlying goals and mores. The ideas currently fashionable among upper-class lefties are suicidal lunacies that will force actual working class Americans to vote against them out of self-preservation.

What’s depressing for me is that I know exactly how this happened. Only people who can afford the kinds of schools Platner and I attended can afford to be as detached from reality as the new progressives have become. Writing on his site recently, Andrew Sullivan is right. If the new choice is between this brand of leftism and MAGA Republicanism, we’re in for a “very long” period of “MAGA dominance.” And that’s the best case scenario:

In the Tolstoy story The Kreutzer Sonata, a hyperkinetic narrator describes entering a Bearded Lady tent at a P.T. Barnum circus in Paris. Discovering that the woman was just a “man in disguise” he hustles for the exit, whereupon the carnival barker points to him and says to the waiting crowd: “Ask the gentleman if it is not worth seeing!” The narrator doesn’t answer, being too embarrassed that he got conned out of a franc. “It was upon my false shame that the Barnum must have counted,” he concluded.

In The Kreutzer Sonata this is Tolstoy’s metaphor for marriage, but it fits better with modern higher education. After years of exclusive schooling I was horrified to realize not a dime of my parents’ tuition money had been spent preparing me to earn a living. I’d been too stupid to worry about it myself, and schools simply never brought it up, instead encouraging youngsters like me to programs of enlightened self-actualization through drama, political sciences, creative writing, and literature. Great fun, but when you hit the job market — yikes! When I realized the only saleable skill I had in the modern economy was the family business of journalism — which I hadn’t studied — I fled the country in shame, living off money saved up waiting tables and working demolition shifts until I could support myself selling articles.

Across the next decade or so of embarrassed residency abroad, I saw that real working class people don’t have the luxury to send their kids away to whack themselves off in intellectual spas. It’s understood that large percentages of young people will be needed to design the next generation’s roads, water treatment plants, refrigerators, etc. Living in places like Mongolia and Uzbekistan also introduced me to the idea that less than extravagantly wealthy countries don’t have the luxury of sending class after class of their best young minds through curricula devoted to deconstructing the core premises of their society. In other words, in the rest of the world, rational social planning not only results in fewer kids studying pure theory, but the theorists those countries do graduate are far less inclined to spend their lives denouncing their home countries as forces of historical evil.

In countries where the bulk of people have to be concerned with survival — getting enough to eat, not being conquered by rival nations or revolutionaries, and holding crime and corruption to tolerable levels — colleges don’t teach kids that they’re citizens of oppressor nations that should probably be disbanded. They certainly wouldn’t do it if they lucked into the benefits of citizenship in a country like the United States. This country has problems, even serious ones, but it’s not like gangsters are setting up freelance toll booths on I-95, or the strip steak you ordered at Ponderosa has a good chance of being cat meat. Citizens of countries that have known true suckage — including especially the ones with Marxist or Maoist histories — laugh at the things Americans call “problems.” The only people who think the system that produced the richest, safest empire in history is essentially unfixable are America’s own wealthy, whose current disdain for their own good fortune is like a political version of heroin chic.

This is what we’re seeing now, and in particular with the Mamdani campaign, which to a hilarious degree is manna from heaven for Trump. Mamdani is the face of the new brand of socialism that embraces the preamble theme of the Communist Manifesto, in which all society is divided into “oppressor and oppressed.” Illegal immigration isn’t a problem that needs to be contained in order to make social programming for citizens affordable, as Bernie Sanders once believed (and perhaps still does), but because immigration laws are inherently oppressive. So as Mamdani now proposes, let’s spend $165 million making New York the “strongest sanctuary city in the country.” Let’s not fix police violence by ending stats-based enforcement or doing away with Broken Windows theory, but let’s tweet things like “Queer liberation means defunding the police” (Mamdani says he no longer favors defunding, but be your own judge). On other subjects, here’s how Sullivan sums up:

In 2022, Mamdani declared of his political career: “For me, there’s no point in doing this without D.S.A.” The Democratic Socialists of America favor full amnesty for all illegal immigrants, abolition of the Senate, voting rights for noncitizens, and public ownership of major corporations. Since he won the nomination, he has softened on some of these points, but remains a DSA member and fan. New Yorkers can decide if he’s sincere…

Then there’s Mamdani’s gambit in which he decided to “speak to the Muslims in New York,” telling a story about an aunt who “stopped taking the subway after September 11th” because “she did not feel safe in her hijab.” I lived in New York for most of the 2000s and recall extraordinary levels of amity and cooperation between most of the city’s Muslim and non-Muslim residents. The numbers bear this out. New York is and always has been a liberal city welcoming to people from all over, one of the reasons its Muslim population has more than doubled since 9/11. For a likely future Muslim Mayor of New York to even remotely imply that Muslims in New York were victims of 9/11 is infuriating lunacy. Unfortunately, it fits in the aforementioned “oppressor and oppressed” mindset, in which a “marginalized” community always holds the moral high card over people who built your roads, bridges, and ports, and put out your fires.

Once you see attendees* of $75,000 boarding schools talking about the need to arm the proletariat and a candidate for Mayor of the world’s financial center talking about perhaps toning down the rhetoric on “seizing the means of production” so that “over time, we can bring people to that issue,” its clear neo-Marxist idiocies have been allowed to gain a stronghold. Only people who don’t know how hard it is to build a society think this way, but the number of such people is growing, ironically because of the educational system.

The liberal left in this country used to be about searching for ways to moderate the excesses of capitalism, creating more opportunities for social mobility, and promoting tolerance and generosity. Instead, we’re in the “upper-class twits promoting revolution” space, a script with which most of the rest of the world is sadly familiar. Is there no defense against the ignorant rich?

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested Platner graduated from Hotchkiss.