Aesthetic Leftism

Tattoos, swearing, and flannel are a costume; authentic leftism requires a commitment to policies instead of just looking cool.

I noted yesterday that Graham Platner’s defenders loved his ‘authenticity,’ which was, in Matt Stoller’s should-never-be-imitated phrase, the opposite of ‘Democrat HR Lady politics.’ In the same way that Donald Trump’s biggest fans love how he ‘tells it like it is’ even though very few of Trump’s statements have even a distant contact with actual reality, Platner’s fans love mostly the fact that he looks like a tough guy. Platner’s absence of any demonstrated commitment to Democratic Party or Leftist organizing didn’t matter because he had tattoos, swore a lot, and worked outdoors. He wore a costume really well. I called this love of appearances over substance ‘Aesthetic Leftism’ and I think I need to explain more of it, especially now.

I need to define what I mean by ‘leftist’ in order to make the distinction between an actual progressive and the ‘Aesthetic Leftist’ easy to see. There are people who spend much of their adult lives advocating for government action designed to make life better and more secure for people who aren’t from rich families or are from groups that in most of the past were kept out of education, government, and advancement up the social ladder by law and custom. The Civil Rights Act and the Equal Rights Amendment are good examples of these kinds of progressive policies. The key here is that a real progressive focuses on policies and not on appearances. The best possible example is Franklin D Roosevelt, a scion of the oldest money in this country, whose economic policies saved capitalism. Roosevelt looked and talked like the rich kid he was and yet his policies created the American middle class. He was a true progressive.

FDR is a good introduction to the second element of a true progressive: pragmatism. He pushed through the Social Security Act which has kept old people out of poverty and freed up uncountable amounts of their kids’ money for other uses. When it was originally enacted, Social Security excluded agricultural and domestic workers. This had the result, whether intended or not, of excluding about half of the employed people in the US and a very large percentage of Black people. All the New Deal programs were products of brutal fights in Congress and even more brutal fights in the federal courts. FDR, having been Navy Secretary and governor of New York, was a veteran of government procedures and knew how to compromise to get some of what he wanted. He’s idolized by people today who have no idea what he and Congress had to do to get social programs passed, and that’s with 72% of Congress from his own party.

Aesthetic Leftism, in contrast, is much more of a purely appearance-based movement. Graham Platner is the current poster boy for Aesthetic Leftism. This Slate article very specifically notes that aesthetics were why Platner got so much attention:

His left-leaning ideology was essential, certainly. And Mainers have spoken about his talent for riling up a crowd with an uncommon magnetism. But what really made Platner appealing to Moraff and Fan didn’t have anything to do with the kind of person he was or what was, or wasn’t, on his résumé. It was his unvarnished aesthetic. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” Moraff told the Wall Street Journal. “They want people who are real human beings, and they want people who do not look and sound like the vat-grown people who’ve been leading this country off the cliff for the past century, and that was Graham.”

Platner’s backers were dazzled by what the Slate article calls “a series of signifiers fetishized by white-collar consultants like Moraff who think they know what working-class voters want: forearm tattoos, earrings, a cruddy trucker hat, a facility with raw shellfish, a litany of offensive Reddit posts, and a history of drinking too much.” Matt Stoller described Platner as ‘a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.’ This leads me to another element of Aesthetic Leftism: performative anger. Platner looks like he’s in an ad for Ralph Lauren flannel shirts, but that’s not enough for Aesthetic Leftists. Platner’s anger at the System and The Establishment, especially the establishment of his own political party, appealed to the pundits who supported him. He looked and acted like a guy who’s going to get into a fistfight over Medicare for All.

So what’s my problem? Don’t I want a fighter for my causes?

Yes, but mostly I want to WIN on my issues, and Aesthetic Leftism doesn’t really allow for winning. The question has never been who is most sincere in his beliefs about Medicare for All or Justice for Palestine; it’s who can actually DO something to achieve those goals. Who has the experience and temperament to get good laws passed? Platner may be the most sincere advocate for Gaza ever but if he loses the election or wins and can’t get anything through the Senate he has failed.

That’s the real problem with Aesthetic Leftism — it’s all about appearances and has no substance at all. Stoller’s insult about ‘HR Lady politics’ isn’t insulting just because it’s sexist, but also because it’s stupid. As I noted yesterday, Human Resources ladies are the people who check references, confirm resume entries, get transcripts and license documents, and generally ensure that the employees at a job have the qualifications to do that job. They do not care whether or not someone told the truth when they said they dreamed of being an insurance adjuster since 2nd grade; they do care that the person has a valid driver’s license and no disqualifying criminal history and they do this before the applicant has a chance to crash a car or steal from a client. Without the substance of qualifications, the appearance is irrelevant.

I am not saying that ‘passion’ doesn’t matter or that there’s no place in politics for people who haven’t spent every moment since completing toilet training perfecting their CV’s for Congress. What I am saying is that passion needs some discipline and planning. Anger is a deadly sin and basing an entire political program on one deadly sin is, as the consultants say, suboptimal. Neither Platner nor Trump know anything about how government works and we’re living in the wreckage their ignorance caused. Real leftists have experience working or volunteering or just living in the world of the marginalized and from that, developed feasible ideas to improve their lives. Once reason LBJ could get the Civil Rights Ac and the VASTLY more significant Voting Rights Act passed was that he had taught in a poor school and knew the lives of those kids, and also because he knew how to manage Congress. He never made passionate speeches but he certainly knew what was needed to really improve lives. We got Medicare and Medicaid out of his calculating pragmatism and not from anyone’s slogans.

Aesthetic Leftists don’t care enough about their issues to win, which makes them both useless and dangerous.

gans he repeats, but that doesn’t come close to making him an effective progressive legislator. I mentioned FDR above for a reason — he knew how to get his agenda accomplished.