Casting A Ballot Is Not Flashing A Gang Sign
It's always, always, always about harm reduction; and few people have caused, or threaten to cause, more harm than Susan Collins.
More-or-less regular people will sometimes attach themselves morally to powerful bad actors.
Some people become in thrall to politicians or cultural icons and then begin lying to others or deluding themselves about the ways those actors abuse power. They stop assessing leaders on the merits, or based on how they stack up to their predecessors, and instead build new identities around their support for particular hero figures. They forget that amassing power is opportunistic; that politicians work for us; that transparency and accountability are checks on corruption and abuse. They become unable to criticize their tribe and its members over discrete points of disagreement, because they experience that kind of independent thinking as a form of betrayal.
This essentially describes MAGA.
Other people accept jobs they don’t need to advance the interests of powerful individuals with bad values or poor character, and they stick around long after they’ve been pushed beyond their once-imagined redlines. There is honor even on the political side of public service (campaigns, p.r., etc.) just as there’s honor in representing criminal defendants. There’s less honor in choosing powerful but morally deficient clients for the pay day, while pretending they’re no different from anyone else in the market for professional services. And there’s no honor in being swept into immoral or criminal enterprises.
This essentially describes cretins like Kellyanne Conway, lawyers for the tobacco industry, Andrew Cuomo’s inner circle. People like that. Perhaps one day we’ll say it describes the crew that plucked Graham Platner from obscurity and hid facts about his character, knowing he might become the linchpin for control of the U.S. Senate.
But we’re not there yet. I’m not sure we’re even particularly close.
Reasonable minds may differ as to where we should draw these lines, or how proximate one must be to bad deeds before their service transforms into complicity. Some moral judgments are close calls. Others are more cut and dry. But the realms of power, particularly political power, are sprawling. The world would probably be a worse place if the people who stood up PEPFAR under George W. Bush had instead resigned to protest the Iraq War.
Grey area extends horizon to horizon; people get lost in it and don’t always recognize when they’ve crossed over into the black and white.
Platner, and the relatively small group of people who’ve made Platner possible, are well within the grey area. They might well be vindicated. They might well be disgraced. It may be that the stakes of Platner’s campaign turn out to be minuscule. But it’s reasonable to expect them and him to feel conflicted, like they’ve placed their credibility and the lives of strangers on the line.
Voting in an election, as a distinct act, is not like this at all. It’s not meant to be like this, at any rate. Voting, particularly in a two-party democracy, is about harm reduction. Even when candidates are inspiring and well-intentioned, voting is still about harm reduction, because politics is highly impure. Superpower politics are especially impure. Voting is utilitarian. It is not like flashing a gang sign. In a contest between a bad candidate and a worse one, voting for the bad candidate is like expressing the moral intuition that someone should amputate a gangrenous leg rather than allow the patient to die. To take a more familiar example, a ballot does not ask you whether to pull the lever that sends the trolley onto the new track; it asks you which of two people you want in the conductor’s seat when the dilemma arises.
You can’t know exactly what the future holds—maybe pulling the lever causes the trolley to derail—but for that reason you are not attached to subsequent failures morally, so long as all you did is vote on the basis of sound judgment.
People who voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris because they sincerely believed that, for all his sins, he’d be the better instrument for world peace may have been idiots—but they at least got the concept right. People in swing states who abstained from voting because they couldn’t bear the moral dissonance of associating themselves (via secret ballot) with candidates who failed their litmus tests are different. They may have felt righteous about their decisions—they may still feel righteous. But they contributed to immense harm. To return to the earlier simile, they expressed the view that the patient’s life or limb is immaterial because the best available doctor has committed malpractice and billing fraud, and thus shouldn’t be practicing medicine at all.
This is a lot of throat clearing for me to say that if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for Platner in November without reservation. What we’ve learned about him so far isn’t even really in the ballpark of the kind of thing I’d have to know he did, or see him do, before I’d decide re-electing Susan Collins would cause less harm than replacing her with him.
I wasn’t moved to write this by the results of Tuesday’s Maine Senate primary. Platner won the nomination handily, though the fact that Janet Mills—the retiring, elderly governor who suspended her Senate campaign weeks ago—drew about one in five primary voters suggests some Maine Democrats wanted a place to register their disapproval.
My larger concerns are the slippage we’ve seen in head-to-head polls between Platner and Collins, and the elected Democrats like Jake Auchinchloss and Madeleine Dean who say Platner’s “disqualified” himself.
Having a different preference in a primary, or casting a protest vote in a primary, is totally reasonable. But I think these other people have lost their minds.
Platner’s relatively young. If he wins the election in November, he could serve as a senator for a very long time. If he trounces Collins, he will vault into consideration for the presidency. It is true, we should be circumspect about sending anyone along a path to so much power. But he will have to win more elections to advance his career in either of those ways. The vote in November is—at most—about the six years between 2027 and 2033. Do we think that over this time span, Platner is likely to cause more harm than Collins would?
The answer is incredibly obvious. And it pertains very little to either candidate’s personal character. It is only “yes” if you believe that the Democratic Party is the more malicious of the two parties. Many people in America do believe that! They’re dominated by supporters of Donald Trump.
But at this juncture I’m not even prepared to concede that what we know about Platner confirms that he’s a person of lower personal character than Collins. It’s obviously difficult to compare the moral worth of someone with Platner’s background to someone who’s been making life-and-death decisions—mostly bad ones—affecting everyone on Earth for decades. But even in the realm of personal conduct, why is anyone certain she’s more trustworthy than he is? Or places a higher value than he does on the wellbeing of others? What was her romantic life like when she was a young adult in the 1970s? What did she say about black people or gay people when she thought the public wasn’t listening? All lost to history, and all thoroughly beside the point. The only thing I know about her in this regard is that she called the police to report a protester who chalked a polite, pro-choice message on the sidewalk outside her home.
She also just voted to pre-fund the Department of Homeland Security for years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Years ago, she voted for the wars Platner helped fight. She more recently disclaimed responsibility for the harms her votes inflicted on U.S. service members, noting that our military is all volunteer. Platner, like all the others, chose to enlist.
Voting in the Senate is not like voting in an election. Her cavalier and calculating views on husbanding and spending political capital betray a terribly low cunning. Some Republicans (because of who they are, or who they represent) cheer for war and ICE raids and for throwing people off their health care. Collins’ approach reveals she wants these things to happen, but knows they’re wrong, and thus seeks artificial distance from them.
On the trail, she will not want to talk about prefunding ICE. She’ll want to talk about her vote against the OBBBA—to say she is not responsible for costing tens of thousands of Mainers their health insurance. But she is! It is her party—which she joined just as willingly as Platner joined the military—that works day and night to uninsure as many Americans as possible. And it is her party that will attempt to block future efforts to restore that coverage. Re-electing her sets back the cause of reinsuring millions, including in Maine, because we can’t know how much of a buffer Democrats will need ahead of 2028, in order to control the Senate in 2029. Senators are powerful, and the 51st senator is exceptionally powerful.1
There are things I can imagine Platner doing, or that we might learn about him, to change my view. But they’re really out there. Frustrated as I am about the course of John Fetterman’s term, I’m still glad he, rather than Mehmet Oz, represents Pennsylvania. Because that was the choice. If somehow Fetterman wins another Democratic primary, I would make this very same argument about the importance of re-electing him2. Even if his opponent were the Susan Collins of Pennsylvania.
This isn’t just Flight 93-style self-justification, but in reverse. There is a family resemblance, I admit, like the resemblance between Mufasa and Scar. But the people who delivered us Trump have no moral lines, whereas if Platner took a Trumpian turn—if he recanted his apologies, or advocated for political mob violence, or covered up child sex abuse—I would change my view.
But unless and until, let’s keep our heads on straight. A bad senator can be voted out of office. A terrible senator can be driven from office and replaced by their governor. Whether he deserves your vote anyhow turns entirely on the person and party he’s running against. I will take a bad senator from a broadly liberal party over a “moderate” senator from a fascist party 100 percent of the time I’m confronted with the choice. If people like Auchinchloss and Dean can’t bring themselves to say the same, they’re the ones who deserve to lose their next primaries.
After I wrote this on Tuesday, I saw AOC said much the same.
Unless, somehow, over the course of the next two years, Republicans discover enlightenment, and Democrats descend into fascism.
This article should be an op-ed in the Portland Post Herald.
I feel burnt by Fetterman. But I'm not worried about Platner. He's so much more than Susan Collins. I think 'harm reduction' exactly frames Platner's best case both to Mainers and to the rest of us.