Existential Battles Require Strange Bedfellows
We allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler; An alliance with Graham Platner to help defeat Trump is not comfortable, but it is not REMOTELY as objectionable. Just Do It.
“If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
— Winston Churchill in reference to Stalin (June 1941)
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A week ago, I updated an essay I had written a year before about the need for a Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator who had the ovaries to stand up to Trump as she had done to Joe McCarthy. In it, I noted that Susan Collins has often tried to present herself as heir to MCS but has never even in the slightest bit been that. Indeed, Sen. Collins is most accurately portrayed as a negative image of Sen. Smith. I didn’t think at that time of offering that image. Here it is:
In that essay I made the case for why it is necessary to support Graham Platner against Collins. With more accusations against the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee having come out since, I want to revisit the rationale.
No Alliance with Stalin Likely Would Have Meant a Hitler Victory
I began writing this essay on June 6, the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, a time when the fight against fascism was existential and, as a result, alliances with those who did terrible things were deemed necessary to ensure that democracy and freedom would survive.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was among the evilest members of our species ever to walk among us — or at least among those to have achieved control over a major country. Estimates of how many deaths he caused, leaving aside the millions of Russians who died in World War II, range from six million to eleven million or more. He, like other totalitarian rulers seemed to define the individual human being as Arthur Koestler said the Leader in his 1940 novel, Darkness at Noon, did: an individual is “a multitude of one million divided by one million” — meaningless, just part of a mass. Stalin’s policies of collectivization led to the starvation of millions in avoidable famines. In the years before he entered the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1941, Stalin ordered the execution of about a million Russians, many of them his recent allies, in a massive purge of his enemies. (Apart from the executions, that may have a familiar ring in the United States today.)
Despite all that, when Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended Lend/Lease aid to the Soviet Union. The American president justified this aid by saying it was in American interests to have Russia fight Germany on the Eastern Front to prevent Hitler from conquering all of western Europe and Great Britain and then possibly moving on the United States.
When the United States entered the war following Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill — a staunch anti-communist — and FDR, the former with more misgivings and the latter holding out some hope that his famous ability to charm and win people over could work on Stalin — saw cooperation with the devil he was as necessary to defeat the much more powerful threat posed by Hitler. During the war, Stalin was presented to the American people as “Uncle Joe.”
In retrospect, Hitler’s decision to invade Russia without having first defeated the United Kingdom is seen as a monumental mistake — akin to, but with even worse consequences, the Cheney-Bush Administration going to war in Iraq or Trump deciding to invade Iran this year.
The wartime alliance with “Uncle Joe” was essential to the Allies’ victory against the Nazis. Had Hitler been able to do what Napoleon had failed to do — successfully invade Russia — the Nazi Regime would have been able to move massive numbers of troops from the Eastern to the Western Front. It is very difficult to see how the Allies could have won under that circumstance.
Had the Roosevelt government placed a need to be “pure” above the need to defeat fascism, we might have been living under a fascist regime since before Donald J. Trump was even the proverbial twinkle in his greedy, racist father’s eye.
A Vote for Platner Is a Vote against Trumpism, Not an Endorsement of Some of His Past
That is the context in which I am weighing the Graham Platner situation. Democrats have an unfortunate proclivity for insisting on absolute purity in a world where that is not in great supply.
We are in a different sort of existential struggle with fascism today. The enemy now is within. It controls most of the levers of our own government. In some respects, that makes the threat even graver.
Whatever Graham Platner’s sins, he is not remotely a Joe Stalin. Or a Donald Trump.
I am a feminist and proud to say so. Much of what Platner did to and said about women over the years disgusts me.
But in trying to get him elected, we are not endorsing that behavior or even overlooking it; we are asking people to vote against Susan Collins and Trump to save democracy and freedom.
All hypocrisies are not equal.
What Platner is alleged to have done is in a different galaxy from what Trump has done and continues to do.
A Look at the Latest Accusations
Let’s take a quick look at the latest allegations against Platner. The New York Times article on Friday was based on interviews with a substantial number of women who have dated Platner over a period of many years. Many of them said that “while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.” The Times reports that “several women” its reporters interviewed on Wednesday described “Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.”
But the article goes on to say that in interviews over a period of two months, reporters found “three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.”
The one woman who described Platner’s behavior in the worst terms — but accused him of doing nothing physical to her beyond grabbing her by the shoulders — Lyndsey Fifield, is identified by the Times as having “worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns.” That is not to say that her accusations are false, but to put them in context. It is also worth noting that her relationship with Platner ended a decade ago.
Fifield described Platner as having a “warrior ethos.” You know, what faux masculine Pete Hegseth says everyone in the military should have. Platner is working to go beyond that; the Trump Regime is promoting it.
Susan Collins is “Troubled” — What Else Is New?
The June 5 article in the Times reports that ““revelations about Mr. Platner’s personal history have caused escalating discomfort within his party, while drawing intensifying attacks from Republicans [My emphasis].”
Let’s pause right there. The level of hypocrisy for Republicans, almost all of whom continue to support Donald Trump, who has done to and said things about women that are almost infinitely worse than what Platner is charged with, is mind-boggling.
Earlier in the day, Ms. Collins told local reporters that the allegations in the Times report were “troubling” and that Mr. Platner had “a lot of questions to answer.”
Ah, Susan Collins is “troubled.” That is her very faulty default setting.
Trump’s “Growth” as a Person Is in the Direction of Tom Hanks’ Character in Big
On Friday evening, Rep. Ro Khanna (D, CA), a Platner supporter, noted that the Maine candidate has acknowledged past “misogyny” and promised that he “grew as a person and as a man.”
Can anyone imagine Donald Trump, who we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, has done and said vastly worse things, saying those words? Of course not. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he infamously said In March 2020 about delays in the fight against Covid, but the declaration has been his m.o. throughout his life. And Trump believing he wishes he had been better in his innumerable misdeeds is about as likely as him going into a church Jimmy Swaggart-style and proclaiming, with tears running down his orange cheeks, “I have sinned.”
Or Donald Trump having grown as a person and a man? Trump’s “growth” has been like that of the Tom Hanks character in the 1988 movie, Big — he becomes more of a child by the day.
Past misogyny is a synonym for the recorded history of civilization. Current Misogyny on a massive scale is what Trumpism is all about. It is to the long history of misogyny, racism, and other forms of subordination that it seeks to “Take America Back.” Supporting someone with an admitted misogynistic past who asserts that he has grown beyond it to be one of one hundred members of the Senate is far better than losing an opportunity to check a totally unreconstructed and unapologetic self-made-up “man” who is Misogynist-in-Chief.
The Choice Before Maine Voters Is Clear
The choice before Maine voters is not Graham Platner vs. the Platonic ideal of a political candidate. Nor is it even just Platner vs. Susan Collins. It is Platner vs. Trump, which means Platner vs. a fascist America … the preservation of the American Experiment vs. its interment.
I do not, of course, mean that Platner himself will save America. I mean that a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress is the only way to put a check on some of the Trumpian evil during the next two years.
If our forebears understood the need to make an alliance with one devil to defeat another, far more threatening, devil, we should be able to accept a candidate who has said and done some things we find reprehensible, but who is clearly not the devil in a struggle against Trumpism.
