The Old Playbook in Politics is Happening but it’s Not Working

There are numerous topics I want to write about, but I chose to analyze the way the political machine is treating certain candidates who are running for office that don’t fit into the traditional mold of a political candidate. I’m referring to folks like Graham Platner and Spencer Pratt. You could probably throw Mamdani in that category too. I write about these candidates because they simply aren’t, at least for now, controlled by the parties. What ties them together isn’t ideology — it’s that none of them owe their seat to the machine, and the machine can’t make them behave.

They’re wild cards in the mold of John Fetterman, Joe Manchin, or Kyrsten Sinema. And while I don’t necessarily like these particular politicians, I value their role in politics because they — and this part is really important — they might vote differently than the rest of their party. Along with this feature, people like them are willing to criticize their own party for really obvious things that should be criticized.

I find this trait virtuous and essential in modern politics, because the two parties do not care about their voters. The two parties only care about power, and the way to maintain that power is to corral all of their members and force them into a hive mentality. I have long maintained that a California Democrat should vote more often with California Republicans than with, say, a congressman from Wisconsin. But that’s clearly not the case, which is a major problem in this country.

The effect of this purity nonsense is that you have very little dissent within the party. When such a moment manifests, you see the result in the first and second Trump terms. There is no Congress, which leads to a complete lack of checks and balances that ends with the president running amok without any resistance. It’s fair to say we saw this play out under Obama as well. It’s how we got the ill-conceived Obamacare — a law that was half-baked, jammed through on a strict party-line vote, and so partisan in its drafting that Democrats couldn’t even bring themselves to fix the obvious problems once they appeared. I think it’s fair to say this hive mentality also left Democrats with no clue how to reasonably articulate normal positions on topics like trans issues.

And when these types of politicians step out of line, the party usually expels them. Manchin and Sinema are gone. MTG is gone. Massie was beaten two days ago. There are talks about Fetterman becoming a Republican, or calls for a primary challenge. Never mind that these folks reliably vote with their party. All of them vote with the party at least 80% of the time, but yet, that’s just not good enough.

So how does this machine try to take out independent thinkers? The uncontrollables? Well, with Platner, he has almost no record to criticize, so where do the attacks land? It starts with Platner’s Marine Corps tattoo, which is apparently an SS tattoo from World War II. In normal times, this would be how the left tries to take him out, but this cry has come far more from the right. The Free Press, a fake “straight news” outlet, has run articles ad nauseam about the tattoo. A tattoo! I’m not saying it’s not newsworthy. It was! The article came out, and his primary opponent, establishment candidate Janet Mills (the 79-year-old former governor), had to drop out. In other words, the tattoo story didn’t move the needle. Platner said he didn’t know it was a Nazi tattoo when he got it. But months later, the articles about the tattoo keep coming. Another story: Platner is 100% disabled, and there’s some hay being made about how he might not be eligible for the benefits because, apparently, he can work. There’s another story about how his dad might have lent him money to buy a house, and then also a story about some posts he made on social media about Chris Kyle, the American Sniper played by Bradley Cooper.

Come on. This is all you have? Bob Menendez, senator from New Jersey, was convicted of bribery because they literally found gold bars in his closet. A New York congressman was convicted of insider trading. Trump hands out pardons for $1M. Pelosi is the Queen of Insider Trading. RFK eats raccoons and Kristi Noem kills dogs. A mayor in California was a Chinese spy. There’s an entire apparatus that is hiding the truth about the Epstein files. The betting markets Kalshi and Polymarket are completely manipulated. The DOJ cut an unserious settlement in its antitrust case against Ticketmaster, effectively quasi-dropping the case only for a coalition of states to refuse the deal and win at trial, and a $5 billion bribe got flavored tobacco approved by the FDA. So why the hell would anyone care about the man’s tattoos or old social media posts? Grow up.

With Pratt, the attacks are a little different, but the point remains. Pratt is running for mayor of Los Angeles as an independent. There have been some reports that he’s a registered Republican, but I’m not sure if that’s true. Regardless, even if he were a Republican, he’s running a normie campaign, in my opinion, and is a far cry from the Washington Republican who is in lockstep with the president no matter what. So the attacks from the incumbent Karen Bass, or the other frontrunner, City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, try to link Pratt to the MAGA movement. What makes the Pratt attacks interesting is that the MAGA movement is trying to claim him despite Pratt’s efforts to distance himself. Erika Kirk has praised Pratt. Trump recently mentioned him, and he’s a regular topic on Fox News’s The Five. It almost feels like sabotage from the right. And I think that’s totally possible because, again, Pratt just doesn’t fit into the binary universe that dominates American politics.

Trump also fits this mold. He’s the obvious example. The difference between Trump and at least the idea of these other independents is that Trump shaped his party in a way that it completely capitulated to his will rather than fight him. The Republican party utterly changed its stripes rather than take out Trump. So Trump is now the new establishment on the right. He is responsible for taking out the Republican party independents because, again, they were uncontrollable. And here’s the punchline: on actual policy, Trump now has more in common with Mamdani and Bernie Sanders than with Mitch McConnell. He has the federal government taking equity stakes in private companies like Intel — that’s not Reaganism, that’s industrial policy from the left. Socialism is good now, babe!

I truly hope the American electorate sees what I see. I think it does. I mean. the establishment’s message is basically, “Hey this guy has a tattoo so you just have to eat the shit sandwich that we’ve been serving you for a couple decades.” Despite my hope, these primary results are somewhat concerning. Again, MTG is gone. Massie lost. But Platner won which a good sign. Mamdani won and appears well liked by his voters despite incredible criticism from right-wing media. So there is hope.

I guess we’ll see how this plays out. Our politics are changing. Experts have been talking about how social media usage would change how we view politicians. If you’re a true American and all you want is stability and American greatness, I think you need to embrace the insurgent candidate. Platner’s rise is good for democracy. Nebraska is running independent Dan Osborn for Senate. A victory there for the independent would be good for democracy. A Pratt win in Los Angeles would be good for California. If nothing else, it would signal to California Democrats that there is a line that they cannot cross, or they will be punished at the ballot box. That’s a good thing! But we need the voters to find their independent streak. The politics of yesterday are over.