Graham Platner’s Wife Flagged Sexually Explicit Texts to His Senate Campaign

[u/TheWyldMan]

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/graham-platners-wife-flagged-sexually-explicit-texts-to-his-senate-campaign-628ec832?mod=e2tw

[u/pomme17]

It's not about excusing it. The point is that Democrats spent years trying to uphold a "when they go low, we go high" standard while Republicans repeatedly rallied around a politician who treated those standards as a joke. And Republicans arguably benefited from it electorally.

You can call Democrats hypocrites, sure. But so what? It just doesn't matter anymore. After watching the norm that presidents and public officials should meet some basic standard of conduct get shattered over and over again with few consequences, people just stopped caring. The social contract was broken too many times. Not only was Trump rarely punished politically for it, millions of voters actively rewarded him for it because they saw him as more authentic, more honest, and more "real". At a certain point people stop believing there's any reason to hold one side to standards the other side openly rejects.

[u/PreviousCurrentThing → u/pomme17]

The point is that Democrats spent years trying to uphold a "when they go low, we go high" standard while Republicans repeatedly rallied around a politician who treated those standards as a joke.

Did they, though? I know Michele Obama said that in a speech once, yet Democrats have been been way more vitriolic in the Trump era than I ever remember them being before. I think Republicans are still generally more hostile and vitriolic than Dems, but I wouldn't call the last 10 years the "high road."

[u/Sierren → u/PreviousCurrentThing]

I think this is something Dems often miss. Democrat politicians live in this weird space where they have been far more vitriolic than their civility minded members think they've been, while also not being as vitriolic as their militant members want them to be. They are genuinely caught in the lukewarm position of saying things far too outrageous to be put in the high ground camp, while also shying away from going as far as the militants would want.

You can't call Trump a fascist then not treat him like a fascist. Calling him a fascist means they aren't the party of civility, because valuing civility precludes you from doing that. Not following through means that, if they think he's a fascist like they say, they're weak and ineffectual in the face of him. Dems are caught in this middle zone between these two positions that leaves them with the worst of both worlds.

[u/PreviousCurrentThing → u/Sierren]

That's a really good point, one I don't think I'd ever thought about quite like that.

If you're a militant Dem or to the left of them, mainstream Dem rhetoric is going to be insufficient relative to your perceived danger of Trump and look like the "high road", even if on an objective measure the rhetoric is way more heated than it was in previous decades.

Thanks for the insight. I think that does somewhat reframe how I view this particular "high road" discourse.