The facts are straightforward:. A Senate candidate backed by Bernie Sanders has an SS Totenkopf tattoo on his chest. He claims he got it drunk in Croatia in 2007 without understanding its meaning, yet acquaintance says Platner explained the Nazi connection to him in 2012. His former political director resigned, calling the tattoo antisemitic and warning Democrats against being "painfully stupid." Yet Sanders deflects, asking whether we care more about a tattoo or healthcare policy. The online left has made supporting Platner a litmus test.
I have been arguing in my ethics articles that values are real - a part of our very beings. Every human issue can be looked at through the lens of what our values are and how we prioritize them. In this case, we are seeing how the Democratic Party is prioritizing its values.
Power is a value in politics, though not a moral value. It is an instrumental value. You cannot enact healthcare reform from the minority. You cannot confirm judges without winning elections. Power enables the pursuit of substantive goals.
But instrumental values must be weighed against moral values. Every political actor does this constantly. It cannot be avoided - but it must be transparent.
The Democratic response to Platner fails badly. Rather than acknowledging the tradeoff, party leaders pretend there is no tradeoff to make. Sanders reframes the question as though caring about antisemitism and caring about healthcare are mutually exclusive. DNC chairman Ken Martin calls the social media posts "not right" but "not disqualifying," as though those categories exhaust the possibilities. Representative Ro Khanna invokes the principle of not engaging in personal destruction "especially in our own party," with that final clause doing all the work.
What would honesty look like here? It would sound something like this: "We believe Senator Collins must be defeated in 2026. We believe the policies we would enact with that Senate seat matter enormously. We have concluded that despite serious concerns about this candidate's judgment and character, the instrumental value of winning this seat outweighs those concerns." One might disagree with that calculation, but at least it would be a real argument about real tradeoffs.
Why don't the Democrats do that? Because they would essentially be saying that they prioritize power over principles, which is not something most voters want to hear.
Supporting Platner means accepting that someone who wore Nazi imagery for eighteen years, who may well have understood its meaning much earlier than he claims, and who demonstrated such catastrophically poor judgment even in the most charitable interpretation, deserves a Senate seat. It means deciding that defeating Susan Collins is worth the message this sends about what behavior disqualifies someone from representing the party. It means concluding that the instrumental value of power outweighs these costs.
Again, politicians make these calculations all the time. Both parties are more than willing to overlook their side's moral lapses. When Marjorie Taylor Greene was still considered mainstream Republican, her own antisemitism was largely papered over by her party. Smaller lapses in judgement are weighed against larger political goals, and in some cases the importance of political power do indeed outweigh those lapses. So does the existence and quality of any apologies. But if the party is not willing to say that out loud, then they have another ethical problem.
In this case, the willful blindness is extreme. Platner's excuse is a lie, and everyone knows it. If a Republican had done something similar the Democrats would be filling up the media with outrage.
The deeper problem is that refusing to acknowledge value calculations of power vs. morality makes it impossible to establish any meaningful boundaries. If there is no honest weighing of power against principle, then there is no way to say where the line is. What level of past misconduct would be disqualifying? What evidence of antisemitism would matter? The answer cannot be "none," but without transparent weighing of values, that becomes the de facto position.
This matters beyond Platner's candidacy. Every political movement claims to stand for certain principles. But principles come into tension with each other and with the practical requirements of wielding power. The test of a serious political movement is not whether it faces such tensions, but whether it faces them honestly.
Values must be weighed. Power is among those values, instrumental but real. The question is whether we are willing to do that weighing in the open, where the costs and benefits can be seen and debated, or whether we will pretend the weighing is unnecessary and hope nobody notices what we have chosen.
But when you look at the world through the prism of values, it is very clear which values the Democratic Party have chosen in this case.
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
 |
Buy