I have thoughts on this topic. As someone who has had a lot of interaction with union and working class spaces and people for a long time, I can say quite confidently that unions slid to the right a long time ago. The working class has been sitting solidly in the right for a long time. Most of the working class, if not MAGA, is at least MAGA adjacent. Lifting up these “working class union men,” who are really just white boys is just more of the centrist pandering. They are not on the left. Not by any stretch of the imagination. They know how to be anti billionaire but they aren’t actually for the people. They are misogynist, white supremacists and I don’t trust any of them. These are not men who have EVER had to examine their privilege. They will not be good for us. They have been pushed by more of the consultants like the ones in Maine. People who have never been working class or leftist and think they know how to appeal to that class of people. These consultants are centrist at best and they are finding candidates who look the part, trying to fool leftists into accepting them into the ranks while also trying to appeal to MAGA-adjacent or MAGA-disillusioned men. Why are we doing that? Welcoming and catering to those men has been the downfall of every step of progress we’ve ever tried to make. We don’t need more white men in office. Them being working class coded and thus “not elites” doesn’t make them automatically good. John Fetterman and Graham Platner are not anomalies. They are par for the course. Both of them ended up exactly how I expected when I first heard about them. But what choice was there? We deserve more than a choice between verified MAGA republicans and white boy “every men” masquerading as progressive working class people. (Mostly because “progressive” and “working class” no longer go together in a sentence, especially if that “progressive working class” person is white… that’s a unicorn.) We need to stop operating as if the working class who fought the coal barons in the 1930s still exists. Reagan politics changed the landscape in ways I think people are still refusing to fully see and until we do see it and respond accordingly, then we are going to keep ending up with these Platner style red flagged men who turn on us Fetterman style in office.
And I just saw Amanda Litman post a photo here on Substack from an article talking specifically about Platner and Maine but that I think applies to all of the men mentioned in this article. I can’t repost the photo here because comments here don’t work like that. But it talks about the problem being a “casting call” approach to picking candidates. Which…. Yes. That’s it’s exactly. They are doing casting calls not actually vetting and picking and prepping people who will do a good job. Go to her page and see the quote directly (it’s from six days ago). I really wish I could easily post it here.
First off, just love your overall analysis here (the one thing I'll add is that when we talk about unions moving more conservative, that trend is more pronounced in traditionally white male dominated union spaces than in unions that are dispropotionally women of color- not to downplay the reality of the former segment of unions, but just giving voice to the latter). I particularly appreciated you playing through "so what's the alternative here? what would be a better way?" and agree completely with you raising up Amanda's point about a more holistic candidate recruitment process as a key part of the puzzle. Your journey through your thought process and then trying to play out "so what do I want to see" reminded me a lot of what it felt like to write the essay.
I was as happy as the next woman with sexual assault history to see Platner step aside. And it also made me sad, not because of any particular nostalgia for the image of the white working man (I call it nostalgia, because the working class has been majority Black, Brown, and female for a long, long time.), but because his campaign was actually doing good organizing work, especially compared to other Dems (both progressive and not) in Maine. Platner was the only one who was actually going into communities of color across the state, talking and listening, building relationships. Those can be true at the same time in the same way that whoever replaces him may be less problematic in their background and not at all connected in marginalized communities, nor inclined to be so.
There's a lot of discourse about how the Right is trying to stave off the reality that we will be a majority Black and Brown country in short order, but the Left is similarly occupied. They just do it by consistently looking for their white male working class savior. I try to be hopeful that slowly but surely we will make the transition to reflecting the reality of our population in our national political leadership, but honestly I expect as long as the political strategists are still largely rich, white, and male on both sides of the aisle, we'll keep rehashing this nostalgia to the detriment of everyone.
I appreciate you naming that element, Asha. I absolutely shared that sadness. One of the things that's tricky to parse about the Platner campaign was that it was all true-- this was a cautionary tale of out of state consultants looking for a hero, this was a guy who should have gotten to focus on reparations and repair rather than running for office, there was some real cowboy behavior around that campaign, AND at the same time, there was the real potential in that campaign to do what I've seen happen with Mamdani and Hong, for a campaign to both be a fulcrum point of inspiration and a catalyst for organizing that would outlive the campaign. I've heard that sense of sadness and loss from so many in Maine (and why for some activists there the situation will long continue to feel less cut and dried than it does for analysts like me from out of state).
The theater of the most-masculine (and therefore most-electable) is such an evergreen, unabashed performance in Montana. We see it in Zinke's too-large cowboy hats and Gianforte's zeal for wolf-trapping, in Daines's folksy shtick and Busse's gun-industry-insider-turned-public-lands-warrior persona. The blue collar chops may be genuinely earned in guys like Tester and Forstag, but it's still played up as the most valuable qualification for public office and policy making.
And, when someone like Alani Bankhead comes along — experienced, competent, with her own history of military service — she's discounted as unelectable for being a Democrat, doubly so for being a woman. Rather than putting all the force of the machine behind her, Tester and others are instead touting Seth Bodnar as the indie golden boy to champion Montana Values, in spite of his deep-pocketed, out-of-state, blueblood donors, the Title IX discrimination suit brought against him by 18 women, and his predominantly poor reputation among those on campus who have worked with him over the years.
Erin, how many ads have we lived through in a lifetime as Montanans with some combination of the following: the chore jacket, the cowboy strutting the active shooting at things as the point of the ad... it's not the only reason why our state fell to Yellowstoneification and all its after effects, but it's one of the many things that have made it so much harder to connect to the full three dimensional, multi-racial, not-at-all-just-traditionally-masculine, story of our state.
Also, given all these dynamics, I just wish that there was an upcoming anthology of writing about Montana with a perfect editor and an absolutely impeccable list of contributors that wrestled with and celebrated the complex stories of our state in this particular tenuous and emergent moment. Oh well, a boy can wish!
My god, the ads. I bet we could script and shoot our own on our lunch breaks, just from our over-saturated memories. It's odd to feel both targeted and completely overlooked at the same time, as though the writers and PR firm spent half a day people-watching at the Belgrade Airport and said, "Greetings, fellow Montanan, I am now at one with the spirit of Big Sky Country."
Ugh, Bodnar... it's been very openly speculated around UM for a few years now that he'd run for office, it was just a question of which one and when. I'm dying to hear your million thoughts. Wish we could sit down at Butterfly Herbs this weekend and hash it out!
Oh Garrett. Brilliant. You have done it again: nailing the hidden-in-plain-sight weird and troubling thing. Yep. We are a complex mess and it is not our advantage to pretend otherwise. Thank you for helping decode this perilous time. Clarity and honesty is rare, and you always bring it.
One of the reasons why (though I think that the questions I raise in the piece are worth asking) I have a ton of respect and sympathy for him in particular is because MAN, I bet he went through the ringer with that last name a bunch growing up! Having accidentally saddled my oldest with a name that makes for easy jokes, I can't help but be like, oh man! I feel for ya!
My dad's name was Donald, and he wasn't a fan of Donald Duck comics because guess what classmates took to calling him? He went for a brief time as Donny by family and loved ones. He was Don by the time I met him. If he were still in the land of the living, I'm sure he'd have a whole other reason now to not be a fan of Donald. Names can be tricky.
While I'm at it, his sister's name is Berdean. Their mom wanted to name her Barbara, but their dad said that name made him think of barbed wire. I don't know whether my grandparents saw the name somewhere or if they just made it up. I've always thought it was a nice name. Her husband called her Bernie.
Which brings me back to Bernie Bro Poindexter. lol
It's genetically and by extension culturally hard-wired in humans. Masculinity -> Strength. Strength -> Power. We're not anywhere near as evolved as we think we are, we just hang ourselves about with symbols of civilization. It won't change in my generation (I'm 68), and probably not until my compatriots and children are gone, but the seeds are being planted. Thanks for pointing out that the weed needs to be pulled.
Thanks Yvonne. It's tricky to do in Internet writing, but that's one reason why I try to present this less as a jeremiad but more (I hope) as a mirror to a bunch of really tightly woven knots! One foot in front of the other, generation-to-generation.
There IS something to having regular folks in office. If only it were more like, uh, Nordic countries instead of "image" that often covers someone they really don't want you to know. Sigh.
So as one of those early feminists who participated in the insane bras into the river on the Michigan Bridge in Chicago event, my first reaction to those privileged white boys was: get over yourselves whiny pants. I was bowled over when I heard academic dad friends getting freaked about how their sons were being devalued by the current rhetoric focusing on White Females (caps in their disparaging tone) and all people of color. It made me crazy, so I started talking with the sons who thought their dad's must be getting senile and having too much time on their hands. It left me wondering who's advising these pols and why they're taking that kind of advice. I recognize that you're talking about working class, and that may be very different, but I'm not so sure.
I have thoughts on this topic. As someone who has had a lot of interaction with union and working class spaces and people for a long time, I can say quite confidently that unions slid to the right a long time ago. The working class has been sitting solidly in the right for a long time. Most of the working class, if not MAGA, is at least MAGA adjacent. Lifting up these “working class union men,” who are really just white boys is just more of the centrist pandering. They are not on the left. Not by any stretch of the imagination. They know how to be anti billionaire but they aren’t actually for the people. They are misogynist, white supremacists and I don’t trust any of them. These are not men who have EVER had to examine their privilege. They will not be good for us. They have been pushed by more of the consultants like the ones in Maine. People who have never been working class or leftist and think they know how to appeal to that class of people. These consultants are centrist at best and they are finding candidates who look the part, trying to fool leftists into accepting them into the ranks while also trying to appeal to MAGA-adjacent or MAGA-disillusioned men. Why are we doing that? Welcoming and catering to those men has been the downfall of every step of progress we’ve ever tried to make. We don’t need more white men in office. Them being working class coded and thus “not elites” doesn’t make them automatically good. John Fetterman and Graham Platner are not anomalies. They are par for the course. Both of them ended up exactly how I expected when I first heard about them. But what choice was there? We deserve more than a choice between verified MAGA republicans and white boy “every men” masquerading as progressive working class people. (Mostly because “progressive” and “working class” no longer go together in a sentence, especially if that “progressive working class” person is white… that’s a unicorn.) We need to stop operating as if the working class who fought the coal barons in the 1930s still exists. Reagan politics changed the landscape in ways I think people are still refusing to fully see and until we do see it and respond accordingly, then we are going to keep ending up with these Platner style red flagged men who turn on us Fetterman style in office.
And I just saw Amanda Litman post a photo here on Substack from an article talking specifically about Platner and Maine but that I think applies to all of the men mentioned in this article. I can’t repost the photo here because comments here don’t work like that. But it talks about the problem being a “casting call” approach to picking candidates. Which…. Yes. That’s it’s exactly. They are doing casting calls not actually vetting and picking and prepping people who will do a good job. Go to her page and see the quote directly (it’s from six days ago). I really wish I could easily post it here.
First off, just love your overall analysis here (the one thing I'll add is that when we talk about unions moving more conservative, that trend is more pronounced in traditionally white male dominated union spaces than in unions that are dispropotionally women of color- not to downplay the reality of the former segment of unions, but just giving voice to the latter). I particularly appreciated you playing through "so what's the alternative here? what would be a better way?" and agree completely with you raising up Amanda's point about a more holistic candidate recruitment process as a key part of the puzzle. Your journey through your thought process and then trying to play out "so what do I want to see" reminded me a lot of what it felt like to write the essay.
I was as happy as the next woman with sexual assault history to see Platner step aside. And it also made me sad, not because of any particular nostalgia for the image of the white working man (I call it nostalgia, because the working class has been majority Black, Brown, and female for a long, long time.), but because his campaign was actually doing good organizing work, especially compared to other Dems (both progressive and not) in Maine. Platner was the only one who was actually going into communities of color across the state, talking and listening, building relationships. Those can be true at the same time in the same way that whoever replaces him may be less problematic in their background and not at all connected in marginalized communities, nor inclined to be so.
There's a lot of discourse about how the Right is trying to stave off the reality that we will be a majority Black and Brown country in short order, but the Left is similarly occupied. They just do it by consistently looking for their white male working class savior. I try to be hopeful that slowly but surely we will make the transition to reflecting the reality of our population in our national political leadership, but honestly I expect as long as the political strategists are still largely rich, white, and male on both sides of the aisle, we'll keep rehashing this nostalgia to the detriment of everyone.
I appreciate you naming that element, Asha. I absolutely shared that sadness. One of the things that's tricky to parse about the Platner campaign was that it was all true-- this was a cautionary tale of out of state consultants looking for a hero, this was a guy who should have gotten to focus on reparations and repair rather than running for office, there was some real cowboy behavior around that campaign, AND at the same time, there was the real potential in that campaign to do what I've seen happen with Mamdani and Hong, for a campaign to both be a fulcrum point of inspiration and a catalyst for organizing that would outlive the campaign. I've heard that sense of sadness and loss from so many in Maine (and why for some activists there the situation will long continue to feel less cut and dried than it does for analysts like me from out of state).
The theater of the most-masculine (and therefore most-electable) is such an evergreen, unabashed performance in Montana. We see it in Zinke's too-large cowboy hats and Gianforte's zeal for wolf-trapping, in Daines's folksy shtick and Busse's gun-industry-insider-turned-public-lands-warrior persona. The blue collar chops may be genuinely earned in guys like Tester and Forstag, but it's still played up as the most valuable qualification for public office and policy making.
And, when someone like Alani Bankhead comes along — experienced, competent, with her own history of military service — she's discounted as unelectable for being a Democrat, doubly so for being a woman. Rather than putting all the force of the machine behind her, Tester and others are instead touting Seth Bodnar as the indie golden boy to champion Montana Values, in spite of his deep-pocketed, out-of-state, blueblood donors, the Title IX discrimination suit brought against him by 18 women, and his predominantly poor reputation among those on campus who have worked with him over the years.
It's all quite exhausting to watch.
Erin, how many ads have we lived through in a lifetime as Montanans with some combination of the following: the chore jacket, the cowboy strutting the active shooting at things as the point of the ad... it's not the only reason why our state fell to Yellowstoneification and all its after effects, but it's one of the many things that have made it so much harder to connect to the full three dimensional, multi-racial, not-at-all-just-traditionally-masculine, story of our state.
As for Bodnar... a MILLION thoughts.
Also, given all these dynamics, I just wish that there was an upcoming anthology of writing about Montana with a perfect editor and an absolutely impeccable list of contributors that wrestled with and celebrated the complex stories of our state in this particular tenuous and emergent moment. Oh well, a boy can wish!
Ain't it good that wishes can come true!
My god, the ads. I bet we could script and shoot our own on our lunch breaks, just from our over-saturated memories. It's odd to feel both targeted and completely overlooked at the same time, as though the writers and PR firm spent half a day people-watching at the Belgrade Airport and said, "Greetings, fellow Montanan, I am now at one with the spirit of Big Sky Country."
Ugh, Bodnar... it's been very openly speculated around UM for a few years now that he'd run for office, it was just a question of which one and when. I'm dying to hear your million thoughts. Wish we could sit down at Butterfly Herbs this weekend and hash it out!
Oh Garrett. Brilliant. You have done it again: nailing the hidden-in-plain-sight weird and troubling thing. Yep. We are a complex mess and it is not our advantage to pretend otherwise. Thank you for helping decode this perilous time. Clarity and honesty is rare, and you always bring it.
Thank you, Gene.
Poindexter. /irony font/
One of the reasons why (though I think that the questions I raise in the piece are worth asking) I have a ton of respect and sympathy for him in particular is because MAN, I bet he went through the ringer with that last name a bunch growing up! Having accidentally saddled my oldest with a name that makes for easy jokes, I can't help but be like, oh man! I feel for ya!
My dad's name was Donald, and he wasn't a fan of Donald Duck comics because guess what classmates took to calling him? He went for a brief time as Donny by family and loved ones. He was Don by the time I met him. If he were still in the land of the living, I'm sure he'd have a whole other reason now to not be a fan of Donald. Names can be tricky.
While I'm at it, his sister's name is Berdean. Their mom wanted to name her Barbara, but their dad said that name made him think of barbed wire. I don't know whether my grandparents saw the name somewhere or if they just made it up. I've always thought it was a nice name. Her husband called her Bernie.
Which brings me back to Bernie Bro Poindexter. lol
It's genetically and by extension culturally hard-wired in humans. Masculinity -> Strength. Strength -> Power. We're not anywhere near as evolved as we think we are, we just hang ourselves about with symbols of civilization. It won't change in my generation (I'm 68), and probably not until my compatriots and children are gone, but the seeds are being planted. Thanks for pointing out that the weed needs to be pulled.
Thanks Yvonne. It's tricky to do in Internet writing, but that's one reason why I try to present this less as a jeremiad but more (I hope) as a mirror to a bunch of really tightly woven knots! One foot in front of the other, generation-to-generation.
There IS something to having regular folks in office. If only it were more like, uh, Nordic countries instead of "image" that often covers someone they really don't want you to know. Sigh.
So as one of those early feminists who participated in the insane bras into the river on the Michigan Bridge in Chicago event, my first reaction to those privileged white boys was: get over yourselves whiny pants. I was bowled over when I heard academic dad friends getting freaked about how their sons were being devalued by the current rhetoric focusing on White Females (caps in their disparaging tone) and all people of color. It made me crazy, so I started talking with the sons who thought their dad's must be getting senile and having too much time on their hands. It left me wondering who's advising these pols and why they're taking that kind of advice. I recognize that you're talking about working class, and that may be very different, but I'm not so sure.