I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about this email from a TPM Reader from Maine which I posted last week. It crystallized a few thoughts I had about the Maine Senate primary and politics more generally. In general, I’ve always been pretty against purity tests in politics, though the label “purity tests” somewhat prejudges the question. TPM Reader JU tells us that she didn’t rank Graham Platner first (Maine has ranked choice). But that she wasn’t disappointed that he prevailed. She also believes that most of the morality tale interpretations of what happened in the primary miss what’s driving Maine voters. It’s not that they don’t care about Platner’s baggage, or that they’ve adopted some Trumpian cynicism. They just have a different understanding of character tests in politicians mount to. (You can read the post here.)
Basically I agree with JU. But I want to abstract this out, to at least a degree, from Platner’s specific issues because I know people have strong feelings about that race and the specific accusations that were made against him. Possibly the argument I’m making is valid but I’m misapplying it to Platner. But I’m trying to articulate a more general point rather than relitigate the Platner primary.
Most of our current politics is still based on the idea that there are “character” or morality tests that are tied to the person and then there are judgements about how they’ll vote. And those latter ones are “political.” The world of ideas tends to have a much more expansive idea of what is included in “politics” or the “political.” But this is a popular or news commentary definition which is more constricted. Implicit in this use is that the “political” is tawdry, cynical, rough and amoral, if not immoral.
I saw many arguments during the fights over Platner that one or the other of Platner’s voluminous crates of baggage passed a moral “red line” or essentially daring others to say where such a red line would be if Platner hadn’t passed it. But the essence of the conversation is still that division between morality and politics.
What occurred to me when I read JU’s note is that people who make these moral red line arguments are generally at the front of the line arguing that those legislative voting questions are deeply moral too. When a Susan Collins or any other politician carries Trump’s water, helps pass his legislation or confirms his nominees, we get these very moralized questions: what kind of country elects these people? What kind of voters elect these people? So, the questions are deeply moral, involve simply a different kind of red lines, and we know this because the same people tell us this, volubly. So any simple binaries about “morality” or principles vs power are self-serving and demonstrably incomplete, a kind of oddly inverted “heads I win, tails you lose.”
As I said above, I want to abstract this as much as I can from the particulars of the Platner argument. Maybe the principle is right but it doesn’t apply in this case. I don’t want those particulars to distract from the general point. Because the general point is key. It’s not that actual Democratic voters (and perhaps not even Democratic politicians) need to hear it precisely. I think they’re acting on this principle or this necessity, even when elites and cultural gatekeepers say it’s not okay. So they’re a bit shame-faced about it, as though it’s a bit unseemly but what choice do they have. Only it’s not unseemly. It’s simply a matter of aligning moral equities with a proper theory of power.