In late April, a popular left-wing social media influencer with more than a half million followers on X fired off an angry post about Ben Sasse, the former Republican senator from Nebraska who is suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer, being interviewed by CBS News’s 60 Minutes.
“It’s so annoying [that] we have to listen to this condescending bulls*** because he’s dying,” the self-described independent journalist wrote of Sasse. “The Make A Wish commentator.” This was followed up with derogatory remarks about Sasse’s physical appearance, which has been affected by his cancer treatments, likening the extremely ill man to a ghoul in a video game set in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Dumb and ugly things get said on the internet all the time by people of all political persuasions. The desire for clicks and social media virality actually incentivizes making comments that elicit outraged responses, and these posts were no exception. Conservatives pushed back, including this writer. Nobody is obligated to agree with Sasse or watch him on 60 Minutes just because of his condition. But there ought to be some basic lines of decency even in a highly polarized political climate.
Normally, it wouldn’t be worth discussing, and it was probably a mistake to engage with or pay any attention to such postings in the first place. It’s exactly what the ragebaiter wants. But the responses to the conservative protests were notable: lamenting “political correctness,” calling critics “snowflakes,” decrying “virtue signaling,” posting the famous meme of the screaming woman protesting President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, even quoting the old Ben Shapiro line, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
Readers can decide for themselves whether such commentary amounts to a clever send-up of conservative social media cliches or a total misunderstanding of conservative viewpoints by nasty, very online liberals. But a more serious point is also evident: For some progressives, mostly men who spend way too much time at their keyboards, the takeaway from the Trump years is that nice guys finish last.
This is actually close to the sentiments of many conservatives as the Republican Party passed the leadership baton from Mitt Romney, a decent fellow who, except for a single solid debate performance, seemed wholly unequal to the task of beating Barack Obama in 2012, to Trump four years later. “But he fights!”
By contrast, liberals have spent most of the decade of Trump bemoaning his boorish behavior on social media and his overall personal character. They dislike his meanness, from apparently imitating a reporter’s physical deficits and shushing another journalist with “Quiet, piggy,” to saying he was glad former Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller had died. Trump had an especially nasty, and totally inexplicable, Truth Social meltdown when Hollywood icon Rob Reiner was killed.
To Trump-era liberals, this kind of behavior is illustrative of what they consider to be the wanton meanness of the president’s policies: immigration crackdowns, the erosion of civil liberties, a real and metaphorical bulldozing of the White House grounds. “The cruelty is the point,” wrote Adam Serwer in an oft-quoted 2018 Atlantic essay that was later turned into a New York Times bestselling book.
These all remain commonly held and frequently expressed viewpoints among earnest liberals — and, it should be noted, fervent Trump critics across the political spectrum, such as the original Never Trump conservatives — well into Trump’s second term. But like a dog that resembles its owner, some of Trump’s most passionate detractors have long adopted his worst traits. Now, a nontrivial number of progressives no longer view liberal earnestness as the best way to oppose — indeed, fight and resist — their least favorite president.
The personification of these online progressive trends may be Graham Platner, whose first of many controversies concerned a series of offensive Reddit posts that were not always predictably or conventionally liberal in nature. Now Platner is the Democrats’ nominee in one of country’s most important Senate races this year, as he beat the sitting governor of Maine with more than 70% of the vote in a primary for the right to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).
National Democrats wrung their hands, fretting that Platner would put this crucial Senate pickup opportunity at risk. But socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) stuck by him. So did online progressive activists, even as the allegations against Platner grew to include sexting while married, toxic behavior, physical abuse, and having an account on Kik, a private messaging app often used by men seeking to meet teenage girls. (Platner has acknowledged behaving poorly, but has denied accusations of violent or illegal activity.)
“When hurtful things I said on the internet a decade ago came out into the public, as I shared my personal journey through PTSD and darkness of recovery and accountability and growth — Maine had my back,” the 41-year-old candidate told a crowd in Maine before the primary. “And when politically motivated, serious, and false accusations are made against me: Maine, you have my back.”
Platner supporters demanded to know why they needed to be the bigger person after all the years of Trump getting away with various transgressions, both real and imagined. “I get really tired of Democrats being held to some lofty moral standard when Republicans are just ‘boys will be boys,’” Ann Leamon, co-chairwoman of a local Maine Democratic group, told the publication NOTUS in a story that ran shortly before Platner won his primary.
Leamon continued by asserting that Platner isn’t so bad by Trumpian standards: “Trump never claimed to have changed. He never came out against misogyny after he said he wanted to grab a woman by the p****. Platner has said very clearly that he’s learned a lot, he’s grown a lot. His wife stands by him, and I don’t think we have any option but to trust that at this point.”
This argument can cut both ways, of course.
“It doesn’t necessarily matter, the 10-plus years of arguments we’ve made about morals and ethics against Trump and Republicans who’ve empowered Trump, because we can win a seat,” GOP strategist Shermichael Singleton said of Platner on CNN. “It’s very Machiavellian in many ways. And to me, any argument that Democrats have framed against Trump, against Republicans, is now null and void. They have revealed themselves to be nothing but hypocrites, nothing but liars.”
But the basic political problem for angry online progressives is that nice, polite liberals have not been able to consistently beat Trump. And even when they do beat him, as Democrats managed to do in back-to-back elections in 2018 and 2020, he comes back. If you can’t beat him, you might as well join him — or at least switch to trying to beat him at his own game. Owning the libs, meet owning the cons.
Another reason progressives are in a foul mood: The failure of former President Joe Biden, who in dealing Trump his biggest electoral defeat of the past decade, vowed to turn back the clock to a pre-Trump, bygone political era. Not only was Biden unable to accomplish this, but he presided over conditions that rehabilitated Trump politically and allowed him to return to the White House. “Welcome home,” Biden told Trump, whom he had spent several years painting as a borderline fascistic threat to American democracy, on the day he handed the keys back to him.
It is largely lost on progressives that a significant part of Biden’s failure was that he listened too much to them. It was their influence that drove Biden to pursue inflationary fiscal policies and neglect the U.S.-Mexico border. But they have observed Biden’s lack of energy and clinging to the past. Hunter Biden has come back to defend his father, but he does so with Trump-era internet energy.
Many progressives no longer entertain any illusions about returning to the political world as it was before Trump. This has created a fertile climate for the resurgence of what was in Trump’s first term often labeled the “dirtbag left,” a more vulgar and freewheeling progressivism that excelled — if that is the correct word — at online mudwrestling with the racist alt-right.
“Enter a new culture of the online left. It’s a reinvigorated wing that’s simultaneously anti-alt-right, anti-PC and anti-[social justice warrior], anti-centrist and against liberal-democratic line-toeing,” John Semley wrote in a long explainer piece for MacLean’s back in 2017. “It’s a movement that uses many of the tactics of the online alt-right — humour, memes, Twitter trolling and open animosity — while remaining committed to progressive leftist ideology.”
Biden mostly ignored this trend, and the more commonplace online wokeness, during the 2020 election season. “The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional left that has taken over places like the New York Times,” a Democratic strategist told Politico at the time. “The Biden campaign’s unspoken primary slogan could have been, ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” the reporters who wrote that story concurred.
But as happened on the Right a decade ago, it’s possible that the left-wing comments section has now taken over. How this will play in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries is anyone’s guess, but the party’s activist base is angry and not in an accommodating mood.
THE PLATNER PROBLEM: WHAT WENT WRONG IN MAINE?
There are counterexamples, to be sure. Former Rep. Eric Swalwell was not saved by his combative, pugilistic political style when he faced credible allegations of sexual assault — the Democrat was pushed out of both the California governor’s race and Congress. Former Rep. Katie Porter went nowhere in the same primary, thanks in no small part to persistent complaints about her personal nastiness. Democrats turned instead to a boringly conventional Biden official, former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, to lead them into the general election.
It is always risky to extrapolate too much from angry social media posts. But progressives willing to drink conservative tears and dunk on Republican snowflakes may be having their moment, one internet flame war at a time.
W. James Antle III (@jimantle) is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.