The New Yorker:

The U.S. Senate candidate from Maine seems like the embodiment of the dirtbag left. But there’s another way to understand his appeal.

By Jay Caspian Kang

What happens after an online political movement burns itself out and fades from our social-media feeds? And how do we assess the influence it might have had on the wider world?
In the early days of the first Trump Administration, a profane, potent political energy appeared on the platform formerly known as Twitter—which, at the time, was the No. 1 source of internet addiction for a seeming majority of reporters, columnists, television pundits, and editors in America. The dirtbag left, as it became known, mostly revolved, at its start, around the podcast “Chapo Trap House,” the Democratic Socialists of America, and a few scattered high-follower social-media accounts. Its adherents were largely disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters who believed that the populist movement behind their candidate had been upended and diverted by a cabal of soulless careerists in both politics and, perhaps more pointedly, in the political media. Among the targets of the dirtbag left were Neera Tanden, a Hillary Clinton operative; Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones; and various reporters and editors at the Times, the Washington Post, and so on. The accusation was simple and alluring: by torpedoing the Sanders campaign and running an unelectable cipher in Clinton, these blinkered establishmentarians were responsible for Donald Trump’s victory. The dirtbag left’s job was to never let them forget it.

I’ve been thinking about that era in online politics while observing the campaign of Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate hopeful from Maine. In some ways, he looks like an updated version of the ideal dirtbag-left candidate. Here is a working-class veteran who has talked about America’s “new Gilded Age,” called out the “billionaire economy,” and explicitly avoided the sort of “neoliberal” identity talk that seems to exist primarily to mediate disputes between well-off, highly educated people. Lately, Platner has fallen under intense scrutiny for a trove of old Reddit posts that included homophobic comments and a Nazi tattoo that he has since covered up. (He has said that he was not aware until recently of the tattoo’s Nazi associations.) This was surprising, although, for some skeptics, it might have fallen right in line with the image of the dirtbag left, who were often criticized as misogynistic and narrowly focussed on the feelings of white men.

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