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.

How did we get here? Should we credit the “Bernie bros” with Platner’s rise on the national stage, where he, along with Zohran Mamdani, has become emblematic of a new . . . something in the Democratic Party? Is he the figure that has finally emerged out of the energy that Sanders unleashed on the country? Or does the interest in him come from elsewhere?

It need not be one or the other, of course—it could be any number of factors working in concert. But I do think that question is worth asking, because the answer might tell us something about the electorate at large. Are we still debating the virtues of the neoliberal establishment versus Medicare for All and wealth redistribution, or are we actually talking about something else? Where does the discontent among the nearly two-thirds of voters who disapprove of the Democratic Party come from?

Earlier this week, I spoke to Platner, who told me that his journey into politics began, in high school, when he read work by the historian Howard Zinn. Following graduation, he enlisted in the Marine infantry; after serving for four years, he went to George Washington University, where he discovered the writing of the anarchist scholar David Graeber and the historian Greg Grandin. He did another stint in the military, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and came back to the United States disillusioned with the American project, especially its foreign policy. He started listening to podcasts, most notably “The Majority Report,” hosted by Sam Seder and Michael Brooks. This was around 2016, and while Platner supported Bernie Sanders and his policies, he was in a “time of deep frustration and isolation,” he said, before he returned to Afghanistan, in 2018.

Platner does see his campaign as an extension of Sanders’s, he said—maybe not exactly in terms of its rhetoric so much as in its animating force. He talked with me for a while about the long history of economic-populist political movements in America, and about how they died out after the Vietnam War, as labor lost power during the Reagan Administration and a new type of liberal politics was formed under Bill Clinton. Platner argues that the old momentum did not totally dissipate but merely needed Sanders to kick it back up. “Those underlying problems never got fixed, and so the energy has just remained there,” he said. “The inequality is still there and all the underlying structures are still in place.” His campaign, like that of Sanders, is rooted in “movement politics,” he said, and in “building power through organizing.”

The problem with the dirtbag left wasn’t that it was uncouth or edgy or rude—those were its selling points—but, rather, that it could sometimes feel too intellectual, insider-y, and a bit too close to the élites that it was always criticizing. When populist rabble-rousing comes from fancy professors, writers, and podcasters who went to private school, you don’t take it all that seriously. Sanders had given them a vehicle for political change, but, in the years between his runs for President, much of the online left fell into a blinkered, Noam Chomsky-inspired form of media criticism—at times, it seemed as though they believed that the greatest threats to their socialist-ish, decidedly metropolitan utopia could all be found in the opinion sections of the Times and the feature well of The Atlantic. They flagged bad headlines and dog-piled on clumsy tweets from journalists, accumulating some influence in the process, but mostly among people like me—a left-leaning journalist at a fancy magazine who lives in one of the most expensive cities in America.

Meanwhile, the electoral legacy of the Sanders insurgency had been carried most notably by a trio of women of color: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar. Each of these politicians has achieved national prominence, but one could imagine how their identities might place a ceiling on any national ambitions. What was needed, one might conclude, was a rural white guy, perhaps one who had served as a grunt overseas and had an unassailably salt-of-the-earth job—say, an oyster farmer. Someone who could credibly talk to the alienated, broke people of America about economic redistribution.

Platner, it turns out, had even more in common with the enfants terribles of the online left than people initially realized. Like them, he posted a lot online. He did so anonymously, and used offensive language that was meant to provoke a reaction. Having read his Reddit archive, I believe that his posts—which, in addition to homophobic language, include a question about Black people’s tipping habits—were mischaracterized in the early news coverage. He was not some reactionary who is now posing, for whatever reason, as a liberal; in most of his posts, Platner was writing about military stuff, and about being the only lefty in his platoon. He also discussed his disenchantment with the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and spoke out, on several occasions, about racist and violent police practices. Granted, he was not typing out words that might be suitable for an appearance on “Meet the Press.” Platner sounded like someone who had listened to a lot of leftist podcasts.

But there’s another way of explaining Platner’s rise, one I find more convincing. If you read his literature and listen to his speeches and interviews, you won’t hear too much talk about specific policies, although Platner officially supports Medicare for All. You will hear a lot of talk about billionaires, which is standard-fare Sanders-ese, but you will also hear the word “fascism” when he describes Trump and the G.O.P. In these moments, he sounds like someone who could bring down the house at a “No Kings” rally. In a recent speech, Platner said, “When we have defended our democracy and our country and our freedom, let it be a different kind of freedom, the freedom to not be condemned to scraps and to struggle, but the freedom to live lives with dignity and fulfillment, the freedom to not be ripped off by a for-profit health-care system, the freedom to have a roof over our heads that we own.”

What Platner doesn’t really do, at least not yet, is explain the policies that will get us there. He is fiercely oppositional—not only to “the establishment” but to anything that smacks of the old way of doing politics. “I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the Army,” he says in a campaign video. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, and the politicians who sell us out.” The candidate who emerges from all this isn’t in the mold of Mamdani, who focussed his campaign almost solely on cost-of-living issues. This is, rather, someone who might inspire the aunt who sends you Trump-as-modern-Hilter memes and spends every weekend protesting in front of a Tesla dealership and also the cousin who canvassed for Sanders and listens to “Chapo Trap House.” (This is also, by the way, a strategy that should work well in southern Maine, which has many people like that aunt and many people like that cousin.)

Such talk about fascism appears to have become unfashionable with the Beltway consultants who get paid to tell candidates what not to say but can’t seem to give them much useful advice on how to act like normal, likable people. I asked Platner why he was going against the conventional D.C. wisdom and talking about things that might get him lumped in with the failed campaigns of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. He said that he had read books about fascism, and recognized what it meant when “armed, masked federal agents start kidnapping people off the streets and putting them into camps.” He also used a term that I assume must be on every consultant’s list of phrases to avoid. “My politics are deeply antifascist and anti-authoritarian and rooted in building power for working people,” he said.

To return to the question I set out at the start of this column: online movements can sometimes turn into a set of recognizable clothes that can fit fairly malleable candidates. I don’t mean that Platner is an empty Carhartt jacket; rather, he seems like a different vision of the mainstream candidate, one that’s no less reliant than every other politician on saying popular things. And, when your party is polling at less than thirty-five per cent, one of those popular things will be calling for the establishment’s head.

“I legitimately want the Democratic Party to be the Democratic Party that most Democrats want it to be,” Platner told me. “Most Democrats I know want to tax the ultra-rich. They want to break up big corporations that have been destroying the planet for decades. They want universal health care. People want this stuff. They’re against American taxpayer dollars being spent on stupid foreign wars or dropping bombs on Gaza. People think this shit is stupid, and yet there’s the leadership of the Party, who don’t want to change anything.”

At a recent political rally, Platner said, “Our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza.” The statement was met with a standing ovation by the crowd. Platner is also one of the few prominent Democrats using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s military actions. “I said on the day of our campaign’s launch that the genocide in Gaza is the moral test of our time,” he wrote on X. “That’s rooted in a belief in universal human rights, in the belief that every life has dignity. It’s why I condemn the war crimes of October 7th and why I’m committed to ending this U.S.-funded genocide in Palestine.”

Pick any poll you like and you will find that Democrats have not only turned against American funding of Israeli weapons but also have expressed increasing sympathy for the Palestinian plight. And yet, if you watch TV interviews with mainstream Democrats, you’ll find almost nobody who is willing to stray from the platitudes and deflections that have become the lingua franca of the Democratic response to the war. Platner was a Bernie bro, yes, and he is also an antifascist, but he also happens to be one of the only Democrats who isn’t reading the polls upside down.

As I wrote after the election, I do not think that the specific politics of the new class of candidates matters at all. They can be economic populists, cultural conservatives who like food-assistance programs, or they can even run on roughly the same platform as Kamala Harris. What they need to do is convince the public that, like them, they also hate the establishment. Platner fits this bill more than any other. The establishment is old. He’s young. People in the establishment went to Harvard. He went to the Marines. They worked at McKinsey; he worked on a boat. They deflect when asked about Israel; he says the word “genocide” without hesitation. And, thanks largely to this collection of opposing traits, he is probably the closest thing we have to the id of the mainstream Democratic voter in 2025. ♦