I wondered what Bill Maher thought about the sketchy Graham Platner and his run as a Democrat for the Senate seat from Maine. Well, see the video below. Maher realizes that Platner is a “broken person,” but we’re “always electing our reflection in the mirror.” And he thinks that Dems should still vote for Platner because they need the Senate and we should just get used to America being “a country full of a lot of “broken, horribly educated, phone-addicted sort of nutty people,” and Platner is simply one of those. Maher points out some of our representatives or candidates who are already plenty weird (e.g., Tom Kean Jr., who’s been missing for over 100 days, Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist who wants to put Zionists in concentration camps, and.Victor Marx, who does exorcisms over the phone).
Maher goes off further on Americans: “Everything people ‘know’ now is from social media and shitposting and whatever some other idiot send them or whatever the Chinese are feeding them on Tik Tok.” This leads to a new breed of voter “who is intensely political but somehow know[s] almost nothing about politics.” True, and also true for “encampers.”
Maher includes Trump as a primo example of brokenness, faulting him for not editing his stream of consciousness (the clips of the Prez are rich), though Maher misses a chance to mention Joyce’s Ulysses (the audience might not know what he meant, though).
This is a pretty good bit, but it’s also somewhat depressing because Maher, though appearing elitist here, does show us how nuts American politics has become.
The guests on Friday’s episode of Real Time were author David Sedaris, political scientist Ian Bremmer, and former National Security Council director Hagar Chemali. The last two appear in this segment.
I am astounded to see Democrats attempt to justify support for Platner. It doesn’t matter if he’s running as a Democrat or a Republican–he’s not a good person and should not be in public office. Just because more and more politicians say and write bizarre things doesn’t mean we voters must lower our expectations. I think the same thing of Trump. It is possible to reach middle age without having done or said something monumentally cretinous in a public setting.
It makes me wonder if Trump lowered the tone of political discourse or if a lowered tone of political discourse enabled Trump.
In either case, this is a pendulum I hope swings back quickly. That will only happen if the two major parties make common decency a priority.
Why Ulysses?? Stram of consciousness?
Did you read Ulysses? Yes, the book is famous for representing the characters’ own stream of consciousness (aka “interior monologues”) as a critical feature—a narrative style that was unique.
Along the theme of the decline of quality candidates, this article in Politico supports Maher’s thesis on a presidential level.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/06/14/trump-bush-clinton-generation-legacy-00956933?nname=politico-magazine&nid=00000180-3e78-de92-addf-fe7ff2220000&nrid=0000014f-091f-dc50-a77f-2fff8b380000
The Democratic Party seems to be of two minds—or have two sides to its mouth. On one side, key party leaders, who for years compared Trump to Hitler, are endorsing someone who might have been an actual Nazi. And then we have the other side—those who have long claimed that only Democrats can save democracy. These are the Democrats who installed Kamala Harris without holding a primary. Some of them are still trying to save democracy, this time by trying to remove the democratically elected Platner from the ballot.
Nothing matters but winning, apparently.
Reminds me of:
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Richard Hofstadter
Harper’s
November 1964, pp 77-86
See also:
Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956–1965
And, of course :
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.”
“A Few Pages of Notes,” The Smart Set (January 1915); later published in A Little Book in C major (1916), and A Mencken Crestomathy (1949)
Found on :
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken
In the first Gilded Age there was a phrase, “Government of the masses, for the classes, by the asses.” I propose an update for our age, “Government of stupidity, for cupidity, by vapidity.”
There is a quote from Robert Wilson (https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/reality-check-germany-does-not-get-half-of-its-energy-from-solar-panels/) that has some bearing on this. “The rise of the Internet means that simple factual issues can be checked quicker than would have been believed possible a generation ago. The rise of social media means that facts are not checked, they are retweeted”