Stuart N. Brotman is digital media laureate and distinguished senior fellow at The Media Institute. He is the author of “Free Expression Under Fire: Defending Free Speech and Free Press Across the Political Spectrum.”
Graham Platner may be the most vivid reminder in American politics that we abolished the pillory but never retired the impulse behind it.
The 41‑year‑old Maine oyster farmer and Iraq veteran has gone from obscure primary challenger to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and, with that, to the center of a rolling scandal.
Over the past year, the media has uncovered a skull‑and‑bones tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol, old Reddit posts in which he called himself a communist and derided rural white Americans as racist and stupid and repeated a slur for people with disabilities.
Most recently, several women have described “unsettling” and at least once physically intimidating behavior in past relationships, as well as sexually explicit text messages that his own wife brought to the attention of his campaign last year. There is more than enough here for voters to question his judgment and character.
But the Platner story is not only about one candidate. It is a window into how we now use shame as a political weapon — through media and social platforms, not courtrooms — and what that does to our democracy.
Platner’s campaign has offered a familiar explanation. He says he was shaped in a “hyper‑masculine, hyper‑violent” military culture, did four infantry tours and came home with a crude sense of humor and a narrowed worldview. In some interviews, he connects his language and the tattoo to the psychic fallout of war, including a horrific incident outside Fallujah in which a mortar killed local children working near his unit’s base. This is a standard move in the scandal playbook: ask voters to see offensive behavior as the product of trauma or youth rather than malice.
At the same time, Platner has chosen a selective apology. He has said he is sorry for some language, notably on social media and for using the r‑word, while dismissing other claims as “gossip” or driven by a media appetite for sensationalism. His wife has called the reporting on his texts “shameful,” arguing that journalists should focus on economic policy instead of private failings. This is the counterattack that now comes with almost every scandal: turn the spotlight back on the accusers and claim that the real disgrace lies in their obsession with personal flaws.
The media, for its part, is behaving exactly as you would expect in the age of the smartphone. Local outlets and national brands alike have treated each new revelation as a fresh story, each generating another wave of headlines, TV segments and social media outrage. None of this is formally adjudicated; there is no evidentiary hearing, no defined punishment and no clear moment when the “sentence” has been served. Instead, the penalty is recalculated day by day by editors, producers and algorithms that reward anger and disgust.
Platner’s case also shows how differently shame works in a divided political culture. For many Democrats, especially women, the tattoo, the slur and the women’s accounts may be disqualifying on their face. For some voters drawn to his economic populism and war record, the fact that “the media” seems to be piling on offers evidence that Platner is being targeted for speaking uncomfortable truths. In one community, he is a symbol of everything wrong with male power in politics; in another, he is a fighter who is being dragged through the mud by elites.
When shame no longer rests on a shared moral code, it loses its ability to bring a community back into line. But it does not lose its power to destroy. Being shamed in one circle can raise your status in another, which means we no longer have a common understanding of which offenses should end a political career and which mistakes can be forgiven.
In this environment, a candidate like Platner does not simply survive or fall. He lives in a kind of permanent moral probation. Every apology can be revisited, every allegation remains searchable, every attempt at repair runs into an archive of screenshots and video clips. The law eventually closes the file on most offenses. The shame machine never does.
A better model of accountability would start with some basic distinctions. Voters should weigh patterns of conduct more heavily than isolated, years‑old missteps; give more weight to harm done in office than to offensive talk before a candidate entered public life; and look for concrete efforts at repair, not just carefully worded apologies.
Political parties, for their part, should be clearer about which kinds of behavior are disqualifying and which can be forgiven after real contrition and change. That kind of hierarchy will never be perfect, but it is far better than letting every viral revelation carry the same political death sentence.
You do not have to feel sympathy for Platner to be uneasy about the current system of public shaming. You can believe, as many reasonably do, that his record makes him unfit for the Senate, and still worry about a culture in which accusation plus virality becomes a substitute for proportion and process. There is no statute of limitations on a bad joke or a cruel text, no distinction between conduct that should end a public career and conduct that might warrant contrition, repair and a chance to govern differently.
The Platner saga will eventually be decided at the ballot box in Maine. But the rest of us are watching a broader test. As more candidates arrive in public life with searchable histories of posts, texts, tattoos and private cruelties, voters are being asked not just whether those histories matter — but how much, for how long, and on what terms.
We no longer build wooden pillories in the town square. We scroll, share and condemn instead. Platner is learning in real time what that feels like. The question for the rest of us is whether this is the kind of accountability we want to govern American democracy.