Chuck Schumer wants 77-yr-old Janet Mills to run. Platner: “I’ve not gotten a single phone call from anybody in the Democratic Party outside of the state of Maine. Nobody’s followed up with me from D.C. Nobody’s reached out. Nothing,” he says. “Which I take as a compliment.”
"To him, persuasion is a dead end if the people you’re trying to sway have already torched the rulebook. Power, as he sees it, is the ability to ignore the referee and keep scoring. His goal isn’t to negotiate—it’s to demonstrate what a candidate backed by a real movement can do."
“It’s not about getting me elected. It’s not about getting anybody elected in many ways. It’s about using all of this as a mechanism of building working class power.”
"Precarity can spark the political division that Star Trek-style post-scarcity might alleviate, but Platner thinks its most pervasive damage to our society is more subtle: We just don’t have time for each other. This is not just a political crisis. It’s an existential one."
(precarity=instability, as in precarious)
Almost in unison, they say: “People aren’t ready.” “Take it from an infantryman.” Platner adds, “You’re never ready. People think they are, but they’re not.”
“Write this down,” he says. “No matter which way it goes—taking the Senate or the fall of democracy—whatever the eventuality, the work remains the same.” “You have to build things for people to access. You have to build the apparatus for change, even if no one else shows up."