Dirtbagism.

I'm reading "Graham Platner and the Rise of the ‘Dirtbag’ Democrat/And what the Maine candidate reveals about politics today" in the NYT.

That's long, so let's jump to the place where the word "dirtbag" is thrown into the mix:

Michelle Cottle: And honestly, is it even fair to compare Platner to somebody like Paxton or Trump? 

Jamelle Bouie: You know, I don’t think it’s fair. And I say that because, so far, what we’ve learned about Platner is that, for lack of a better term, he’s kind of a dirtbag. Just a dirtbaggy kind of guy.... That’s versus Trump, who isn’t just a reprehensible person, but is actively engaged in harming other people in his private life, right? And I’d say the same for Paxton: not just a slimy guy, but a guy whose modus operandi, as a human being, is to try to dominate the people around him in really ugly ways. And so, I think Platner is more on the John Fetterman continuum than he is on the Trump continuum, which is just, eh, kind of dirtbaggy.

Cottle: OK, so I want to drill down just a little bit more....

The drilling down does not explore the concept of dirtbagism. Cottle was swooping in to take the conversation away from that, even though the headline writer saw the click-bait value of the word. In the conversation, "dirtbag" never reappears.

I asked Grok "how the word 'dirtbag' is being deployed what kind of people use that term and why" and got quickly tracked into the subject of the "dirtbag left." There's this New Yorker article from last October: "What Explains Graham Platner’s Popularity? The U.S. Senate candidate from Maine seems like the embodiment of the dirtbag left. But there’s another way to understand his appeal." Excerpt:

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....