Well, that didn’t last long.

Establishment Democrats and their assorted hacks have spent the entire past year incessantly insisting that wokeness, elitism, and language policing were out, and that white guys, working-class politics, and speaking your mind were in. The year wasn’t even up by the time they reversed themselves on all of it so they could stop the rise of a working-class, left-populist candidate and try to clear the way for a septuagenarian establishment insider to have her turn in Congress.

I’m talking about the Democratic Senate primary campaign of Graham Platner, the veteran and oyster farmer running in Maine to unseat its nearly thirty-year-long Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Until last week, Platner was looking more and more like a shoo-in. Then Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, threw her hat into the ring, and Platner was hit with a wave of what looked like opposition research that somehow made its way into the press.

But let’s rewind for a moment and think about how we got here. After November’s disastrous loss, the Democratic Party establishment, as part of its regular quest to deflect blame for its own failures, once more took aim at the spinning wheel of excuses in front of it and threw a dart. In previous years, that dart hit squares labeled “Green Party,” “sexism,” “white voters,” and “Bernie Sanders.” But this time, the party’s leading excuse was not going to be that Americans are too backward and ignorant for the Democrats, but that Democrats are, if anything, too tolerant and enlightened for America.

This has more or less been the official party line for the past year, hammered home without end at every tier of the Democratic establishment, from the centrist politicians eager that Congress remain their stepping stone to lobbying careers as their pockets bulge with corporate cash, to the gaggle of consultants kneeling below them with cupped hands, hoping some of the spare change falls out. The message was simple: progressive “groups” forced Democrats to adopt a grating “woke” style and ultraliberal policy positions that are politically toxic with working-class voters, especially men, and the party needed to drastically reverse course.

To be clear, they did not pull this entirely out of thin air. Democrats really do have what we might call a “woke” style that comes off as elitist, and which is obsessed with and front-loads identity and social issues at the expense of economic ones. And this really is a political liability for them, especially with working-class voters who both find it alienating and don’t feel like it speaks to the core kitchen-table issues that are most important to them. Copious amounts of evidence and research bear this out.

But the Democratic establishment’s plan isn’t to copy the style of socialist Bernie Sanders, currently the most popular politician in the country. They’re not planning to lead with a class-first message that foregrounds economic issues while not giving an inch on people’s basic dignity and rights, let alone reject corporate donations and back policies like guaranteeing health care as a human right.

No, their solution is to marginalize and purge the broad left entirely from the Democratic Party (while still expecting them to loyally turn out in droves and vote Democrat, of course). After that, the thinking goes, the party establishment can return to the plainspoken, commonsense, pocketbook-focused style they always wanted to pursue in their hearts but couldn’t in practice because of the dastardly “groups,” leaving behind the excesses of wokeness, cancel culture, and identity politics that have proven a drag on the party. Well-funded think tanks and even a whole astroturfed political movement have sprouted up around this basic idea, with a major part of the goal being to win back the support of working-class men.

Then Graham Platner showed up.

Platner is, on paper, everything the party establishment says it wants. He’s a straight white guy. He’s a veteran and a small business owner, oyster farming in a tiny rural town. He also didn’t make it through college and bartended before his current gig. He’s covered in tattoos and regularly peppers his speeches with profanity — far from a professional politician, in other words. And he rails against the slow crushing of the middle class while also calling for stronger border security, the exact kind of “moderate” message establishment Democrats consider the political sweet spot.

But Platner also happens to be a left-wing populist, who’s endorsed by Sanders and points the finger at both billionaires and a corrupt Democratic Party that sold out workers. He backs Medicare for All while opposing more military aid to Israel. These are views held by millions of working-class Americans, men included, but that haven’t been particularly popular in Democratic establishment circles the past few decades.

So almost as soon as Mills, the party establishment’s handpicked candidate, entered the race against Platner, he has all of a sudden been hit with a series of damaging stories about dumb things he said more than a decade ago on the internet: offensive statements about black Americans and women; his use of the words “retard” and “gay” as derogatory terms; his support for fighting tyranny with semiautomatic rifles, indistinguishable from any National Rifle Association ad in the past twenty years; and now a tattoo he drunkenly got with his military buddies in Croatia that he didn’t realize at the time was a Nazi symbol. (Platner has now apologized and had the tattoo redone.) One of the other controversies is that he wore an “antifa supersoldier” label on his military gear.

The establishment hypocrisy here is off the charts. You can be outraged by Platner’s statements, or disturbed by his tattoo, or think it’s all irrelevant. You can decide that one part or all of it is disqualifying, or decide that you really don’t care. Certainly many have decided the first one: Jordan Wood, Platner’s distant rival in the contest, is already calling for him to drop out entirely, while a host of pro-Democratic commentators, like Hillary Clinton 2016 alumnus Kaivan Shroff, Biden administration social media czar Megan Coyne, and MSNBC columnist Michael Cohen, are arguing that the controversies should rule Platner out.

Whatever you feel, how does any of this square with what the Democratic establishment has been saying about cancel culture and inviting working-class men back into the tent? After spending an entire year blaming the Left for forcing them to be too “woke,” the Democratic Party is now desperately trying to cancel a working-class left insurgent for not being woke enough.

The reality, as we’re vividly seeing now, is that all of the Democratic establishment’s positioning on “wokeness” and identity politics is about one thing: control. As I pointed out after their election loss, Democrats spent years stoking these trends as a way to stop Bernie Sanders and his political movement from taking over their party. When that eventually backfired, by making them seem out of touch and bizarrely hostile to white men in particular, establishment Democrats then turned around and pinned the blame for it on progressives — and at the exact time, conveniently, that their control over the party was once again looking precarious.

The Platner controversy is this in microcosm. The Democratic establishment is happy to be hypocritical and use the exact kind of “woke” cancel culture they’ve spent a year decrying to go after Platner, because they see it as the most effective way to stop him, maintain their hold on the party, and keep the Left out. Do not be surprised if in a month or two, they go right back to complaining with a straight face about how progressive “groups” made them do it.

Judging by Platner’s polling, the size of his crowds, and the political support he’s maintained in the middle of this controversy, it’s not clear this will work. But the political cost for the Democratic Party could still be considerable. There are millions of working-class American men who say or believe things that are no different from what Platner wrote on Reddit twelve years ago — in many cases, things that are far worse. In their desperation to stay in control, establishment Democrats are once more sending those voters the message that the Democratic Party is not for them.