A 2005 obituary in the Chicago Tribune advised, “In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans.” From such comparatively decorous partisanship we have descended to the long dying of Graham Platner’s ludicrous-from-the-start Senate campaign.

His reputation is in tatters. So should be the reputations of all those national figures who tried to put him in the Senate from Maine. The Platner debacle is just a smidgen of the Everest of evidence for two propositions:

The Democratic Party no longer has a knack for its business, which supposedly is politics. In America, this means cobbling together majority coalitions from a politically and culturally diverse continental nation. The second proposition is that the nation cannot have just one healthy party. When one welcomes contamination by the extremism and stupidity on its side of the spectrum, the other, relishing the collapse of standards, does likewise.

Platner’s campaign was born of the cynicism that permeates the Democrats’ devotion to identity politics. Never mind that Platner is a lout whose work résumé is thinner than his record of sponging off his parents. Rather than assess him as — Heaven forfend! — an individual, Democrats anointed him the embodiment of........

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