In John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, set in early-1960s New Orleans, Ignatius J. Reilly is the ultimate self-aggrandizing dunce. Over-educated, unemployed, living rent-free off his mother, armed with a useless master’s degree and an endless supply of contempt for the modern world, he stages absurd crusades while contributing nothing. He rails against the family, the police, the capitalists, and the university, even as he depends on all of them. The system enables him. It does not punish him. It simply keeps the farce going.

Sixty years later, the same archetype walks among us wearing a better costume. Graham Platner — bearded veteran, oyster farmer, progressive populist — is the modern veteran version of Ignatius Reilly.