The Changing Face of “Authenticity” in Politics

In 1968, Janet Malcolm visited a new showroom for high-end furniture that was, she wrote, among “the most beautiful and interesting” in New York. The venue was designed by Warren Platner, an architect who himself designed furniture; Donald Trump would later acquire a set of his chairs, and sounded gratified when, during an interview in 2010, a reporter from the Times recognized them. Platner’s son, Bronson, went into law, in Maine; his son Graham studied at Hotchkiss, a tony boarding school in Connecticut, though he hated it, skipped classes, and was quickly kicked out. Graham transferred to a different private school closer to home, where he starred in a production of “My Fair Lady.” He played Henry Higgins, the haughty phonetician who teaches a lower-class flower girl to speak proper.

Last summer, Graham Platner—by then an oyster farmer in Maine, following tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a spell in Washington, D.C., where he studied, and worked at a bar—announced that he would be running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat. He did so in a video, set to throbbing music, that showed him driving his boat in a camo wetsuit, working out, and splitting wood in a tight-fitting T-shirt that revealed arm tattoos. Cynics (and G.O.P. operatives) might say that this mise en scène defied Platner’s family background, but Platner has insisted that there was nothing “performative” about it. “I do swing kettlebells, I lift weights, I work on the ocean with my hands, I shoot guns,” he said recently. “It’s just, kind of, my existence.” Indeed, Platner would quickly win praise for coming across as a real person: in the weeks following his campaign launch, a local labor official likened him to “somebody who I would meet in a union hall”; Bernie Sanders, in an endorsement, called him “a Mainer through and through.” When Lisa Wood Shapiro profiled Platner, for this magazine, she asked whether he’d rein in his notably foul mouth if elected. “I know what rooms not to swear in,” he reassured her. “But what I’m not gonna do is purposely change my personality, or put on some kind of adaptation to try to appeal to folks.”

In politics, there is a common word for this sort of thing: authenticity. As a quality, it has been invoked with particular insistence in recent months, especially with reference to Democratic candidates given the Party’s second defeat to Donald Trump, its subsequent existential crisis, and generally out-of-touch aura. Pundits and politicians have called it the “coin of the realm” and the subject of a “constant battle”; the stuff of a “gap,” but also a “trap.” The Democratic primary for Senate in Iowa, which took place this week, was described as an “authenticity-off.” Jasmine Crockett, a since-defeated Senate candidate in Texas, claimed that Republicans were “fearful” of her authenticity, after Vice-President J. D. Vance quipped that “her street-girl persona is about as real as her nails.” When old posts surfaced in which Mallory McMorrow, who is running for Senate in Michigan, appeared to disparage Trump voters and the Midwest, she said that she had merely “tweeted normal things like a normal person, and people are desperate for authenticity.” Platner has repeatedly used the A-word, ascribing to himself “an authenticity . . . that most other politicians just can’t provide because it’s inauthentic for them.”

Nothing screams authenticity like insisting that you’re authentic, and in many ways the discourse, of late, has revolved around just how stilted and superficial politicians tend to be. In fact, the entire concept of authenticity in politics has come to seem superficial, or at least miserably clichéd. It has been criticized for trapping women candidates, who risk seeming weak if they act “feminine” and fake if they don’t, and candidates of color who, as the strategist and author Maya Rupert has written, are encouraged to be their “real selves” but only if the results are “nonthreatening, legible and familiar to the status quo.” Your real self could, of course, be that of a risk-averse political hack. Real people can also be old; indeed, there’s little more authentic in life than the individual ways in which we age. And yet neither of these things really comports with what the political media means by authenticity. (Janet Mills, Maine’s seventy-eight-year-old governor, who challenged Platner but suspended her campaign long before the upcoming primary, perhaps found this out to her cost.) Rather, the term has come to stand for a range of attributes—intemperance, ordinariness, outsiderness, likability, spontaneity—that aren’t especially related philosophically, either to authenticity or to one another. Worse still, it has come to stand for the skilful performance of such things. Whether acting or not, Platner—white, macho, sweary, Midwestern-coded (if not actually Midwestern)—seemed to fit the bill.