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We live in an age dominated by the politics of authenticity. Steve Cohen, describing what he calls “the search for reality” in “American politics today,” attributes this shift to the sweeping and rapid transformation of media environment and corporate influence:
Before the internet, journalists curated our facts and adhered to professional norms and ethics when presenting those facts. That has been replaced by a free market in real and made up information along with endless commentaries by mostly non-expert experts. […] [a] number of networks now provide televised news 24 hours a day. Corporations advertise on these networks, then pay to influence elections, and then pay to lobby elected officials to do their bidding. […] [t]he corporate sector increasingly seeks to define reality itself. The public reaction to that has been to seek out and respond to political candidates that offer some degree of independence and authenticity. They are looking for “people who can’t be bought”; from Mike Bloomberg to Barack Obama to Donald Trump and now to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we have a craving for something real that we might define as the politics of authenticity
(Cohen).
Whatever authenticity in this context may mean, it coincides tangentially with a notion of truth. In a post-election survey conducted eight days after the 2017 US presidential election, 61.8% of voters for Donald Trump rated him as “highly authentic,” despite the fact that 68.8% of these same voters rated as “highly false” a statement from his Twitter account accusing China of having invented the concept of global warming for the purposes of economic gain.1 Nor, as Cohen’s analysis suggests, is the appeal of authenticity simply the effect of a media culture besotted by celebrity profiles and the resultant demand that candidates evince “political intimacy” with constituents via spontaneous expressions of the private self. To be authentic is not just to show the self for what it truly is; rather, it connotes an active stance of being anti-establishment, anti-media and anti-norm.
This concept of authenticity is based in a deep mistrust over the inauthenticity of the public sphere. Its genealogy is multistranded and, in the case of its contemporary usage in American politics, inflected by the rise of both right- and left-wing populism. Here, I aim to tease...