Authenticity is Overrated
We need a new politics of duty
Amid the endless fury of headlines last week, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan got in a plane and went to Washington to meet with President Trump. Whitmer, you may know, is a Democrat and listed among those who may make a run for the White House in 2028. She and Trump have had a tumultuous political relationship. In 2020, amid the COVID pandemic and after a Tweet from Trump demanding “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” armed protestors entered Michigan’s state capitol. Later that year, pro-Trump militia members in Michigan were arrested by the FBI for plotting to kidnap Whitmer.
But last week Whitmer had governing business to do, and it depended on the president. She sought funding for an Air National Guard Base near Detroit, aid for Michiganders reeling from an ice storm, and help with fighting invasive species in the Great Lakes. When she entered the Oval Office, to her great surprise, she found herself in a photo op—or, rather, a setup. Trump was preparing to sign an executive order to punish officials who had challenged his lies about the 2020 election and Whitmer was made a prop.
When asked about the incident a couple of days later, Whitmer responded,
Public service is about putting the people of Michigan before my own interest. My job was to try to get help for people who were suffering as a result of the ice storm, to land more investment at Selfridge air base, to protect the Great Lakes and to fight for the auto industry. And that’s what I was doing.
Sounds just like a politician, no? Whitmer should do a gut check.
In fact, it’s we who need the gut check. I may be assuming too much, but I doubt it. When we hear Whitmer respond, “Public service is about putting the people of Michigan before my own interests,” we probably on some level roll our emotional eyes. Oh no, we think in our gut, another politician. We’d prefer a response that sounds, well, more authentic. How about some outrage?
One of my favorite movies of the past decade is Greta Gerwig’s rendition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (2019). I love the film for the tender and intricate way it portrays the growing pains of the March sisters. You get the sense that each of these young women has their own particular purpose to fulfill in the world, a “true self” that is very much their own and not anybody else’s. Raised in a family with an uncommon sense of moral duty, the March sisters nevertheless are not asked by their parents to conform uniformly to some straightforward moral ideal. Life is complex, people are different, and each person has their own particular ends to try to realize that represent the fullness of who they can become. Little Women is a story about what we call authenticity.
The philosopher Charles Taylor declares ours an “age of authenticity.” Indeed, authenticity may be the most powerful social ethic we have today. The basic idea is that each of us has a true self to which we must be faithful. If we don’t, we risk the shackles of an artificial existence and the unhappiness and anxiety that come with it. To call a thing, for example a coin, inauthentic is to call it counterfeit or fake, but to call someone inauthentic is to go further: it is to assume that they have a genuine self that they are betraying. It is therefore to accuse them of moral failure.
As history goes, authenticity is a relatively new moral ideal. The 18th-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau is considered a key source for it. He urged people to look “within” for ethical and moral direction. It’s easy to pan this idea as mere “subjectivism,” but the fact is that few of us deny that looking within is essential to moral life, and few would question the idea that each person is unique. Authenticity asks us to consider our uniqueness in moral and ethical terms.
Yet authenticity has become something more than a celebration of the unique potential of each and everyone. It has become a pivotal standard of everyday political judgment, specifically when it comes to forming opinions about political personalities. And I think here we revere authenticity to our peril.
A few weeks ago, The New York Times’s Michelle Cottle interviewed Ben Rhodes, one of Barack Obama’s former speechwriters and advisors. They got to talking about authenticity. The gist was that the Democrats had a big authenticity problem. As Cottle put it, “they don’t know how to talk to normal people and not sound like they’re running some kind of freshman seminar at some pointy-headed college.” Democratic electoral losses, Cottle and Rhodes agreed, are at least partly due to such “pointy-headed” inauthenticity.
Which is another way of saying that Democrats were suffering because they were failing to effectively perform authenticity.
Of course, if we take the ethic of authenticity seriously, the idea of “performing” authenticity is a contradiction. Authenticity, because it comes from one’s true self, is precisely that which can’t be performed—it can only be shown, expressed, or lived out.
But here’s the thing: authenticity, or at least its appearance, not only can be performed, it’s performed all the time.
It’s not a coincidence that Collet and Rhodes argued that Democrats need to learn to talk differently. Vocal speech patterns are particularly powerful means by which public personalities perform authenticity. Much more than how somebody looks, we rely on how people sound to judge authenticity.
Why is this? I don’t claim to precisely know. But it is something we should be aware of. I suspect it is because the voice, more than any other expressive faculty, signals access to the “interiority” of another person. The media theorist Walter Ong wrote in his book Orality and Literacy,
Sounds all register the interior structures of whatever it is that produces them. A violin filled with concrete will not sound like a normal violin. A saxophone sounds differently from a flute: it is structured differently inside. And above all, the human voice comes from inside the human organism which provides the voice’s resonances.
When we see a public personality being particularly expressive, but especially when we hear them, we get a sense that we are accessing something that is interior to them, precisely where we assume their “true self” resides.
I think voice is Donald Trump’s singular performance art. Looking at him with the volume off, he is the paragon of inauthenticity: a tan so fake it makes him literally glow orange, yellow hair that at times looks like it was grown in a biohazard lab, and scalp reduction surgery that makes him look like he has a toupee cemented onto his head. But listen to him talk, with or without video, and whatever else you might think about what he says, he sounds unfettered, unfiltered, and, well, authentic. We get a sense of a unique individual, a true personality, a man who knows who he is and is unashamed. In an age of authenticity, there is indeed a singular kind of appeal here, powerful enough to propel him to the White House—twice. It appears that when Trump speaks, we are getting a window to his “true self.” (His ALL-CAPS social media posts seem to be designed to replicate this “voice.”)
Trump alone should be enough to persuade us that authenticity is a problem if it becomes a primary means by which we judge politicians. While he excels at a certain kind of performance, he continues to fail at governing and remains politically weak.
Prioritizing authenticity in politics is doubly problematic: it disarms our critical faculties and it teaches us to pay less attention to the qualifications and actual job-performance of politicians. We forget that authenticity can be inauthentically or artificially performed, and we may end up caring more for our perceived access to a public person’s “true self” than the quality of that self.
Are there better criteria by which to judge politicians as public personalities? Of course! Competence, qualifications, and general honesty stand out, all of which are capable of being objectively assessed, and all of which are far more important to actual governance than authenticity.
But I would like to re-introduce another criterion, duty. “Duty” is the translation frequently used for the Latin word officium, from which we get our English word “office.” Public life is composed of an array of “offices,” and, crucially, it is precisely the role of offices to impinge upon personality, even if that personality authentically expresses one’s “true self.” Whether we are talking about police officers, school officials, or sports referees (i.e. officials), it is precisely the role of the “office” to prescribe duties on those who occupy the office, and it is precisely when they break from their duties in the name of self-expression that things go badly wrong.
So I want to praise Gretchen Whitmer! She was doing her duty. Even her statement reacting to Trump’s setup was an exercise in duty. We desperately need more duty doers in our political life together.
But more importantly, we, the people who put politicians in power, need to retrain our own political intuitions. Again, authenticity is a worthy ethical ideal for individuals in the course of their lives. The gut check that asks “Is this true to who I am?” is a crucial one.
But it is utterly impossible for democracies to function if authenticity is made a primary political ideal. We are seeing that now in spades. In public life, authenticity is best left for rock stars, not politicians.
Why do we resist putting a premium on politicians just doing their job, including talking like they are just doing their job? Why do we think duty “dull,” limiting them and us? Why do we think duty-doing is not a worthy political ideal?
Next week I am going to begin to write about historic republicanism, the sort David Walker and Abraham Lincoln swore allegiance to, not to mention Olympe de Gouges and Hannah Arendt. Duty is a central concept in the republican vocabulary. So I will leave you with a brief reflection on duty from a contemporary Italian republican, Maurizio Viroli.
Duty is liberty. It is moral liberty, the most precious form of liberty, because without it the other liberties wither and die. To feel a duty means that you believe it is just or unjust to do or not do a certain thing. It is our own conscience, not other people or the state, that tells us that a certain action is right, and that we must therefore perform it, or that it is unjust, and that we must therefore refrain from performing that action. Duty cannot be imposed or ordered. . . . Nor can duty be encouraged with the promise of a reward or the threat of sanction.
In other words, duty is a way of owning our obligations, making them our very own. In this is found authentic political liberty, and in authentic political liberty there is the possibility of a political life together where politicians can be praised rather than panned for putting the people they serve ahead their own particular interests, and for saying so.