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Lately, as I’ve followed the contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, I’ve found myself thinking of The Red and the Black, and its play with antiquated notions of authenticity. The passionate support for Sanders has, one hopes, much to do with excitement about his insistent expression of a platform of economic populism. But it would be naïve to think it doesn’t also have to do with his appearance, his way of speaking. There is authenticity, and there is appearing authentic. These two things may mostly align—as they largely but not entirely do with Sanders. (Most anti-establishment figures avoid 35 years in government.) Or they may almost perfectly not align—as in the case of Donald Trump. (A liar celebrated for speaking the truth.) Either way, it’s worth investigating authenticity in our political thinking, both to understand its power and to consider how it helps or hurts the kind of effective, forward-looking agenda that we hope will emerge from a fractured Democratic Party.
One problem with authenticity as a campaign tactic is its unsettling, subconscious alliance with those who benefit from the status quo. If you’re not who you say you are—if you’re moving on the social ladder, or are not in “your place”—you’re inauthentic. Keeping it real subtly advocates for keeping it just like it is.
The semiotics of Sanders’s political authenticity—dishevelment, raised voice, being unyielding—are available to male politicians in a way they are not to women (and to whites in a way they are not to blacks or Hispanics or Asians). Black women in politics don’t have the option to wear their hair “natural”; nearly all white women appear to have blowouts, even Elizabeth Warren. It’s nonsense, and yet the only politically viable option, and therefore not nonsense.
It’s not just that research has shown that women are perceived to talk too much even when they talk less, or that men who display anger are influential while women who do so are not. It’s that there is no such thing as “masculine wiles.” The phrase just doesn’t exist. This doesn’t mean that calling into question Clinton’s authenticity and trustworthiness—the fault line along which the Democratic Party has riven—is pure misogyny. It just means that it’s not purely not misogyny.
Clinton is often described as the institutional candidate, the establishment. There’s a lot of truth to that. But she’s also the woman who initially kept her name (and her job) as the wife of the governor of Arkansas, who used the role of First Lady as cover to push for socialized health care, and who was instrumental in getting health insurance for eight million children past the Republican gorgons when a full reform failed. Someone who has survived being attacked for nearly 40 years must possess a highly developed sense of what the critic Walter Benjamin calls “cunning and high spirits”—the means by which figures in fairy tales evade the oppressive forces of myth, and mortals evade gods. Somehow she achieved one of the more liberal voting records in the Senate, despite rarely being described as a liberal by either the left or the right.
Perhaps one reason that Clinton’s “firewall” of black support has remained standing is that “authenticity” has less rhetorical force with a historically oppressed people, for whom that strategy—being recognizably who people in power think you ought to be—was never viable. There are, of course, important and substantial criticisms of Clinton. But perhaps when we say that Hillary is inauthentic, we’re simply saying that she is a woman working in the public eye.
Democrats on both sides of the party should consider which tactic best suits the underdogs they feel they are defending, and want to defend. Whoever receives the nomination, perhaps the worry should shift from whether the candidate is cunning to whether the candidate—and the Democratic Party—can be cunning enough.
Rivka Galchen
― nakhchivan, Sunday, 19 June 2016 01:05 (seven years ago) link
one month passes...
one month passes...