The Changing Face of “Authenticity” in Politics
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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.
Not long after Platner launched his campaign, news outlets reported on old, and somewhat less so, Reddit posts in which he expressed opinions ranging from the politically inconvenient (“I got older and became a communist”) to the offensive (“Why don’t black people tip?”). Some of the comments appeared dismissive of the prevalence of sexual assault in the armed forces, and to partially blame victims of rape who get “blacked out.” A few days later, Platner went on “Pod Save America” and revealed that, when he was in the military two decades ago, he drunkenly got a skull-and-crossbones tattoo that resembled a Nazi Totenkopf insignia. (He said that he would get the tattoo removed and that he didn’t previously know about its symbolism, a claim that some of his acquaintances have challenged.) Suddenly, Platner seemed a little too authentic in the eyes of the pundit class, and conventional wisdom held him to be dead in the water, or fated to spend his career on it. But something surprising happened: Platner’s campaign kept surging. “No actual voter that I’ve talked to is put off by this stuff,” a resident of Newcastle, Maine, told the Midcoast Villager. “Everyone is worried that some other voter will be turned off, that their neighbor will be turned off, that some swing voter next year will be, but they’re not.”
Many people even seemed to view Platner’s baggage as proof of his authenticity. If Trump long ago broke the idea of the political purity test, Platner’s durability suggested that this dynamic now applied across the ideological spectrum, reflecting a bipartisan backlash against managerial, focus-grouped politics. Less cynically, in a world awash in fakery—in which conspiracy theories are rampant, and A.I. is flooding our feeds and coming for our jobs—many people seem more aware than ever of the value, and fragility, of the real, however elusive that concept may be. Across decades of political discourse, the word authenticity has been tortured to the point of meaninglessness, but I’ve found myself wondering, in recent months, if a new paradigm might be swimming into view. Platner’s campaign, I think, has been a case in point, albeit in ways that might resonate across the electorate, beyond one Senate candidate whose flaws are becoming more visible by the day.
What it means to be authentic has always been slippery—according to Merriam-Webster, definitions can include “not false or imitation” but also “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.” (When I Googled “Platner authenticity,” the first result was a Reddit post asking how one might detect a fake Warren Platner dining table.) The modern notion of “authenticity” grew out of the Enlightenment era. Prior to that, in medieval Europe, societies were highly localized and hierarchical, and their denizens were not encouraged to think reflectively about their “real selves,” or how they related, as individuals, to the world around them. Then came modernity, or, as the academic Charles Lindholm has put it, “the condition of living among strangers.” This required trust, which in turn required sincerity, which in turn raised all sorts of questions—What does it mean to be sincere? What internal truths should guide us? And how do we access those, anyway?—that philosophers are still sorting through today.
America’s electoral politics themselves grew out of Enlightenment ideals. And yet, the tropes that would come to read as authentic in this sphere are, arguably, a quite recent invention. Historians have located their echoes in William Henry Harrison’s log cabin, Theodore Roosevelt’s thrusting campaign style (one opponent, Woodrow Wilson, lamented that he was perceived as a “vague, conjectural personality” compared with T.R.’s “real, vivid person”), and Richard Nixon’s speech about his family’s cocker spaniel, Checkers. More than one scholar, however, has dated the modern thirst for authenticity to the Watergate era, during which voters began to demand more of an insight into the character of their leaders, and the burgeoning medium of television was able to serve it to them. The first candidate whom today’s Beltway media might have recognized as authentic was Jimmy Carter, who portrayed himself as a humble outsider with down-home Southern bona fides. The pollster Erica J. Seifert writes, in her book “The Politics of Authenticity in Presidential Campaigns, 1976–2008,” that, before Carter, candidates who emphasized their humble roots largely did so to demonstrate their “extraordinariness of character” and “American heroism” in escaping them. After Carter, those who best presented themselves as normal, straightforward people who had led legibly American lives far from D.C. tended to win—even if they were the incumbent.
This sort of behavior was a contrivance from the start, but, as time passed, it seemed to have ever less to do with who politicians really were, and ever more to do with the pathologies of professional, consultant-driven campaigns—a key currency of a culture that placed the political horse race above all else, made celebrities of backstage image-makers, and eventually led voters themselves to second-guess which candidates their peers would perceive as more “electable.” (The latter trend is very much still with us; consider the voter from Newcastle, Maine.) Trump’s victory in 2016 was, in some ways, the logical endpoint of the authenticity cult. He clearly appealed to many voters as an inimitable and assured outsider who invariably spoke his mind. At the same time, though, he destroyed the idea by exposing its hollowness: he lied constantly, and was, in no way, a normal person. Trump came from the highly artificial world of reality TV, in which people’s real selves blur into the archetypes they play; it was possible to view Trump, the emerging politician, as a performed character, but one that became real, so intense was the actor’s belief in the bit. In 2020, Dan P. McAdams, a narrative psychologist, described Trump as lacking the inner story that gives most lives meaning. McAdams saw him, rather, as an “episodic man,” who approached life as one battle after another. (Lately, this may have changed: Trump still loves a battle, but he seems to care a bit more about his longer-term legacy, and acting on his convictions no matter what his base thinks.)
By shattering the tired conventional wisdom about authenticity in politics, Trump may have created the space for others to inject fresh energy and meaning into the idea—though, in politics, nothing is truly new. The conception of authenticity that Trump broke may be traceable to Carter’s post-Watergate win, but a richer version of authenticity was one of the key concerns of an earlier “new left,” which emerged in the decades following the Second World War, and which pursued the “real” as a salve for feelings of alienation within a consumerist, bureaucratic society. Six years before Carter took the White House, the Marxist philosopher Marshall Berman declared that the search for authenticity is almost inextricably “bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are.” This line of thinking seems hard to relate to the question of which politician you’d most like to grab a beer with. But the political climate that gave rise to Carter was certainly born of a backlash against a corrupt status quo, even if its codes of authenticity would themselves become corrupted.
This present moment of rejectionism, alienation, and disgust at rampant graft might provide fertile soil for a rebirth of what it means for a politician to be authentic. Such a dynamic came into view, last year, in the New York mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, a candidate who was frequently credited with authenticity, despite not fitting the typical mold. In no small part, this came down to his apparently effortless manner of communicating online. This was a misimpression—he actually worked very hard on his output, and the broader way he presented himself in public was highly disciplined and on message. (Much of what passed for his authenticity, I think, was charisma.) And yet, it wasn’t wrong to view his campaign, or even its online presence, as authentic, at least in the sense that—while rivals targeted him with A.I. slop—he used social media to show himself moving through the physical world, be it plunging into the icy waters of Coney Island or walking the length of Manhattan. “I think social media is often discussed as a way in which you can escape the world,” he told Wired. “What’s been exciting is to be part of a team that’s looking to use it as a way to tell the stories of that world and then to transform it.” In the same interview, he bemoaned the fact that “too much of politics has become artificial, has become the creation of a self that is actually divorced from the way in which you grew up in the world.”
For months, Platner’s candidacy stood for something similar. After his offensive Reddit posts came to light, he described himself as a “retired shitposter.” He also released an earnest, unproduced video in which he explained that his time in the military left him feeling “very disillusioned, very alienated, and very isolated,” and that he had tried and failed to find a sense of belonging on the internet before finding “actual community” back home, in Maine. “I am very proud of the person I am today,” he concluded. “And it was that whole journey that got me here.” Since then, he has repeatedly made the case that people are capable not only of change but of fighting, side by side, to live as their truest selves. He has, notably, refused to feed trans people into the maw of the culture war, bemoaning the fact that outside money was able to inject transphobia into a local school-board race, and insisting that “a politics that is willing to sell anyone out will eventually sell everyone out.” Platner is angry at the system—or, in other words, things as they are. But the way he has expressed himself has often been softer-edged than his caricature would suggest. “Most of my hobbies are things that people tend to associate with, like, manly stuff,” he told NPR recently. “At the exact same time, I go to therapy. I have a very open sort of dialogue and emotional relationship with my wife.”
Since that interview, however, Platner has faced bad headlines again, and they have had to do with his relationships. Last week, the Wall Street Journal and the Times both reported that his wife, Amy Gertner, discovered explicit messages that he exchanged with other women after they got married, in 2023, and informed campaign aides about the potential embarrassment that the messages posed. (In response to the stories, Gertner released a video of herself walking down a street and flicking away bugs. “No marriage is perfect, and I don’t want a perfect marriage,” she said, insisting that she and Platner have been working through their problems.) Then, on Thursday, the Times ran with the stories of three women who dated Platner—at least as long ago as 2013, and as recently as 2021—and described his behavior, variously, as contemptuous of women, unfaithful, and generally “unsettling.” One, Lyndsey Fifield, alleged that, while Platner never hit her, he did sometimes grab her roughly, on one occasion twisting her arm behind her back before shutting her in a bedroom.
Platner’s campaign strongly denied any physical violence, and pointed out that Fifield is “a lifelong G.O.P. operative.” Fifield insisted that her politics had nothing to do with her decision to speak out, and shared a diary entry, from 2016, in which she described Platner as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” Platner did acknowledge that he “too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend” during a “very dark period of my life.” His campaign put the Times in touch with three other women, who, broadly, called him a great guy. Even the three who had very different experiences said that he could be exhilarating company.
The Times story used the word “complicated” four times. One of those usages was actually in the negative: a reference to Platner telling CNN, back in January, that he had not lived a complicated life, and that, beyond the Reddit posts and his tattoo, no more skeletons would emerge from his closet. This, obviously, was not true. More may yet emerge. Already, the story of his marital infidelity had spooked some Democratic lawmakers and strategists, though others dismissed it, including by praising him and his wife for showing up “every day on the campaign trail as their authentic selves.” Many voters seemed not to care.
There are, clearly, unresolved questions as to what Platner’s real self looks like: the accounts of some of his former girlfriends cast doubt on the softer edges of his persona, but, given the period in question, they aren’t necessarily incompatible with his claims of personal growth; the sexts, apparently consensual, are less serious, but more recent. Henry Higgins, the character Platner once played in “My Fair Lady,” at his private school, was based on Pygmalion, the sculptor of Greek myth who, dissatisfied by the imperfections of nature, crafted a statue, then fell in love with it. Platner’s critics might see a metaphor there, but Platner has, in many ways, set up his campaign in opposition to the politics of carefully chiselled perfectionism. He’s about to find out the extent to which voters are willing to go along. ♦