by David A. Bell

David Greenberg and Michael Kazin's posts raise some fascinating issues. In many ways, questions of authenticity have been at the heart of democratic politics since the eighteenth century. They were central to the Enlightenment, as readers of Lionel Trilling's wonderful Sincerity and Authenticity well know. During the French Revolution, they became matters of life and death (woe to those revealed as inauthentically revolutionary!). But in contemporary American politics, the issues are bit trickier than they appear. To start with, it just isn't as good, politically speaking, to be an authentic liberal, or an authentic patrician, or an authentic intellectual, as it is to be an authentic cowboy. In theory, authenticity should be "content neutral"--you should get points for it regardless of what you authentically are. But in practice, things don't work that way. Think back to the first President Bush, and the way he was ridiculed for eating pork rinds. His taste for them was widely considered "inauthentic" because of his patrician background. But had he instead touted a love for expensive imported Brie accompanied by a nice vintage Saint-Émilion, would he have won any points for authenticity? And then there is the curious American taste for actors in politics, from George Murphy to Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Fred Thompson. As any reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau knows, actors are by definition paragons of inauthenticity. They adopt (in his view) so many different masks that they no longer know who or what they really are. They manipulate others through shows of false emotion. They teach lessons in deception and subterfuge. The French Revolution initially denied professional actors full citizenship for precisely this reason. And the actual careers of Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Thompson make one wonder if Rousseau didn't have a point. Whatever their accomplishments, they were all very skillful at deceiving the public as to their "authentic" natures. Reagan was so good at acting the cowboy type that the public forgot, or didn't care about his messy family life, his less-than-sterling war record, his almost non-existent church-going, or the fact that socially, he felt most comfortable with the sort of "Hollywood types" that his party reviled. Schwarzenegger, an exceptionally canny businessman and self-promoter, was happy to have the public see him as the tough guy action hero of his films. Thompson, egregiously, acted the part of the aw-shucks-down-home-pickup-truck-driving ordinary guy to perfection in his Senate campaign, and magically made his real career as a high-powered lawyer and lobbyist fade to black. But then, it's not as if the public was ignorant of the "authentic" lives of these three actors. And I don't think it was simply overawed by the performances, either. I think these three men succeeded so well precisely because the public, implicitly, recognized the strength of their performances, admired how well they played their parts. One reason the same public reacted so strongly against figures like Michael Dukakis and John Kerry was that they tried to play the same sort of role, and did it badly. The same goes for Bush 41 and his pork rinds (and, perhaps, for John Edwards, and the contrast between his political populism and his supposed "pretty boy" obsession with his hair). They weren't just being inauthentic--they were doing it badly, being bad actors. Which is to say that perhaps, in the end, "authenticity" doesn't actually count for as much as we think in politics, and performance counts for more.