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Mitt Romney and the Fallacy of Political “Authenticity”
It is worth reading the entire article.
All of this is a crock. We—the astute writers noted above, and pretty much everybody else too—are fetishizing one of modernity’s most potent fantasies: that there is a deeply internalized “authenticity” which dramatically reveals our true, inner selves. Yes, we want to know, truly know, who these people are and who can blame us? And the task of excavating this “authenticity” seems especially urgent in the case of those few who wish to be our president. But we’re on the wrong track and we’ve been on it for a long time.
...
So does Mitt Romney’s scorn for the Democrat party reveal who the real Romney is? No. Not anymore than his anodyne reference to the Democratic Party just a few weeks earlier did. Whoever he is, the real Romney is mostly irrelevant. Romney, like all of us, performs the roles he must within the public institutions he inhabits and the different dramas which he plays a part in enacting. There are reasons why he performs on the stages he does—he’ll never be any kind of liberal—but he doesn’t just play the same character every time. Each of those institutions will have a different set of observers with which the individual engages. The audience, venue and dramatic script shape and constrain our public performances. To perform the wrong script at the wrong time is entirely possible—and a contradiction between verbal and non-verbal cues often occurs—but significant social costs will then accrue to the performer. Even famously “conviction” driven politicians like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Paul Wellstone behaved in a manner that could only be socially interpreted—once an individual’s “inner direction” engages in a variety of externalized, relationally-defined episodes, the protocols and rules systems of those episodes channel the behavior of even the most willful actors. This is the great insight of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which is, like The Lonely Crowd, a landmark work of 1950s American sociology. Goffman’s brilliant, if ruthlessly unsentimental, work pretty much undermines all of the romantic prattle about authenticity from Rousseau to the latest self-help scheme. The performer isn’t necessarily trying to deceive the audience (although sometimes s/he is). Rather, he or she attempts to intuit what a given audience is expecting in a given situation. Employing Goffman in this way is itself a conceptual shortcut, a heuristic device designed to properly frame, at least, what we are trying to understand about presidential politicians. But it places our judgments in the realm of the socially interactive, rather than the reductively psychological, and thus seems like a more fruitful way to apprehend likely political outcomes.
People are what they do, and part of what presidential candidates must do is project a fully integrated depth of being before multiple audiences. Romney’s political problem—his poor job performance as a professional politician—is that he has an almost poignant difficulty in managing to do that. His inability to merely fake the “realness” that people hunger for reminds me of what was once said about former Texas Governor, and Democrat turned Republican John Connally: he is the only man in the world whose real hair makes people think he’s wearing a toupee.
...
We will probably never find out who the real Romney is, just like we haven’t found out who the real Obama or the real Lincoln is. And it won’t matter what he is not telling us about his Mormonism or how many nightmares he’s had about that terrible day in Beaulanc, France in 1968. But who controls Congress will matter a lot as to whether we see the Romney who basically agrees with Obama about health care, but just wants to figure out a way not to tax his own class to pay for it, or the Romney who will abolish Obama’s health care reform bill, defund the EPA and the NLRB, and redistribute money from the elderly and the poor to the rich. That is a play we should never want to see performed. I can’t make it any more real for you than that.
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/13/mitt-romney-and-the-fallacy-of-political-authenticity/
...
So does Mitt Romney’s scorn for the Democrat party reveal who the real Romney is? No. Not anymore than his anodyne reference to the Democratic Party just a few weeks earlier did. Whoever he is, the real Romney is mostly irrelevant. Romney, like all of us, performs the roles he must within the public institutions he inhabits and the different dramas which he plays a part in enacting. There are reasons why he performs on the stages he does—he’ll never be any kind of liberal—but he doesn’t just play the same character every time. Each of those institutions will have a different set of observers with which the individual engages. The audience, venue and dramatic script shape and constrain our public performances. To perform the wrong script at the wrong time is entirely possible—and a contradiction between verbal and non-verbal cues often occurs—but significant social costs will then accrue to the performer. Even famously “conviction” driven politicians like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Paul Wellstone behaved in a manner that could only be socially interpreted—once an individual’s “inner direction” engages in a variety of externalized, relationally-defined episodes, the protocols and rules systems of those episodes channel the behavior of even the most willful actors. This is the great insight of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which is, like The Lonely Crowd, a landmark work of 1950s American sociology. Goffman’s brilliant, if ruthlessly unsentimental, work pretty much undermines all of the romantic prattle about authenticity from Rousseau to the latest self-help scheme. The performer isn’t necessarily trying to deceive the audience (although sometimes s/he is). Rather, he or she attempts to intuit what a given audience is expecting in a given situation. Employing Goffman in this way is itself a conceptual shortcut, a heuristic device designed to properly frame, at least, what we are trying to understand about presidential politicians. But it places our judgments in the realm of the socially interactive, rather than the reductively psychological, and thus seems like a more fruitful way to apprehend likely political outcomes.
People are what they do, and part of what presidential candidates must do is project a fully integrated depth of being before multiple audiences. Romney’s political problem—his poor job performance as a professional politician—is that he has an almost poignant difficulty in managing to do that. His inability to merely fake the “realness” that people hunger for reminds me of what was once said about former Texas Governor, and Democrat turned Republican John Connally: he is the only man in the world whose real hair makes people think he’s wearing a toupee.
...
We will probably never find out who the real Romney is, just like we haven’t found out who the real Obama or the real Lincoln is. And it won’t matter what he is not telling us about his Mormonism or how many nightmares he’s had about that terrible day in Beaulanc, France in 1968. But who controls Congress will matter a lot as to whether we see the Romney who basically agrees with Obama about health care, but just wants to figure out a way not to tax his own class to pay for it, or the Romney who will abolish Obama’s health care reform bill, defund the EPA and the NLRB, and redistribute money from the elderly and the poor to the rich. That is a play we should never want to see performed. I can’t make it any more real for you than that.
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/13/mitt-romney-and-the-fallacy-of-political-authenticity/