In democracies, rulers require the consent of the governed. Even within elite theories of democracies, some sort of common consent is necessary. The easiest way to secure such consent is to persuade the people that you are really one of them. Politicians from elite backgrounds work to appear as if they are unafraid of working a day in McDonald’s, or plead for the fortunes of a favourite football team. They are not “regular people,” but they try to look like they belong. These efforts cut across ideology as attempts to cultivate authenticity emerge on both the left and right. But politics cannot be defined by personality alone. History teaches us that political formations and demands change when circumstances and contexts do. Even those who have argued that elites are inevitable, such as Gaetano Mosca, or more recently Hugo Drochon, recognise that elites can be substituted if they fail to produce what is expected of them. The collapse of the Gilded Age brought with it a demand for the state to finally intervene. This makes the people, even in a democratic system defined by “elite rule,” crucial to the forms of politics we find.

　　FDR’s deep-rooted popularity, formed from reimagining the state’s role and Huey Long’s vulgar caricature populism, highlights that in desperate times, new, previously unforeseen measures can be successfully enacted. Technology also plays a major role in shaping both elites and public demand. Although ideology does matter, both the left and the right like to present their signature issues as representations of the will of the people. This logic presumes that the electorate does have distinct value sets that guide their votes. However, politics remains both a personal and an ideological affair. Connection to the voters is just as important, if not more so, than the ideology the candidate holds.

　　As Francisco Panizza argues in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, politics is just as much about disposition as it is about ideology. The post-Cold War credit and civil rights boom appeared to make politics merely a matter of management; social democracy had won out, and electoral competitions were merely a matter of who could best manage the state’s resources. However, the combination of the war on terror and the collapse of our financial system created the conditions for the post-Cold War consensus to collapse. Our politics today are riven with dislike, fear, and suspicion of the other.

　　Following 2008, elites became especially hated, blamed for our financial ills and engagement in so-called “forever wars.” As a result, popular commentary has gone backwards to move forward. There has been renewed interest in Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites, and Postliberalism has tried, through scholars such as Patrick Deneen, to recraft what the “elite” represent, highlighting a demand for something different from what came before. Elite decision-making has been blamed for a variety of policy disasters, from foreign policy to the economy to migration on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The demand for change is here, and with it comes fresh charges of inauthentic leadership against policymakers. This is significantly different from where we were even twenty years ago, when long and complex white papers were revered as the sensible outcomes of electoral politics.

　　Our online personae function like shades in a Foucauldian hellscape.

　　At the beginning of the millennium, politicians were expected to be managers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and rising living standards, it appeared for a time that we simply knew how to manage our economy and society. A social democratic consensus had emerged, and third-way politicians were fighting over an increasingly narrow political terrain. If Blair was the heir to Thatcher, as was widely proclaimed, then Cameron was also the heir to Blair. Policy and values appeared largely uncontested, even as disputes over competency remained. The arc of history was long and bending towards a liberal consensus, until it wasn’t. The attacks of September 11, for many, began the long road towards today’s political situation.

　　New foreign threats, interventions abroad, and the financial collapse fueled unrest in the West. Living standards have remained troublingly static, and our information environment has become corrupted by virality and simplicity over nuance and complexity. Managerialism, as an aesthetic of politics, now appears to be dead. The era of virality and social media demands not only a more omnipresent but vitalistic political presence.

　　Economic and social circumstances lead to a mass change in what people expect from politics, and also how far citizens are willing to be led. Yet, neither of these explanations fully explores political movement as related to communal relationships that rely on the authentic to flourish.

　　Authenticity is not mere aesthetics. Authenticity is a value that must be found and lived if we are to adhere to it. As Lionel Trilling argues, for authenticity to emerge, we must be sincere. Sincerity is not simply a genuine recognition of the self that is divorced from dishonesty; it is also a recognition that we are not merely atomised individuals. True sincerity is recognising that the values that we hold, even those that directly contradict our societal norms, paradoxically emerge from them. After all, rebellion can only truly be rebellion to the home culture.

　　Authenticity promises us a road out of the artifice and empty self-expression that are ubiquitous in our time. As Taylor argues, we should not seek the narcissistic nor the facile relativism which ultimately derives from an individualism untethered to any greater promise. The lonely young boy or girl, stuck to a screen swiping up or down for endless entertainment, the AI that “syncs” to your ideas and praises you to the heavens for mediocrity, the politician who promises to squeeze redress from those who have wronged you.

　　Genuine authenticity gives us reasons to order our values and not excuse the worst based on the mantra of individual choice alone. A more authentic politics is not simply kinder and more connected, but rather one that grounds us to make a value system, while giving us the space for genuine recognition of the self. Without these conditions, it is difficult to move past a politics torn between reaction, anger, and a callous willingness to excuse the worst actors, provided they champion our cause. Without authenticity, democracies will always face great danger of degeneration in moments of crisis.

　　How do we find real authenticity? Our current politics demands it of our leaders, but increasingly, we are asking to be misled. Authenticity is not merely being true to ourselves, as people often suppose. Instead, as argued in The Ethics of Authenticity, the decisions we make are not exclusively ours, but remain rooted in a communal ethic that is shaped and guided by our own individual decisions. Crucially, neither one can exist without the other. Conservatism cannot stop time or individual experimentation if it wants to craft a genuinely authentic community, but neither can authentic living be de-rooted from the societies in which we live. Science and the rise of AI may promise material abundance, but this will not heal our social rifts. Liberalism’s focus on individualism is a path to atomism, not genuine authenticity.

　　Taylor sees modern individuality as something tacked on to pre-modern ideas of human anthropology. Neo-liberalism is nevertheless a fully embodied ideology that has devoured institutions and civil society. Taylor is cautious of moving in that direction, as the consequences paradoxically take us away from our authentic selves. This perhaps feels out of tune with a society that proclaims that “the personal is political” without even taking a breath to think about what such a claim really entails.

　　Taylor simultaneously rejects stasis and atomisation, which cannot give rise to a genuine ethic of the authentic. This makes authenticity not the product of any one political ideology but a deeper ethic which recognises the roots and responsibilities of the citizen and the leader to one another. This makes authenticity necessary for responsible, honest, and limited politics that acknowledge the cultural and social foundations that have already been laid. The politics of authenticity teaches us about the importance not only of being ourselves but also of recognising our communal roots.

　　The Industrial Revolution as enabler of the rigid development of capitalism certainly increased the well-being of capitalists as well as many landlords, but at the cost of impoverishment of the many, both in terms of living standards, and in those of living conditions: ugly, overcrowded, polluted surroundings in the new cities, until democratic action by nonelites succeeded in winning some economic gains for workers; and until the social-democratic institutions and policies which tamed early capitalism were undermined by globalization and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century, which laid the conditions in which the present wave of xenophobic populism is now sweeping the democratic world.

　　Taylor, like Rousseau, recognises that the past cannot be recalled. The post-liberal path will not lead to real authenticity, a view echoed by scholars such as Matt Sleat. We cannot turn back time; we must negotiate with the settlement that we have inherited. As Edmund Burke argued, society is a contract between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.

　　For politics, this creates a trap of authenticity or at least real challenges in developing the aesthetics of the authentic self. If democratic minimalists, such as Schumpeter, were correct, democracy is little more than a movement between alternative elites as opposed to mass participation. This would necessarily require our leaders to “convince” the masses over who should rule. More optimistic models suggest that democracy itself can be an expression of an important value. In this conversation, democracy can itself help ground authenticity. However, this approach gives little insight into the question of elites.

　　We must put down our phones, recognise our communities, and begin to engage more vigorously, honestly, and seriously if we want to cultivate genuine authenticity.

　　The paradox of authenticity and leadership requires the leader to bind themselves to the people, leading all too easily to the creation of the demagogue. The demagogue promises to imbibe the values of the community and clamp down on those who are threatening it. Be they billionaires in sharp suits or impoverished migrants hurrying across a barbed wire border, demagogues will use any tools at their disposal to gain the currency of authenticity. Demagoguery is a form of politics arising out of leaders tying themselves to “the people” as a mass while simultaneously demanding to lead them and rectify injustices they have suffered. The search and desire for newness, whether that is harking back to the days of yore or a radical drive to the future, is always tempting, especially in an inauthentic world. 

　　In a political world marked by Virality, a phenomenon that rewards either vitriol or awe, we should all be nervous about what authenticity, or the demand for it, can mean for our society. Clickbait media, which functions as an attempt to stimulate our ire towards the other, remains firmly embedded within the economics and function of mass media today. Indeed, the “gotcha” videos further incentivise journalists and us to demean and degrade the other. Far from recognising community, such political expression further divides and atomises us. Virality, far from acting as an authentic method of communication, prises the authentic from our grasp by neutering our connections to each other and the bonds of our commonality. It acts, as best, as a shallow form of authenticity, which further divides and breaks us into atomised individuals.

　　Our online personae function like shades in a Foucauldian hellscape. We attempt to shape and mould our behaviour towards the crowd, as we manipulate each other for the next “like,” “love,” or “share,” drawing in engagement as we can. This locks in features of demagoguery on a more micro-level as a structural feature of our political lives. We need not look to any singular figure; our own behaviour shows us where the misdirected quest for authenticity can lead. This is not the society that Charles Taylor was hoping to cultivate.

　　The relationship between people and leaders in this environment becomes ever more strained. We see the rifts, but far from leading us towards something more“authentic,” our alarm pushes us further inside our own bubbles. We mask ourselves online in an attempt to go with the crowd’s supposed wisdom, yet our relationship with the online community teeters between honesty and dishonesty as we struggle to see real values behind their mutated virtual forms.

　　It may be tempting to give up on authenticity. It appears to us as a poisoned chalice—a glorious prize with a terrible cost. But in a very real sense, this would be giving up on both ourselves and our communities. Instead, we should resist the allure of those who promise to bring us salvation through politics.

　　The paradox of authenticity lures us in and creates a hunger for more. We want our politicians to be one of us—to mirror us and reflect ourselves. Yet, this disposition also leads us to craven forms of politics that erode communal values, making authenticity even harder to find. In the era of individualism and choice, it is easy to misdiagnose these features of ourselves as genuine authenticity. Instead, we must reject the easy solutions and tread the more difficult path. We must put down our phones, recognise our communities, and begin to engage more vigorously, honestly, and seriously if we want to cultivate genuine authenticity. Our democracies, even if they are driven and run by elites, remain bounded by bottom-up demands for our leaders to at least appear that they reflect us. There is hope that we can eventually find our way to true authenticity if we reject the temptations of technology, easy promises, and manicured political leaders.