There’s no reason that competence and authenticity should be odds with one another. Yet many of the ways that we read authenticity—Bernie Sanders’ oversized suits, per say, or Trump’s disregard for political correctness—do defy the codes through which we usually measure a candidate’s fitness for office.
You’re in America, you’re busy, you don’t have time to keep up with politics all over the world. There are a lot of parties, a lot of elections. Who can follow all of them?
After being disinvited from a panel on campus about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Associate Professor Max Weiss wrote in The Daily Princetonian, “Princeton must remain a place where open debate and academic exchange is encouraged and allowed to flourish, even on the most controversial issues.” It would be a lot easier to take him at his word had he not just convened a panel on academic freedom the week before, to which he invited zero dissenting voices.
What separates Trump from his predecessors is his willingness, and the willingness of his supporters, to give up any pretense of subtly or slyness. Trump’s campaign, despite what the headlines say, is not unprecedented in this way. It has simply set at center stage the racial politics that Republicans have long trafficked in but preferred to dress in finer rhetorical disguises.
