John Alsop
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Several historians trace the idea in its modern form, really to Jimmy Carter's presidential candidacy in 1976.
And there are several reasons for that.
An important one, I think, was that it was the first presidential election after the Watergate scandal really blew up.
That was obviously an episode that dented Americans' trust in politicians' character and integrity and honesty, and so there was
more of an appetite to learn about the character of candidates.
It was also television by that point wasn't new, but had become a sort of ubiquitous medium and kind of allowed for that intimacy of getting to know someone or seeming to get to know someone.
And Carter sort of took advantage of that.
He had this, you know, these kind of ads that were almost cinema verite in the way that he was filmed just sort of at home, I think, doing normal things.
Presented himself as, you know, a man of the South, a man who, you know, got his hands dirty on his farm.
just a kind of normal person who was, yeah, who was an outsider to DC in this corrupt, broken system.
And I think it sort of went from there in terms of, yeah, in terms of the signifiers we were talking about earlier specifically.
Post-Carter, I think you see over decades this kind of same politics of trying to present yourself as this kind of outsider who speaks their mind and is an honest, reliable person who is kind of legibly all-American, even if they were very much insiders.
Or in the case of someone like George W. Bush, the scion of a kind of Yankee...
elites and an oil dynasty, they would try and appropriate those codes for themselves, right?
Just a regular guy who sort of talks in a normal way and is relatable.
But I think people got sick of or started to perceive or become more aware of the superficiality and fakeness of that.
And I think Trump was kind of both the logical endpoint of that style of politics, but had also kind of smashed it to smithereens, as he has done with so many other things.
you could kind of read him as incredibly authentic, someone who is unconstrained, completely disinhibited, always seemingly speaks his mind, even when it's to his political detriment or the cost of things that people will say about him in polite society, and certainly a complete outsider to normal political structures.