“What you see is what you get”: How the Bid for Authenticity From Far-Right Populists Undermines Representation Virtues

In The Good Representative, Suzanne Dovi (2006) argued that good democratic representatives must manifest three virtues: they must be fair-minded, build critical trust, and be good gatekeepers. However, a recent series of electoral come backs and the political entrenchment of public figures known to be lying demagogues, anti-pluralists, and fear mongers suggests that growing sets in the populace of consolidated democracies have little to no concern to Dovi’s (Ibid.) call to evaluate would-be representatives based on established democratic standards. To understand why this is the case, scholars have paid closer attention to the ontological effects produced by populist performances, and the ways in which populists’ mobilisation of grievances, identities, and antagonisms seeks to position their audiences in a particular relationship to reality that makes them willing to condone, justify and whitewash flagrant transgressions of democratic norms (e.g., Hahl et al. 2018; Severs and Meier forthcoming). In this paper, we turn our attention to the authenticity performances (cf. Moffitt 2016; Enli 2024) of far-right populists, and how their appeals to be “true to themselves” affords them greater leeway to stray from generally accepted standards of political humility, integrity, temperance, justice, accountability, collaboration, and mutual respect (Crossan et al. 2015). The “what you see is what you get” dictum, mobilised through their discourse and bodily performances, shifts responsibility for their transgressive behaviour (e.g., lying, promise breaking, intimidation and ridicule of opponents) to their audiences, who are made complicit (cf. Aiolfi 2024). We discuss a select set of populist performances to demonstrate and elucidate how far-right populists’ mobilisation, presentation, styling, and otherwise use of the body is an accessory to their discourse and undergirds the legitimacy of their norm transgressive behaviour. In our discussion, we consider and contrast toxic masculine styles (e.g., US president Donald Trump) with respectability performances (e.g., Giorgia Meloni, and Marine Le Pen, whose clothing choices earned her the label “Madame Tout le Monde”) (Kedrowski et al. 2024).