The slick, polished career politician that you see on TV is a product of more than just “hard work”. They’ve been acculturated to an identity that ordinary people can’t really reproduce because it is made up of mannerisms, clothing cues and speech patterns guarded by ruling class educational institutions and passed through powerful families. You know, just like the aristocracies of Old Europe.
There is a reason grassroots candidates look “unprofessional” next to them, even when they put on suits and ties; and there is a reason the temptation is so great for third parties to nominate neoliberals like Bill Weld — an Ivy League good ol’ boy with old family money and ruling class connections that allow him access to media spaces where our grassroots personalities would appear jarring — unfortunately, that reason is not individual liberty. It is a carefully rigged social construct that allows the interests of the global ruling elite to remain dominant, continuously place themselves at the center of discourse and talk over the rest of us.
In this way, respectability norms are a method of control designed to limit political access to people with conforming presentation and financial means. By grooming the general public to perceive a specific presentation type as “viable”, all other identities are sidelined and silenced.
The answer is obvious: we must shift the Overton Window around respectability so far to the popular culture and fashion end of the scale that ordinary candidates in affordable clothing are within it. Only when authentic grassroots identities can stand forward for offices and the people in the slick polished suits are the ones who look out of place will the reality of a citizen’s legislature by and for the people become a reality.
