Pablo Zevallos is a senior and the student body president at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. You can reach him at @PabloZevallos.

Wearing a Hillary Clinton T-shirt around campus counts as being provocative these days. My classmates approach me and ask me if I’m a Hillary supporter. After I confirm the obvious, I ask them if they, too, support Clinton. Seemingly without fail, they shake their heads politely, and, with a self-satisfied smile, say, “I’m for Bernie.” When I ask why, I almost always get back some variant of, “He’s authentic.”

The conversation suddenly feels stale.


This phenomenon is far from unique to Davidson College, the small liberal arts college in a Charlotte, North Carolina, suburb where I am a senior. Bernie Sanders has become the grass-roots hero of millennial liberals across America. They have descended upon his rallies. They have formed an online army for him. In last week’s Iowa caucuses, entrance polling showed voters ages 18 to 29 backed Sanders over Clinton by more than 70 points. Last Tuesday in New Hampshire, exit polling showed Sanders ahead by 75 points in the same age group. The figures are so staggering that one exit polling organization said early in the night that Sanders “is seeing Kim Jong Un levels of support among millennials.” For a candidate who started the race polling in the high single digits, #FeeltheBern has spread like wildfire.

There are certainly thoughtful reasons for people my age to support Sanders. You may call yourself a democratic socialist, or you may disagree with Clinton’s voting record. Among the weakest reasons we have to support Sanders, however, is this breathy assertion that he is “authentic.” My generation is, in fact, remarkably inauthentic. Who are we as we curate our LinkedIn profiles and Instagram our yoga-on-the-beach photos, to be demanding that quality from our candidates?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “the usual sense” in which the word “authentic” is used in modern English means “genuine; not feigned or false.” Apparently, millennials, similarly to prior generations of youth dating to the 1960s, are particularly concerned with authenticity. A December poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that authenticity ranked as the third most-valued leadership trait among millennial voters, behind integrity and level-headedness.

But any notion that we are a generation that actually exhibits this “authenticity” we claim to prize is laughable. Never has a generation lived so publicly—or been so deluded about its own ways. Just look at our social media profiles, where we create and manicure our own brands for display to others. There are listicles and even classes that exist to help anyone cultivate their brand, which can be found among the 13 million hits for searching “cultivate brand” on Google. Exercising this degree of control over what we post may well yield benefits, but it is not authentic.

As important as what we share is what we choose not to share. One recent survey found that the top two ways in which millennials' use of social media has changed are to pay more attention to privacy settings and to remove embarrassing information or photos. There are practical reasons for this behavior: it’s probably best if a photo of an 18-year-old holding a red solo cup doesn’t turn up in an employer’s background search. It feels good to present a perfect life on social media. But, the perfect life is not real life.

We say we like authenticity, but sometimes we shun those who display it. One study shows that more than half of people surveyed have unfriended someone on social media because of his or her online posting behavior, giving reasons such as frequent or unimportant posts, polarizing posts, inappropriate posts and everyday life posts. This isn’t just unfriending because people were offended by someone else’s highly filtered brunch photos: Another study shows that hard-core liberals are the most likely to have unfriended someone—both on social media and in real life—because of opposing political beliefs. Again, there are practical reasons to cut undesirable content from our social media feeds. But it is still hypocritical to expect authenticity from others and recoil when we see it in practice.

To add to the absurdity: In our obsessive quest for “authenticity” we have settled on Bernie Sanders, who is no more forthright a politician than the others in the field. He might break the mold with his rumpled suits, uncombed hair and socialist ideology, but the basic tenets of his record and message do not survive scrutiny of the authenticity he supposedly possesses.

There is the time he admitted that he would have changed his position on a gun law had he represented his native Brooklyn instead of Vermont. And he supposedly supports a requirement that any new government spending be offset by new revenue or spending cuts, yet a nonpartisan analysis of Sanders’ single-payer health care proposal reveals that, over the course of 10 years, it raises $3 trillion to $14 trillion less in revenue than the cost of the program.

What about his proclamation of a “political revolution”? The phrase is catchy and might feel good to voters, but he conveniently leaves out of his stump speeches how he is going to create and sustain a hyper-liberal Democratic majority in both houses out of thin air—especially as liberal-leaning millennials disproportionately sit out midterm elections. A promise rooted in delusion is a dishonest rendering of what a Sanders presidency would be.

Few millennials—or observers of the campaign, whether in the media or in the voting public—have raised these questions about Sanders’ authenticity. But maybe the bigger issue is: Why do we care about authenticity so much? Might we be self-conscious and insecure about our own shortcomings in that area? Pursuing this line of thought further only leads to conjecture, but we must reflect on why authenticity matters more than other basic qualities of leadership, such as a candidate’s values, vision, experience and ability to execute what he or she sets out to do. Until we think more critically about the impact of our choices, we’ll continue to fall in love with second-rate political leaders who will let us down in their hopeless politics of “what can we do for you?” instead of an uplifting politics driven by what we can do together.

This mutual setting of unrealistic expectations—of the candidate by the voter and of the political system by the candidate—may feel good to all involved now, coming off a Sanders win in New Hampshire, but it is a surefire way to erode trust in the political process in the long run, and that’s not something we need more of. Fellow millennial liberals, we owe it to ourselves to take off our rose-colored glasses and examine the demonstrated leadership qualities and policy preferences of the Democratic candidates. Only then can we have an honest conversation about who should be our party’s nominee.