One of their key findings is that the cooptation happened decades before Trump, when corporations tempted the hippie generation to sell-out its values. WWII and the Cold War forced Americans to adopt the British attitude of “keeping a stiff upper lip,” of repressing their inner self for the sake of appearances. The implicit advice was to resist showing fear of the enemy or doubt about the prevailing social systems; instead, you were to obey the proffered conventions blindly to the point of attempting to escape a nuclear bomb blast by hiding under a desk, as the government instructed. After the repression of the “conservative” 1950s came the let-it-all-hang-out attitude and the rocking-and-rolling of the 1960s, which ended in tears as the hippies’ socialist utopia failed to materialize. Minorities won some civil rights, the Vietnam War eventually ended, and Nixon left in disgrace, but the dark side of hippie culture was apparent from the disaster at the Altamont Music Festival and from the cult of Charles Manson. Still, the wave of psychedelic drug use popularized an ideal of personal authenticity, since the drugs rebooted the psyche and encouraged skepticism towards the conventional roles that had to be occupied by your persona. After the leftist takedown of “the System” or “the Man,” there would be no need to split your personality into your private and public selves.

By the 1980s, corporations had absorbed that subculture of resistance. Advertisements exploited the value placed on finding your true self, by manufacturing interest in unnecessary products that were vaguely associated with your fundamental desires. Politicians learned they could appear “authentic” by acting as though they weren’t upper-class power elites. By rolling up their sleeves at a campaign speech or by organizing a photo op of them sitting in a diner eating a slice of pizza, politicians could impress the gullible, narcissistic, slow-witted and uninformed masses, by mastering the use of certain symbols. Personal authenticity became a shallow performance and thus a paradox.

After decades of neoliberalism, in which both American political parties worked together to hollow-out the middle class and sustain the plutocracy that prevailed in spite of the myths of American democracy and upward mobility, conditions were met for the rise of a populist demagogue in the US. (Neoliberalism is roughly the view that economical ways of thinking—particularly those of “free market” balderdash which rationalize plutocracy—should invade and govern all areas of life.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton vainly attempted to appear authentic by revealing sides of her inner self to the public, but became infamous instead for seeming all the more phony and robotic. In reality, she was demonstrating the good manners of steering clear of the multitudes she rightly despised. Much of this was the same public that had cheered on the Republicans under Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, as they tarnished Bill Clinton’s reputation by persecuting him for his sex life, like so many medieval inquisitors, and that had gone on in 2016 to nominate the anti-American troglodyte, Donald Trump. Thus, she seemed to think it best to avoid appearing mediocre by playing the role of the “authentic” candidate, since many average Americans were evidently responsible for those appalling outcomes. To feign that she was a regular nobody, after all, would have been akin to turning to the dark side of the Force, from her perspective at least. Instead, the neoliberal is a consummate technocrat and elitist. Hillary Clinton, then, was staying true to herself by denigrating or ignoring the majority of Americans for being “a basket of deplorables,” as she said, or for being hypocritical in not voting enough or in pretending to have high standards while simultaneously helping to suck the planet dry through overconsumption.