The Authenticity Drought

Everything is fake. What does it take to connect with real people and have real, human experiences?

I am not a big podcast person, but my social media algorithm, in all its wisdom, did manage refer me to a compelling clip from Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show. His guests were OG podcast bros Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett, the Pod Save America guys who made their bones in the Obama ‘08 campaign and administration.

About 36 minutes in, Jon — and Jon and Jon — talk about something they believe is greatly lacking in Democratic politics: authenticity. I completely agree. Somewhere along the way, Democrats have forgotten how to just say what they think. Lovett does a very nice job of breaking this problem down:

“And so all these Democrats that have now kind of, over many years, stopped asking themselves what do I think and instead said what am I supposed to say right now to get through this five minute interview, are kind of unprepared and no longer comfortable in a setting where they're going to talk to somebody for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour, where they have the next sentence, right?

“They don't even feel comfortable enough with their own kind of worldview, deeper kind of ideological motivations to just shoot the shit about politics. …[T]here are more and more Democrats who can do it.

“So what happens is instead of saying I'm going to go out and just say what I think. And if I'm the right person for this moment, that's how we'll find out. They think I must be the right person for this moment.

“What must I say to be the right person for this moment?”

Look, that’s a big quote, I get it. But it nearly perfectly encapsulates the political problem Democrat’s face today.

The word to describe that phenomenon Lovett is talking about? Authenticity. Until Democrats can find politicians who aren’t afraid to say what they really think, what they really believe — even if it’s unpopular — then they’re going to keep losing elections across the board.

Of course, the authenticity drought extends beyond politics. Just look at the onset of Artificial Intelligence. AI. I have yet to see an AI creation I thought was remarkable, beautiful, funny, compelling, or, in any meaningful way, creative.

Someone showed me a ten or fifteen second video the other day. It was relatively harmless, a girl holding a cat with a simple voice over. They loved it, flipped their lid over it. To me, though, the movements looked forced, strange, unnatural. The voice sounded mechanical and, well, inauthentic. I was unimpressed.

And when it comes to AI, you don’t want to spend too much time thinking about the larger fallout. There are the environmental impacts that even advocates of AI admit is a problem.

Beyond electricity demands, a great deal of water is needed to cool the hardware used for training, deploying, and fine-tuning generative AI models, which can strain municipal water supplies and disrupt local ecosystems. The increasing number of generative AI applications has also spurred demand for high-performance computing hardware, adding indirect environmental impacts from its manufacture and transport.

Every time I see something like the AI generated video of the girl holding the cat with a voice over, I think about what that means in terms of jobs. I know people who make TV shows, commercials, and movies. These are real people with real jobs. When someone plugs in some parameters to an AI machine to make a video, that’s a video that real people don’t get to make.

This isn’t just me whining about my friends. The World Economic Forum is predicting that AI will have a massive impact on not just entry-level jobs, but as much as 60% of every job. Goldman Sachs says that 60% of jobs could be fully automated in just twenty years (they didn’t mention how many of those jobs were actually Goldman Sachs job).

Sure, I get that generative AI will also create some jobs. That’s how technology works. And I know there’s not stopping this train now. I’m just not sure it had to be this way. Especially with something so inherently fake.

There’s a solution to the AI problem. Well. Not a solution, really, but something of a counter. It’s the same solution for the Democrats: create things that are authentic. Be with real voters, experience real moments. And if they’re captured for social media, great. But the experience drives the content, not the other way around.

One of the reasons voters didn’t support Kamala Harris is that they felt she was inauthentic. She appeared disconnected from them, from their problems, from what they were seeing day to day in their lives. There weren’t a lot of campaign moments were the Vice President was with everyday Americans, talking about what mattered to them.

Back in 1996, a journalist named Joe Klein wrote a New York Times bestselling book — under the name Anonymous — called Primary Colors. Though it was a work of fiction, about a governor of a small southern state who uses his innate charm and authentic connection to everyday Americans to ascend to the presidency (albeit with some genuine, nearly fatal political flaws), it reflected quite closely the Clinton/Gore campaign of 1992.

They made a movie out of it in 1998 — with a genuinely excellent cast, including John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Kathy Bates, Billy Bob Thornton, Adrian Lester, and Maura Teirney. (And by they, I mean actual filmmakers, not AI.)

There’s a scene in the movie that sticks with me. The team of the nascent campaign is trying to convince the Adrian Lester character to join the campaign as the campaign manager. They take him to an event in New York City to meet “Governor Stanton” (really just Travolta doing his best Clinton impression, which is pretty good). The Governor is led to a room with adult literacy students (by a scene-stealing Allison Janney), where he listens with genuine, authentic emotion as the students tell their stories. Lester’s character is taken aback that there is a candidate for President of the United States who actually cares for everyday Americans, who has feelings for their experiences, and who can relate to those experiences. (Sure, the next scene undercuts that message. But only to a degree. The Stanton character does have empathy for real people, and that’s what drives him to success.)

Is this my roundabout way of saying Democrats need another Bill Clinton? Not exactly. I think there are politicians with that empathy chip embedded in them, with the ability to relate to everyday Americans. AOC comes to mind. Bernie Sanders has been authentically talking about the problems of middle-class and lower-class Americans for decades, now (the reason he did so well in his 2016 presidential campaign). Sherrod Brown, the former U.S. Senator who announced he’s running again in 2026 for the Senate, is another who comes to mind. Jon Tester — another “Jon” as well as the former Senator from Montana — is yet another. The man was a U.S. Senator and a working farmer. He lost fingers in a combine, if you needed a physical certificate of authenticity.

One last name? Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who died more than twenty years ago in a plane crash. He had a quote I liked, and I think it is applicable to our situation today. It is about politics, but it could be carried beyond:

Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.

What we hope for…

What we dare to imagine…

Whether it’s your politics or your creative cat videos, don’t outsource your hope. Don’t outsource what you dare to imagine. Too much is at stake.