In Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness (2018), Kennedy defines authentocracy as ‘a laundered, centrist populism that seeks to wield power with reference to an authenticity that is always “just over there”’. It fetishises an imagined provincial English working class that is socially conservative, poorly educated, allergic to Bohemian lifestyles, and far too preoccupied by the grind of work to concern itself with anything that smacks of metropolitan liberalism. ‘Imputation’, Kennedy continues, ‘is central to [authentocracy’s] workings: it’s rarely the commentator themselves that wants less immigration, or, let’s face it, more racism, but someone more allegedly authentic who is, we’re told, not being given the opportunity to speak for themselves.’ The practitioner of authentocratic imputation will claim to be acting as a conduit through which the silent majority can finally speak, but in practice this amounts to the laundering of ideas, a way to frame one’s unsavoury beliefs as those of authentic others, who are a population of innocent ordinaries that is thought to be beyond serious scrutiny.
Rebecca Jane Morgan, Gender Heretics: Evangelicals, Feminists, and the Alliance against Trans Liberation
