John Fetterman is a slob. The Democratic Senate candidate for Pennsylvania has been turning up at campaign stops throughout this election season usually clad in a ratty hoodie, sneakers without socks, and basketball shorts. I’m not even convinced that he is wearing any underwear. I know that it isn’t a nice thing to say, especially since I don’t actually strongly dislike Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, and I far prefer him to his Republican opponent, the somewhat-sleazy celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, whose principal accomplishment seems to be pushing diet pills on TV. But someone has to say it: Fetterman is a slob.
(You’re thinking: “God, Friedman, are you that much of a classist?” Bear with me.)
His slovenliness speaks volumes about how he is approaching this election, how he is hoping to connect with his electorate, and how the liberal aristocrats of the Democratic Party, like their Pennsylvania Senate candidate, have fetishized the quasi-mythical “white working class voters” whom, they believe, have not made a positive and explicit choice to embrace redhat racism, and can be coaxed back to party of FDR and JFK.
However any of us choose to fetishize “the working class” (and it is, to be sure, the biggest fetish object in American politics) it bears noting that Fetterman is a wealthy Ivy Leaguer from a privileged background, and not some guy loading coke into the blast furnace at Bethlehem Steel. Even given Americans’ inability to think clearly about class, there is no definition of “working class” that can accommodate Fetterman. So, it is worth asking why this man who was, after all, “to the manor born,” insists on dressing this way when he appears in public?
I am reminded of my late mother telling me that “how we dress expresses the respect that we have for others, for our work, and for school,” as she straightened the knot on the tie I was wearing that day for a grade-school public speaking contest. It makes sense; the guy who turns up for a date in a dirty T-shirt and ratty flip-flops is broadcasting exactly how much he values his companion, and the college professor in sweatpants makes no doubt how they feel about their students. I noticed, over years of teaching, that white students from privileged backgrounds would turn up to morning classes in their pajamas, while the BIPOC kids from the poor neighborhoods of Chicago or Newark would arrive impeccably dressed. The latter took learning seriously, they were overburdened with student loans, and they were often the first members of their families to attend college; the former could take it or leave it.
It is, of course, possible that Fetterman simply likes being comfy and is disinclined to compromise his comfort for anyone. If this is the case, he is saying that his personal comfort takes priority over all other considerations, including showing respect for his office, his constituents, and potential voters. This is entirely consistent with the prevailing American masculinist culture of narcissism, of course, which insists that compromising anything for anyone is an intolerable trespass on masculine autonomy, and such compromise is a show of weakness. However, such an attitude would seem ominous indeed for a public servant whose job is to, you know, serve the public and to put the interests of the res publica ahead of his own.
It seems we have been down that road before.
More charitable commentators have noted that Fetterman’s sartorial choices are calculated to resonate with the white working class voters whose votes he, and every other moderate-to-liberal Democrat, believes he needs to win the election. This does, indeed, appear to be a central part of his strategy in his campaign against the slick Dr. Oz. Most notably, Fetterman made hay – not to mention over $1 million in campaign contributions – over his opponent’s disingenuous video showing him shopping for crudités at a supermarket he mistakenly called “Wegner’s.”
The everyman with his vegetables
This left most observers wondering whether the TV Doctor Feelgood has ever even been in a supermarket before – you know, like normal people – let alone a Wegman’s or a Redner’s. Fetterman turned up the heat to highlight both Oz’s tenuous connections to Pennsylvania and his aristocratic pretensions. “In PA we call this a… veggie tray,” Fetterman tweeted, just like a normal, working-class guy.
Indeed, the candidate’s slovenliness is a deliberate costuming choice to dress just like a normal, working-class guy. In effect, it is a form of cosplay, a cynical theatrical display in which he believes that membership in the proletariat is merely a matter of choosing the right costume. This is a variation on a time-honored belief among liberals, and a strategy that the Democrats have deployed many times in their efforts to appeal to minoritized and marginalized voters. Fetterman’s hoodie evokes the Kente cloths infamously worn by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic House caucus two years ago, not to mention Marie Antoinette’s French milkmaid dress and apron.
It is no more egregious than Oz’s photo-op where was holding a shovel with a road worker… With the $70,000 GMC Yukon that he was driving back to his suburban New Jersey home conspicuously in the background. On the other hand, it is no less egregious, either. And at least Oz has not made the everyman-cosplay shtick the constant focus of his public persona. But the truth is that there really is no way that he could make that even remotely credible.
Heading back to Jersey
Fetterman’s proletarian costume theater is entirely consistent with the bourgeois liberalism that pervades the Democratic Party. It suggests, indeed it declares, that class, racial, gender, ethnic, and community identity is a matter of costume, which can be acquired – bought on Amazon.com, for example – and donned, rather than a matter of lived experience. I can’t help but recall an affluent, white, bourgeois intellectual living in a gentrified luxury apartment complex in Harlem who publicly announced in 2018 that he was “resigning from the white race.” He evidently believed that race is simply a costume that one puts on, or takes off, and that he need only put aside his white (and bourgeois, and male) privilege so as to no longer bear its burden.
It doesn’t work that way, and the intellectual’s declaration was, perversely enough, an instantiation of that privilege, just as Rachel Dolezal’s assumption of an African American, and Jessica Krug’s of a LatinX persona was an instantiation of their white privilege. Their appropriations denied the lived reality of African American and LatinX people who cannot simply “resign” from their experiences of social and cultural oppression. After kneeling for the cameras in the Capitol Rotunda, Speaker Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic caucus, could tuck their Kente cloths in their desk drawers for next time, secure in the knowledge that, for most of them, their ancestors were not kidnapped from West Africa, brutalized, sold into slavery, and raped for a few centuries, and that most of them never had to experience the socio-economic and cultural reality of that legacy.
So, the appropriation of a “working-class” persona by the wealthy, Harvard-educated Fetterman, who has never worked on an assembly line or driven a long-haul truck, or drywalled a luxury condo in sub-zero temperatures in Harrisburg, or Trexlertown, or Bethlehem PA, says something. It says, among a great many other things, that dressing like a “worker” is a way to commune with “the working class.” It suggests that the experience of loading coke into the blast furnace at Bethlehem steel, or unemployment, or opioid addiction, or the loss of hope, is a superficial matter that can be understood merely by dressing the part.
This is how Fetterman believes “the working class” dresses, despite the evidence right before his eyes of casually-but-appropriately dressed working class people (you know, wearing pants, and socks, and everything) at his campaign events. Moreover, any working person who turned up for work dressed in a hoodie and basketball shorts would be summarily fired. This is not the way that working people dress – it is the way a wealthy, Harvard MBA might imagine how working people dress.
The fact is that Fetterman’s costume can be better described as “leisure wear.” It is doubtless what the Senate candidate himself wears when he is unwinding with a beer and a bowl of popcorn in front of his 80-inch OLED TV, and it is also almost certainly what many working people wear when they come home from work, take off their coveralls, their work uniform, or their protective gear, kick their steel-toed boots or black Reebok uniform sneakers into the corner, and settle down for dinner and a little Netflix.
Fetterman’s costume is thus not “working class” attire – what you wear when you are doing productive labor – but what you wear in your social-economic function as a consumer, when you’re watching Netflix, posting on social media, or online-window shopping for unattainable luxuries. It is the down-market version of Hugh Hefner’s pajamas, and Fetterman’s appearance in public, in his place of work (he is, after all, a politician) is a declaration of his white, bourgeois, male privilege – “I don’t have to ‘dress for work’ like all you poor suckers’” – and that the social function of “the working class,” as he imagines it, is as consumers, and not producers.
The first point is particularly germane. Could you, for example, imagine an African American political candidate appearing at a campaign event in a ratty hoodie, dirty basketball shorts, and no socks? Have we forgotten the shitstorm when Barrack Obama had the temerity to wear a (seasonally-appropriate and stylish) tan suit eight years ago? What would happen if Alexandria Ocasio Cortez turned up at a public function in torn jeans and a crop-top?
It is Fetterman’s privilege to dress like a slob, and defending his slovenliness is a defense of privilege. While he would certainly make a better Senator than Mehmet Oz, and I hope he wins, his theatrical, political cosplay oozes contempt, rather than respect, for working people, ignorance of the realities of class and economic oppression in America, and deep disrespect for the political process in which he is participating. Is this the best that we can do?