Scams and Slippery Slopes

I’ve always believed that part of education — especially higher education — is learning to ask better questions about complex topics, knowing you might not have the right answers. In my graduate seminars, one of my favorite ways of prompting students to pursue deeper lines of inquiry is by asking this question: If we take off the table that something is racist, sexist or classist, what else can we say about it?

Society is embedded with power imbalances and inequalities. Of course there are gender disparities and discrimination, of course there is a racial hierarchy and a racial order. But if we set that aside, what more can we say about a text, about a person, about a moment?

I was thinking about this when reading a “rare interview” with Politico this week, in which Kyrsten Sinema weighed in on writing about her clothes, including our three-part discussion of her sartorial presentation as a form of political speech:

The idea that women dress only for themselves is a truism in modern feminism, one that we could dispute or qualify. But let’s set that aside, for now, and stipulate that she’s right, generally speaking.

It still remains that she is a politician. And part of the job of politicians is to court attention and manage their image. As I have argued, since presentation and style are part of the politician’s tool kit, the question for us is whether we are willing to allow this kind of political communication to go unexamined and without critique.

Here, it’s important to consider the context when setting the bounds of appropriate discourse. The details of the Democrats’ social spending bill, Build Back Better, are in flux. But it has funds for Pell Grant increases, affordable child care, paid family leave and expanded health care coverage. It contains policy to slow climate change and mitigate its effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that lives hang in the balance with the fate of the bill.

And Sinema has placed herself at the center of this political drama. So it matters how she marshals her power. It also matters how she manages attention.

Sinema largely allows her performance to speak for her. She avoids interviews, and has been quite guarded about what she wants out of these negotiations. As Politico writes, “On policy, the first-term senator has remained almost completely quiet during breakneck negotiations to finish Biden’s agenda.”

That silence puts a curtain between a powerful political actor and the public, who have a lot on the line. It also means it is more than fair to discuss and critique the political rhetoric coded in her performance, and that includes what she is wearing. Politicians should not be allowed to have a one-way dialogue with the American public. One-way political communication is a very slippery slope to a closed political process — one that trades real accountability for a process that appears transparent only because we can see the moving images on our screens.

We get to talk back. And we should.

Speaking of talking back, many of you wrote in and said we should be keeping our eye on what matters. A pair of reports, both from this month, got my attention. I think they point to an important trend.

First, Politico reported that Sinema has received donations from the multilevel marketing industry:

These are not enormous sums of money, but it is notable for a few reasons. As Politico notes, it’s relatively uncommon for some of these companies to get involved in national politics at all. And Sinema has had a friendly relationship with the Direct Sellers Association, which represents 130 multilevel marketing companies, including Amway and Herbalife.

This alliance is unusual for a Democratic senator given her party’s longtime alliance with unions and labor more generally. In multilevel marketing structures, the independent contractors who sell the product are paid commissions from their own sales of the product, but they also can receive income based on the sales or purchases of the sellers they have recruited. Sinema is the one of only three Democratic senators who do not co-sponsor the PRO Act, which would allow the “independent contractors” to unionize, as well as making it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors at all.

Second, Dr. Mehmet Oz is reported to be considering running for Senate in Pennsylvania, to fill the seat being vacated by Pat Toomey. Through a very convoluted process of media culture that is possible only in the celebrity-obsessed American culture, Dr. Oz has become one of the most visible and wealthy endorsers of a host of scientifically questionable vitamins, herbal remedies and miracle cures.

These news items brought to mind the way these kinds of businesses — on the border of illegality and not quite respectable — have gone mainstream in America. Donald Trump is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. Among other things, he happened to be the founder and namesake of one of the most blatantly fraudulent for-profit school apparatuses that I have ever seen: Trump University, which National Review called a “de jure” scam.

Donald Trump’s election seems to have opened the door to us not even pretending anymore that these kinds of scams aren’t legitimate parts of our political and economic system, and even pathways to power.

Whenever I talk about multilevel marketing, people often make two suggestions of things to check out. One is a podcast called “The Dream” by Jane Marie. The other is a recent documentary about LuLaRoe, which sells leggings. Both of these tell stories about the mechanisms of multilevel marketers, how they work and why they work.

With the holiday coming up, I’m going to spend some time on your behalf listening to the “The Dream” as I travel around by car. And I’m going to watch the LuLaRoe documentary. I have questions about why scamming has become mainstreamed as a legitimate part of national politics, and what it says about culture. We’ll be talking about that soon. I’ll be off next week to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you the week after that.

Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.