Why are politicians so afraid of wearing ties?

Uruguayan President Jose Mujica

Here’s a prediction: within the next two decades politicians are going to stop wearing ties.

Richard Nixon was so fastidious about his dress that he wore a suit and tie every single day he was president, and every subsequent day as a former president, too. In the book Fraternity, when the author meets Nixon, he presses him on this point. “Like, even if you were all alone, in your house the whole day, with no chance whatsoever of coming into contact with another human being?” he asks (or something to that effect). And Nixon says “I would still wear a suit and tie.”

Nixon was raised in a time when everyone was expected look their role, however. Like the Pope, he probably figured there was never a moment in his life in which he was not embodying the office of president/ex-president, so it was his duty to constantly dress the part. But he was also raised in the aftermath of the Depression, a period when everyone obsessively tried to look as comfortably middle-class as possible, which is to say a sort of watered-down, affordable version of what they imagined higher class people looked like.

Today, in our gloriously non-judgmental age, we’re all very down on the very idea that there is a “respectable” way to look, let alone that such respectability should be defined by the moneyed class. We also much more cynical of all politicians, who we assume exclusively represent the interests of that same moneyed class.

The result: politicians are increasingly forced to dress as casually as possible, as often as possible, in order to alleviate such concerns. And since politicians seem to represent the last frontier of stylized formality in western society, the decline of the tie in their subculture is uniquely tragic.

At the moment, Latin America probably represents the global nadir of political tie-wearing. Jose Mujica was inaugurated as president of Uruguay a few weeks ago and didn’t even bother to wear a tie to that. Based on photos of previous public appearances, I can see that even getting him to wear a proper jacket is a huge deal. The presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, and Nicaragua make a point of never wearing ties, no matter how formal the occasion, and our old pals Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro wear them very rarely. Obviously the common thread of these guys is that they are all flamboyantly left-wing, and this have the most vested interest in eschewing any trappings of bourgeois sensibility in favor of ostentatious “I’m-one-of-you” populism.

It’s problematic because it represents a sort of legitimization and glorification of the permanent destitution of the lower-classes. Their needy state is celebrated and never judged, which in turn is necessary to breed the sort of perpetual dependency state socialist politicians desire. I mean, if the friggin’ president can’t be bothered to clean up and look respectable, than why should I?

It’s an unsettling symbol of a society that has abandoned even the pretense of genuine social mobility in favor of prolonged class warfare, a society that feels no need to pay homage to any ideal of middle class respectability. The starker the differences between the classes, the better, and promoting wildly different standards of dress is one of the best ways to speed this along.

Things aren’t as extreme in North America of course, but as our middle class declines the phenom is present all the same. Our politicians wear ties when they’re governing, but increasingly rarely when campaigning. The implication, once again, is that ties have become so foreign and alien to the destitute voting base that they are best avoided. They represent a level of sophistication that the proles neither understand, nor should even bother aspiring to understand. Just stay slobby, and rest confident that an equally slobby politician will be fighting to get you things. That’s democratic politics in the 21st Century.