George Santos: Sociopath, the new norm, or both?

Let us welcome the new Congressman from Long Island, New York’s 3rd congressional district, George Santos!

At least, we think that’s his name. He grew up in a basement apartment in Queens, the son of immigrants. At least, we think he might have. 

It turns out that everything we know about George Santos, the recently elected and more-recently sworn in member of the House of Representatives, is a lie.

He went to Baruch College and briefly attended NYU. He worked for Citibank and Goldman Sachs. He managed a family office portfolio of real estate (a “family office” is a private company that super rich folks have for themselves to manage their own money). None of this is true.

Members of his campaign posed as executives from the companies he supposedly worked at to act as references for him. It was recently revealed that a Santos campaign staffer, Sam Miele, posed as Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff while soliciting donations from wealthy donors.

There are so many lies and false representations by and about George Santos, it’s hard to imagine that he was able to get away with it for the length of his campaign.

When the news of his fabrications and lies – and outstanding criminal warrant in Brazil – became national, Mr. Santos deflected with the “everyone embellishes their resume”. So, is the guy a straight up sociopath, or what?

I’m not a trained mental health professional, and any good one wouldn’t attempt a diagnosis from afar. But I’ve spent many years working in media and being a student of its uses and abuses. George Santos may or may not be a sociopath, but what he is for sure is a conman. Some conmen use finance, some use real estate, some use card tables along Times Square. George Santos used the game of politics to separate fools from their money while at the same time securing himself a seat as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who now earns 174k a year. Stripped to its underwear, this is a case of a hard-up grifter who hit upon the idea of scamming Republicans to get out of debt and fill his pockets. His chosen field of operation may be unusual, but George Santos is otherwise a conman along the lines of Anna Delvey (Sorokin) or Frank Abagnale (Catch Me If Can). The real story here is not that there’s now a liar in congress (the rotunda would be a stark, echoey cavern if there weren’t any). The real story is that such a blatant fraudster would spread obvious falsehoods at a time when every nook and cranny of human experience is documented and chose to take this path through the Republican party.

Back in the Aughts, not long after the debut of YouTube, I’d once wondered if an infinitely Googleable universe would lead to having politicians who were devoid of human foibles, nary a fault or bad act to be recorded in the infinity of the Internet’s memory later to be subject to public scrutiny. Or would it produce politicians so devious that their human foibles never come to light? What I hadn’t considered was a third way, the Trumpian way: politicians who don’t give a rat’s ass about their actions, their lies, or anything else. That if fame and fortune are your only real goals and your chosen path is politics, shame is for suckers, and it doesn’t matter what you say or do or what others think. Fame begets riches begets more fame begets power, ad infinitum. 

George Santos is the latest evolution of the performance politician, whose objective is not governance and whose mission is not civic engagement through the medium of the state. It is fame and the riches fame brings that in turn brings more fame and more revenue and, therefore, power. Power not to be used to any end other than just to be wielded to yield more fame. It’s the logical outcome of a media industrial complex married to a political industrial complex where the news cycle is the election cycle is the earnings cycle and back around again. Santos merely drafted behind the Mac Truck of the Marjorie Taylor Greens and the Lauren Boeberts and the Matt Gaetzs without needing to resort to their form of outrageousness. He created an identity that checked as many DEI boxes as possible – gay, immigrant stock, Jewish – and put it all in the most incongruent of packages -- Republican – to raise money and get elected despite being from a blue state.

You might think, if the Republican constituents had known what the NY Times revealed in their December 19 exposé, surely the voters would have rejected him? It can’t be as bad as nobody cares about the truth, or that misrepresentation on the Santos scale can happen without consequences. Can it? In the summer of 2022, looking for a Republican candidate to endorse, a small local paper, The North Shore Leader, discovered many of the inconsistencies later called out by the NY Times piece and wrote about them. The paper couldn’t in good faith endorse Santos. He won by 8 points, anyway. 

Because vote counts are increasingly indicative of team affinity and not candidate quality or even policy alignment (not that most voters vote based on a candidate’s policy positions, anyway). If someone represents the team you belong to, that’s all that matters. If it’s not person over party, it’s party over country; self over it all, including truth. 

Santos belongs to a generation that outsourced their identity to the "network," nothing more than a reticulated reflection of likes, shares, and emoji, all vaporous and transient. Santos is in some ways a perfect avatar of the zeitgeist, an empty shell to be filled with whatever it last encountered, whose existence is only affirmed by its last jolt of recognition from the network. An agent untethered from a cohesive social or cultural foundation consisting of others, because there are no "others," just a collection of other empty avatars who themselves seem untethered from any mores that would serve as a hedge against compassionless self-interest. George Santos is the new norm. And a sociopath.