In January of 2016, on the eve of his final State of the Union address, President Obama welcomed NBC’s Matt Lauer to the White House for one of those awkward walk-and-talk interviews that culminates with a manly handshake in the Oval Office. After a few warm-up questions, Lauer mentioned the GOP frontrunner. Wasn’t his stunning rise proof that Americans were more divided than ever?
“Talk to me if he wins,” Obama said. “But I feel confident that the overwhelming majority of Americans are looking for the kind of politics that does feed our hopes and not our fears.”
Lauer pressed on. “So when you stand and deliver that State of the Union address, in no part of your mind and brain can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering the State of the Union address?”
Obama sniggered. “Well, I can imagine it in a ‘Saturday Night’ skit.”
What’s most telling here is the direction Obama’s mind travels when asked to confront the possibility of Trump’s election: he goes to the world of parody—a place that is inherently unserious.
Here’s the crazy part: Obama kept doubling down. A few weeks before the election, he went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to perform a routine in which he read insulting tweets on his phone. The final one came as no surprise. “President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States! @realDonaldTrump.” Obama waited a beat before delivering his riposte: “Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president.” Then he held out his phone and let it fall, like a rapper dropping the mic.
To the tens of millions of citizens who saw this clip Obama was saying, quite explicitly: And it’s okay to laugh at Trump, because he’s never going to win.
Can we speculate as to the potential effect of this bit? Not to cable junkies or partisans, but to that much larger bloc of voters who had heard some bad things about Trump, who harbored an inchoate feeling of concern or mistrust, but who remained unsure as to whether, amid the many competing duties and distractions of a Tuesday in November, they would find time to cast a ballot? Can we assume some percentage of the roughly 103 million registered voters who chose not to cast a ballot might have been swayed by stories suggesting that doing so was meaningless? Let’s say that was true of just one percent of non-voters. That’s more than a million votes, in an election decided by 79,000 votes across three swing states.
To drill down a bit more: two million fewer African Americans turned out for Clinton than for Obama in 2012. In Michigan, she received 300,000 fewer votes than Obama and lost by 10,000. In Wisconsin, she received 230,000 fewer votes than Obama and lost by 22,000. Many factors contributed to these declines: Obama’s greater popularity, the Clinton campaign’s blunders, voter suppression efforts, and the ugly tenor of the campaign, which caused plenty of low-interest voters to tune out. But in a race decided by a margin that equates to .077 percent of the total non-voters, Obama’s public dismissal of Trump takes on a much darker cast.
If it seems like I’m piling on Obama here, I would ask you to think again about that Correspondents’ Dinner back in 2011, which Trump’s confidantes point to as the psychological trigger for his eventual run. The sitting president made a point of inviting a thin-skinned celebrity to this event for the express purpose of mocking him in front of DC’s power elite.
The unseriousness of our electorate starts at the top.
Neil Postman was wise to all this. Amusing Ourselves to Death offers a vision of the future so frighteningly specific as to foresee the president mugging on late-night television. Programs would arise, he predicted, that show “how television recreates and degrades our conceptions of news, political debate, religious thought, etc.” These would “take the form of parodies, along the lines of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python.”
That is the world we now inhabit, one in which televised comedians serve as our leading moralists. While the right reacts to the dysfunction of our civic institutions with delusions of persecution and corresponding spasms of sadism, the left indulges in clever sketches that convert our anguish into disposable laughs. These are the two dominant responses to the state of our union: America as a horror movie, basically, or a farce. Don’t bother looking for the nuanced drama about a liberal democracy struggling to maintain faith in the mechanisms of self-governance. That one doesn’t sell enough popcorn.
As host of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart was an astute cultural critic with impeccable timing, the courage to call out con artists, and the capacity to educate his audience without coming off as pedantic. Like Twain and Mencken before him, Stewart defended reason and factual accuracy in an age of hypocrisy and hype, and plied the dying art of critical thought. I watched his program, on and off, for several years.
I feel compelled to make these points because, by the time he left The Daily Show in 2015, he was widely regarded as a secular prophet who inspired an entire subgenre of satire, from The Colbert Report to Full Frontal with Samantha Bee to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And thus anyone who argues that Stewart might represent more troubling aspects of our age is written off as a self-righteous hater who doesn’t get that he’s just a comedian.
For the record, I get that he’s just a comedian. The question is why, in the decade leading up to the 2016 election, Stewart went from being “just a comedian” to “the most trusted man in America” in the words of the New York Times?
Here’s my take: a majority of our citizens, of every ideological persuasion, share the same disquieting suspicion: that we are powerless to fix our broken institutions. For some, religion remains a source of salvation. Others place their trust in the bluster of demagogues, or simply chose to live in a fog of frantic material and athletic distraction.
The rest of us—the Troubled but Tame Majority, let’s say—chose to embrace Stewart as our spirit guide. Because he was the one public figure capable of articulating the depth of our dysfunction without totally bumming us out. He converted our despair, instead, into laughter. But something more insidious was happening in the process. We were learning to see politics and media as a joke.
There were notable exceptions to this pattern. Stewart was able to help push through a health care measure for first responders to 9/11, for instance. He exposed various charlatans. He even ventured into the larger media ecosystem to have his say, most famously when he lectured the hosts of CNN’s debate show, Crossfire. “Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America,” Stewart told Tucker Carlson. “See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations. And we’re left out there to mow our lawns.”
This rant helped enshrine Stewart as a folk hero. The queasy irony of this exchange was that Stewart had devoted hours to mocking Crossfire. If he was a humble populist raging against dysfunction, he was also a parasite of that dysfunction. His job depended on blowhards such as Carlson.
In an adoring Times profile he spoke of his comedic mission as though it were an upscale anti-depressant. “It’s a wonderful feeling to have this toxin in your body in the morning, that little cup of sadness, and feel by 7 or 7:30 that night, you’ve released it in sweat equity and can move on to the next day.”
But what if Stewart’s daily doses were masking vital symptoms? What if the underlying disease—the one killing American democracy—was unseriousness?
Surveying the defects of American governance more than eight decades ago, H.L. Mencken issued the following decree: “The only way that democracy can be made bearable is by developing and cherishing a class of men sufficiently honest and disinterested to challenge the prevailing quacks.”
To many of their fans, Stewart and Stephen Colbert represented just such a class. And hope for their leadership was never more keenly felt than in the weeks leading up to their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The gathering, a hastily conceived send-up of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally, took place three days before the 2010 midterm elections.
The event amounted to a goofy variety show, capped by one of Stewart’s earnest homilies. Americans are a decent people, he insisted, capable of making “reasonable compromises.” As proof, he showed a video of cars merging in the Holland Tunnel. “‘Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car, is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay. You go and then I’ll go.’ Sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute. But that individual is rare and he is scorned, and not hired as a [TV] analyst.”
Almost everything about this riff was baloney. His sidekick Colbert was living proof that networks hire so many selfish jerks as to create a cottage industry of parodic jerks. The maestros of conservative talk radio, an industry born of commuter rage, had, in fact, taken possession of the Republican Party, with aims on our national discourse.
In Stewart’s formulation, the problem wasn’t us noble citizens. It was villainous pundits and politicians. But we were the ones who watched those pundits and elected those politicians. Stewart and Colbert made their nut by catering to us Troubled but Tame folks who chose to giggle at the results rather than working to change them.
His closing statement at the rally was anodyne to the point of anti-activism. “If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you,” he declared, “I can only assure you this: you have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted.” Stewart had convinced more than 200,000 Americans to crowd the National Mall on the eve of a pivotal election, with millions more watching at home. To what end had he mobilized these citizens? Voter registration? Phone banking? Door-to-door canvassing? No, self-congratulation.
Four days later, Tea Party candidates stormed into the House of Representatives, ushering in an era of ideological extremism, congressional gerrymandering, and perpetual gridlock.
Far from challenging the quacks, Stewart and Colbert proved to be invaluable allies. Their shows insulated viewers from feelings of distress that were an appropriate and necessary response to our historical moment.
If I seem harsh here, it’s because Stewart and Colbert were clearly smart enough to see their role in the larger scheme. They knew why our political discourse had grown so vicious, and why it had drifted away from matters of policy and moral consequence. It wasn’t because of some misunderstanding between cultural factions. It was the desired result of a sustained campaign waged by corporations, lobbyists, politicians, and demagogues—all of whom stood to profit handsomely by the erosion of those civic institutions that might curb their influence. What they needed was a population willing to laugh off this moral depravity, and a few high-tech jesters willing to generate those laughs.
One of the few public figures to criticize the Stewart/Colbert rally was Bill Maher, who noted that the hosts had drawn a disgraceful equivalence between the concerted fear mongering of the right and the activism of the left. “Martin Luther King spoke on that mall in the capitol, and he didn’t say, ‘Remember folks, those Southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point too!’ No, he said, ‘I have a dream. They have a nightmare!’”
But Maher’s complaint obscured his own role in the larger process by which the politics of the left has been subsumed by show business. Back in 1993, six years before Stewart took the helm of The Daily Show, Maher launched a talk show called Politically Incorrect that featured comedians, politicians, and celebrities bantering about politics. The format was popular enough to leap from Comedy Central to ABC to HBO, and—perhaps as telling—to relocate from New York to Los Angeles, where it was easier to book movie stars onto the show.
The central effect of his show wasn’t to bring serious political discourse into primetime. It was to recast political discourse as an amusement, an ill-informed squabble filmed before a live studio audience. Politically Incorrect was an early breeding ground for a strain of punditry that combined cheesecake glamour with smirking sophistry. Maher provided a platform, and extensive media training, for a series of leggy propagandists who would graduate to roles of prominence in the conservative media. “I think we’re the show that kind of made Ann Coulter and Kellyanne [Conway] and Laura Ingraham—you know, those were, like, our blond Republican ladies,” he told the New Yorker.
Those who saw Maher interview Conway, six weeks before the election, witnessed a noxious example of how the game works. Conway, a Republican pollster who once considered Trump unfit for the presidency, was now his campaign manager and most mendacious defender.
How did Maher treat Conway? Like a fond mentor. “On the one hand, you’re enabling pure evil,” he quipped. “On the other hand, I’m, like, so proud of you! You started here. You were just a child star on our show.”
Conway thanked Maher for “giving me a platform for all those swing voters who watch your show” and proceeded to spin for twelve straight minutes.
“You’re so good at what you do,” Maher gushed at one point. “So good. I’m just verklempt.”
That’s how deep the con runs here. Maher styles himself a kind of liberal watchdog for his audience. But his smug tribalism doesn’t advance a progressive agenda. It’s not meant to. That central goal of his sparring session with Conway was to generate ratings.
It’s easy to criticize the commercial impulses here, and harder to confront the psychic forces that drive us to seek refuge in Maher, Stewart, et al.
I think here of David Foster Wallace. “What one feels when [politicians] loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest,” he observed, back in 2000, “the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.”
Our programmed defense against such vulnerability is irony. The political satire of the left—though instigated by a genuine desire to call out abuses of power—allowed us to pretend that none of this mattered. Our addiction to these programs became a cheap and reliable opiate for progressive angst. By laughing at democracy’s dysfunction, by refusing to take it seriously, we laid the foundation for Trumpism. And when it arrived, we could only soothe our horror by retreating into an endless loop of clips, as if watching Trump derided on Saturday Night Live would derail his candidacy.
It was inevitable that pundits would respond to Trump’s nomination by pleading with Jon Stewart to come out of retirement. Some fantasized that he would succeed where the Fourth Estate had failed, by compelling the electorate to recognize Trump for what he was.
This was certainly wishful thinking. But it also betrayed a basic misunderstanding of the role Stewart had played in our larger cultural saga. Throughout his tenure at The Daily Show, Stewart hammered one basic note: that our political and media establishments were feeble and corrupt. Trump hit the same note at every one of his rallies. It was the most convincing aspect of his appeal.
If Stewart’s mission was to decant the anguish and rage of the left into laughs, Trump fanned those same emotions into raw political power. Both, in this sense, profited by a loss of faith.
One of the last shows Stewart hosted, in the summer of 2015, aired just hours after Trump announced that he would run for president. Stewart began by muttering a pro forma speech about the sanctity of our electoral process. “But fuck,” he declared. “This guy is so much fun!” This led to a flurry of Trump clips. Stewart kept trying to turn his attention “back to the process.” But the other candidates were so boring. Watching this riff, I couldn’t help but to think of the central question raised by Postman: “To whom do we complain … when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”
I recalled, too, a line Foster Wallace had written about insurgent candidates, how they stirred “a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there’s nothing left anywhere but sales and salesman.”
One of the many candidates Stewart dismissed was Bernie Sanders, whose stunning challenge to Hillary Clinton represented, in many ways, a more significant insurgency than Trump’s. Sanders wanted a national single-payer health care system. He wanted to impose a tax increase on the affluent and make college tuition free. He’d drawn huge crowds by bluntly articulating the tolls of income inequality.
Sanders was useless to Stewart because he couldn’t be reduced to shtick. And Stewart’s bottom-line product was shtick. So he ignored the Sanders Revolution and promoted the Trump Follies. Those of us chuckling at home were thereby bonded to Stewart in the great loop of impotence. But burying our pain beneath laughter, year after year, came with a risk few recognized until 2016.
Trump won the GOP nomination, then the presidency, because he activated this “deep need to believe.” His cartoonish view of an America in ruins, besieged by dark hordes—the nightmare he’d hustled for decades—felt real to millions of voters. They were primed for a savior even if some part of them knew their standard bearer was just a salesman.
And what was the left’s conditioned response?
But fuck, this guy is so much fun.