While Republicans are focused on the presidential debates tonight in Cleveland, liberals will be gathering around their televisions this evening to say goodbye to Jon Stewart. This will be the last edition of The Daily Show, and Stewart’s exit is equivalent to past television farewells of icons such as Johnny Carson. But while Carson was a seminal figure in American popular culture for decades, Stewart’s importance transcends television or even comedy. While the tributes to his supposed brilliance are, at best, overbaked, there should be no doubt that he has influenced our political culture profoundly during his tenure. Indeed, rather than giving him a hard time for his private meetings with the president in the White House that seemed to point toward him being given his marching orders by his political master, what we should be doing is examining the way Stewart influenced Obama.
As I noted earlier today, Obama has been transformed from the post-partisan visionary that enraptured a nation with promises of hope and change into something very different. He is now a man who was unashamed to conduct a serious foreign policy debate employing bitter hyper-partisan rhetoric that seemed straight of Richard Nixon’s playbook. But unlike Nixon, Obama didn’t merely make an enemies list. He demonized his enemies employing humor. The fact that his nasty lines about Republican critics of the Iran nuclear deal being the equivalent of Iranians chanting “Death to America” got laughs from his campus audience at the American University was no accident.
There is a long and honorable tradition of political humor and satire in the Western canon dating back to Jonathan Swift. But though Stewart’s routines were often undeniably funny, his show deserved to be remembered more for deceptive editing of interviews of those whose views he sought to skewer and the softballs he tossed at liberals and Democrats. Though he pretended at times to be above mere partisanship and took shots at easy though non-controversial Democratic targets, he was in a real sense the poet laureate of the Democratic Party in the last decade. The cheap shots in Obama’s speech the day before Stewart exited stage left is a symbol but a telling one since it illustrates the way the comedian’s style has infected mainstream politics. Whereas in an earlier era it would have been unthinkable for a commander-in-chief to stoop to speak of mainstream political opponents as the moral equivalent of an Iranian mob, this kind of incendiary reference is stereotypical Stewart.
The point about his style is not that it was both funny and unfair, but the way it conveys a sort of not-so-secret handshake among the young and the fashionably liberal. In this world, differing views don’t have to be engaged with, let alone disputed. They can, instead, be dismissed with a vicious swipe aimed at conveying the message that anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxy is beyond contempt.
While the left likes to lament the rise of Fox News, the real engine that has been coarsening our public life is not the existence of a conservative news network to challenge the left-leaning uniformity of all the others. The real blow to civility comes from a mode of discourse that hinges on denigrating those who exist outside of the liberal consensus. Stewart didn’t educate his audience about the issues but merely played to their political prejudices. In the new world of debate for which he played the midwife, one doesn’t have to struggle with hard choices so much as to merely identify conservative oafs who are to be mocked and to then cue the audience to laugh. He became famous for attacking CNN’s “Crossfire” for promoting partisan argument for its own sake but he helped replace that in our culture with a sort of wink and nod sniggering that makes the worst screaming matches on that show seem like a video edition of Plato’s Republic. When one considers that political commentary on television began with William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” in the 1960s, it’s clear that the decline of the culture isn’t so much about liberals and conservatives as it is about the replacement of ideas with a politics of contempt. When one realizes that increasingly large numbers of young viewers get their political news from shows like this, the importance of this sea change cannot be overestimated.
Stewart was in a sense right to dismiss conservatives who rightly denounced him as an administration flunky when they learned of his secret visits to the White House. While the president may well have been seeking to influence Stewart — something that comic did not dispute — the truth is that the president wasn’t so much giving marching orders to his court jester as he was probably gaining insight from him. Stewart didn’t need instructions from Obama about how to attack Republicans as much as Obama needed help channeling Stewart’s comedy while defending otherwise indefensible policies such as the appeasement of Iran.
Conservatives need to take note of this. Among the most important things the next Republican president will need to win his political battles is a similarly friendly forum where liberals are treated as dolts rather than as challengers with ideas. Seen from that perspective, Stewart deserves the attention he’s getting lately. He isn’t just a political comic. He’s someone who has helped to divide the country in a way that the creators of “Crossfire” never dreamed possible.
