Jon Stewart is a brilliant comedian and a great TV personality, but he was never much of a liberal, and certainly no liberal hero.
In case you were living on the other side of the moon, or don’t obsess over the internet like most media types, you are probably aware that Jon Stewart is retiring for The Daily Show this spring.
Stewart of course is a brilliant comedian and a great TV personality, his ability to poke fun at the powerful and issue brutal “take downs” to charlatans like Glenn Beck or bullies like Bill O’Reilly was the stuff of comic gold. Combine that with his recurring focus on serious issues and helping to start the careers of dozens of young comedians that are now doing great work all over the place and you can understand why a lot of folks, especially young liberals, are a little sad to see him go.
Which is kind of strange, because as talented and personally generous as Jon Stewart is, he wasn’t particularly liberal.
I know, that sounds ridiculous but there’s a lot to it. As Jamelle Bouie pointed out his brand of “politics” was really more about making fun of the ludicrous spectacle of cable news than talking about the real questions of politics which eminent American political scientist Harold Lasswell once described as, “who get’s what, when, and how.”
As Bouie puts it:
Cable, however, isn’t the only forum for debate, and most political conversations aren’t as shallow as the ones you see on TV. On op-ed pages and around dinner tables, Americans have substantive conversations about politics. And while the facts aren’t always right, the discussion is often valuable. Stewart gives short shrift to that kind of talk. Instead, in the world of The Daily Show, the only politics is cable politics, where venality rules, serious disputes are obscured, and cynicism is the only response that works.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeNot only does this discourage people who want to make a difference—like the earnest young viewers of Stewart’s audience—but it blurs the picture and makes it hard to see when those arguments really matter. It’s how we get the spectacle of Stewart’s rally, when tens of thousands of liberals gathered on the National Mall in Washington to hear an ode to civility—with an extended metaphor about the Lincoln Tunnel-–as if Washington gridlock were a case of bad manners and not deep-seated ideological differences about government and its place in the world.
None of this means that Stewart is apolitical of course, instead I think political scientist Jonathan Ladd summed up Stewart best back in 2014 as being thought of as a “progressive era reformer” from a hundred years ago. So while Stewart may have criticized the Bush Administration countless times, he still really disagrees with liberals about the fundamental nature of American politics:
When asked in interviews what the biggest problem in American politics is, Stewart often says “corruption,” not the concerns of any of the major parts of modern liberalism, such as racial, gender and economic equality.
This isn’t to say that Stewart is “wrong” or has an “invalid” view, after all there are no invalid views in a democracy. But he still he makes a pretty strange hero for American liberals.
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I’m not sure what one should expect of a comedy show other than comedy, so I find it odd that the author of this article takes Stewart to task for failing to be liberal enough. His job is to poke fun at hypocrisy and he does a wonderful job of doing just that. The quote,” When asked in interviews what the biggest problem in American politics is, Stewart often says ‘corruption,’ not the concerns of any of the major parts of modern liberalism, such as racial, gender and economic equality,” makes me ask, “So what?” He is absolutely right. What’s… Read more »
I’m not saying Stewart is wrong because he’s not liberal enough, I’m saying his world view is fundamentally different from that of most liberals. Stewart’s critique is about process, not outcomes. Very few liberals give FDR bad marks for bullying the Supreme Court into not gutting the New Deal during the 30’s or LBJ for twisting arms to pass civil rights legislation and expand the welfare state, because they really wanted those outcomes. Stewart would have seen that as wrong no matter what happens.
That’s a worldview that’s pretty different than mainstream liberalism.
I agree. The job of a comedian…well, I suppose it’s to make people laugh, but you could definitely say it is also to poke fun at hypocrisy. You might even say it’s job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable! And because that is his job Jon Stewart does generally help the liberal side. All he has to do is play a clip of some obnoxious politician saying “X is terrible!” then pull that face of his and play another clip of the same politician a year earlier saying “X is wonderful!” This is why, when conservatives… Read more »
“When asked in interviews what the biggest problem in American politics is, Stewart often says “corruption,” not the concerns of any of the major parts of modern liberalism”
And this is why he is a hero. If you tie yourself to a Liberal or Conservative viewpoint, it’s like living life with only a left hand or a right, increasingly unable to see an un-tinted reality, and unable to think critically about real problems.
Which is why the increasingly blatant Liberal tone coming out of GMP is rendering it more and more useless to me a source of valuable opinions.
He is far better than Bill O’Reilly. I love the way Stewart tore apart that woman who was fighting against the Affordable Care Act. She had to leave her job because of her humiliation.
Agree with you that Stewart is not an across-the-board Liberal – that is, as non-Liberals define us.
But he IS a liberal as most of US define ourselves: Not so scary-radical, very much in-tune with morality and ethics, and patriotic. How many times I sat and watched him speak to something that liberals, often the victims of our own self-imposed anger, rarely get to present to the world a point of view about, and said, “Yes. Yes! YES!”.