For a lot of teenage liberals jaded with George W. Bush’s America, “The Daily Show” was the only show that mattered. Tuning into Comedy Central on school nights, I watched intently as Jon Stewart played cable television’s court jester, ridiculing Rush Limbaugh and skewering Sean Hannity until the absurd overwhelmed the tortured logic of right-wing media. When I found out Stewart was retiring, my first reaction was a pang of nostalgia for what felt like an exciting political innocence before the cynicism of the late Obama years. When I gave it a bit more thought, my next reaction was one of relief. “The Daily Show” was once a vibrant oasis in a desert of craven television personalities, but in 2015, the American left is better off leaving Jon Stewart and his brand of satire behind.
Most glaringly, Stewart’s worldview has become out of step with the times. In 2004, as Barack Obama movingly proclaimed there was “not a liberal America and a conservative America” but rather only “the United States of America,” such hope and change (to borrow a phrase) felt desperately needed after the poisonous debates about mushroom clouds in Iraq and gay marriage bans at home. By 2010, the Tea Party’s vitriol against now-President Obama’s center-left agenda exposed his rhetoric as wishful thinking. Jon Stewart, however, was not fazed. Holding what he called the “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the Washington Mall, the comedian gathered over 200,000 people in a crucial election year to express hope that “Mormon Jay-Z fans” and “atheist obstetricians” might be able to get along. In his announcement of the event, he drew an equivalency between Republicans who labeled Obama a socialist (which was and is a mainstream GOP position) and liberals who believed 9/11 was an inside job, even though, as comedian Bill Maher pointed out, not a single Democratic leader endorsed that conspiracy theory. Despite Stewart’s rose-tinted rhetoric, Republicans won a landslide victory in 2010, and since then, political polarization has galloped past all-time highs. Once the candidate of hopeful unity, Obama is now doing interviews honestly reckoning with the consequences of polarization, while Stewart either remains tethered to a fantasy or has given up on politics completely. In an era in which “Black Lives Matter” is juxtaposed with a gutted Voting Rights Act, Jon Stewart’s commentary stands in the way of the left moving forward.
Tragically, Stewart has also grown increasingly cozy with the establishment he once railed against. In 2012, Stewart had former Sen. Alan Simpson, chair of a debt commission dedicated to slashing social spending, as a guest on his show. Rather than forthrightly challenging Simpson on the merits of cutting Social Security as elderly poverty increases, Stewart offered a few tepid criticisms of corporate tax cuts while still offering the Republican “kudos” for “pissing off everyone.” Rather than being an insurrectionist comic like his hero George Carlin, Stewart has become so incorporated by the Democratic Party’s political organization that Democratic campaigns have used his now safe image multiple times for fundraising emails. He does still occasionally offer token criticisms of Obama and other party figures, but the subtext is usually that he’s trying to help his team get back on track rather than challenging his audience to think more radically about what ails the country.
That said, liberals shouldn’t despair about Stewart losing his edge. With a new generation of ascendant political comedians (many of whose careers he helped foster), Stewart’s retirement will hardly leave behind a vacuum. John Oliver, once a Daily Show correspondent, now uses his HBO show “Last Week Tonight” as a platform to attack vested interests in depth and bring issues to light that are being neglected by the mainstream news cycle. Larry Wilmore, also a veteran of Stewart’s show, has started off “The Nightly Show” during Stephen Colbert’s old time slot with provocative investigations of race and other topics he has a unique ability as an African-American on late night television to explore. Stewart performed a great public service opening the door for these younger comics, and with their arrival onto the national stage, his career arc as a faux-journalist has come to its natural conclusion.
I will always be thankful to Jon Stewart for acting as my gateway drug to political satire and for using the formative years of his show to say what no one else on TV would say. Sixteen years from his debut as host of “The Daily Show,” it’s time for the left to embrace voices with views more interesting than those of a “rather conventional 50-year old Northeast liberal” and grapple with the reality that the nation’s problems go well beyond the studios at Fox News. By ending his fake news career at the right moment, Jon Stewart is providing us with the greatest Moment of Zen he has left to give. We should all be grateful to him for that.
Gray Whisnant is an Opinion editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.whisnant@cavalierdaily.com.
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