A clip this past week from Jon Stewart's new show The Problem with Jon Stewart went viral. In it, Stewart was interviewing Republican State Senator Nathan Dahm of Oklahoma, about drag shows & gun control laws. Stewart's logic is sound in the argument. In the clip, which you can see here, Stewart discusses how Dahm is trying to ban drag shows in front of minors. This, as Stewart points out, infringes on a drag performer's free speech, as well as the free speech of parents of children who want to attend the performance. Stewart points out (correctly) that the most dangerous thing facing American children today is not drag shows, but gun violence, which is the leading cause of death for young children, and calls Dahm a hypocrite (again, correctly) to his face for basically picking & choosing which constitutional amendments are the ones he values when crafting legislation.
This is a move that Stewart has, quite literally, turned into an art-form, and if you're a Millennial, it's something you know well. While The Daily Show is still around today, currently in search of a host, during the 2000's and into the early 2010's, the show was a cultural phenomenon the likes of which doesn't really exist on the left right now. While Republicans have long favored late-night Fox News hosts such as Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson, & Sean Hannity, Democrats have struggled to have the kind of "appointment" television for their side that conservatives do. Even figures like Rachel Maddow, who is probably the closest traditional news outlets have come to rivaling these figures, doesn't approach their kind of sway & authority.
Stewart, though, during his Daily Show heyday, matched it. The comedian and D-List actor (even he'd own up that his film career left something to be desired) became a voice of the Millennial generation as they first began to vote. I know I watched the show religiously every night, like my parents would David Letterman and their parents before them Johnny Carson. Stewart was a master, along with his crew of correspondents, at making politicians (generally Republicans) look like fools on national television, showing clips of them on TV shows contradicting themselves. In an era when viral videos began to become "a thing," Stewart knew how to craft these types of moments so they could become ubiquitous even before social media became something everyone devoted time toward.
But the question I've asked in the years since Stewart's departure has been: did it do any good? Stewart's attitude toward politics in retrospect feels a bit dangerous, particularly into turning it into a joke. Looking at the clip above, where there's nary a punchline in it, you do wonder if he might've caught that memo too. Because while Stewart retired before 2016 (he left the show the year prior), it's hard not to see a line between a world where everyone feels that politics is a laughing matter, and a country that was willing to elect Donald Trump. Jon Stewart did not, of course, elect Donald Trump (a variety of factors elected Trump, and he is not close to the top of the list), but I have thought in the years since if Stewart made it so that Democrats weren't prepared for him. We had spent 16 years laughing hysterically at the stupidest of Republicans, and assumed that laughing at them would be enough because during the Obama years (coming after the Bush years, which Stewart had accurately maligned) it had seemed to work.
The problem for Stewart at this point is that we all know, today, that the Republican Party's ideology is based largely on hypocrisy. Even the most moderate of Republicans are high-profile hypocrites. Look at someone like Susan Collins, proclaiming to be pro-choice but knowingly (she's not dumb) choosing to confirm the justice to the Supreme Court who would ensure Roe v. Wade is overturned. It's easy to make fun of her...that doesn't mean she didn't stay in office. In the Trump years, it's become clear that coalition building with moderates, some of whom Stewart would've mocked for the inconsistency in their voting records ("you voted for George Bush, but draw the line at Donald Trump?"), is a far more effective way to win elections, and one wonders if we'd tried that approach in 2016 if we'd gotten further.
It's not clear to me anymore what pointing out the hypocrisies of Republicans like Stewart is doing on his new show does, and certainly I don't know if it helps. Republicans at this point live for this sort of things. Making liberals angry ("owning the libs") seems to be the only consistent policy goal they have, and Democrats sharing clips of someone as well-known as Stewart angrily yelling at a Republican who ends up passing this law anyway is kind of what they're hoping for, making the Democrats angry & marginalizing communities that Republicans hate. Stewart's heart is in the right place, and he's not wrong-there is a hypocrisy here, and we should do something to fix the sociopathic gun laws in our country that allow our children to be shot in schools (and we should also protect queer & transgender people who are literally hurting no one), but that comes from outnumbering Republicans at the ballot box, not by making them look like fools. Stewart's approach no longer pays dividends, and it's not clear at this point if it ever did.
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