[M]ost 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.I'll just say that I agree with a lot of it. But there's another dimension to it as well, which I wrote a while back after the "rally for sanity":
Not 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.
Again, there are times when this basic perspective is vital, when we need someone to bathe our government in light and mockery and challenge the dishonesty, incompetence, and self-seriousness of our leaders and elites. But this approach, which worked wonders during the Bush administration, isn’t always the best one. For liberals in particular, the idea that government is only hypocrisy and dysfunction is self-defeating and nihilistic.
Stewart really does seem to believe that there's some happy "middle" where most people live. And I think he believes that middle is pretty much like him. But that just isn't true. People disagree, for real. Yes, we all put aside our politics at work because we have to in order to keep our jobs. And social mores require that we not break into heated political arguments all the time at the kids' soccer practice. Our political disagreements haven't made the society devolve into total anarchy (yet.) But the fact is that there are competing ideologies and philosophies at work in this country about how to govern ourselves. Denying that doesn't make it go away. We can certainly argue for days about the best way to wage the battle, but a battle it is.
I think what disappointed me about Stewart's closing was that I thought he'd staged a pretty nice gathering of the liberal tribe, replete with its hipster irony and inside jokes and recognizable signs of solidarity. No, it's not "We Shall Overcome" but it is a response to the kooks on the right and it's not an invalid way for the true believers to communicate with each other. (God knows the other side has no problem practically speaking in tongues amongst themselves.) No, nobody explicitly called for people to vote, but I think it's fairly clear that anyone who watches Stewart and Colbert are engaged in politics enough to know that an election was imminent.
The problem was that by calling out both sides at the end, he sent a signal to the Villagers that their false equivalence, he said/she said, above it all, "view from nowhere" approach to politics was correct and I think that's a shame. The right doesn't give a damn about this phony construct and the only ones who lose are the liberals. Olbermann under fire for being explicitly political is a good example of where that leads.
Anyway, I think Maher and Stewart and especially Colbert are brilliant political observers and satirists --- the best communicators our side has --- but they sometimes succumb to the same conceits to which all of us liberals have a tendency to succumb: the overriding need to prove we aren't hypocrites ...I'm sure I'll be writing more about the end of the Stewart-Colbert era which I think has been hugely important to liberal politics. But I have always had some reservations about Stewart's "serious" commentary which I'm seeing a whole lot of liberal pundits applaud today as if that's what made him important. What made him important was that he took the piss out of pundits.