Note: This post was almost entirely written by March 6 and only touched up today, so parts of it may be out of date.
In February, Jon Stewart made his triumphant return to The Daily Show after nine years away, effectively skipping the bulk of the Trump era and leaving most of that time to his successor Trevor Noah while working on other projects, to host Mondays through the election. What transpired reminded many fans of Stewart’s Daily Show of, perhaps, why his original departure may have been well-timed.
For his first show back, Stewart discussed the report from special counsel Robert Hur that cleared Joe Biden of mishandling classified documents upon leaving the vice presidency but characterized him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who struggled to remember facts under questioning, re-igniting concerns over whether Biden is too old to serve four more years as president. Stewart played clips of Donald Trump and his associates claiming not to remember things at their own depositions over the years, but spent the bulk of the segment seemingly reinforcing the concerns over Biden’s age, picking apart a press conference Biden gave where he forcefully responded to the special counsel’s assertions but seemed to struggle afterwards, and responding to Democratic surrogates playing up his “sharpness” and “engagement” in official meetings on talk shows over the weekend by suggesting that, if he’s so sharp in those settings, perhaps they should be captured on camera. By contrast, Trump only received one or two shots on relatively trivial matters over the course of the segment, with no mention of the most concerning development to come from his side over the weekend, his seemingly blackmailing NATO allies with a Russian invasion. Stewart was excoriated by various figures on the left, including Keith Olbermann and even Trump’s estranged niece Mary, for focusing on concerns over Biden’s age instead of the far more existential threat posed by Trump’s return to the White House. Responding to those concerns on his second show back, Stewart twisted the Washington Post‘s Trump-era slogan into “democracy dies in discussion” and spent the rest of the segment facetiously studying Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia and interview with Vladimir Putin to learn how to speak “of course” to power.
Stewart is far from the only centrist-to-left-wing figure to come under attack by defenders of the President for giving voice to concerns over Biden’s age and implying if not stating that he should step aside for a younger candidate; Nate Silver, already having lost a lot of the esteem from the center and left built up over the course of the Obama era by more openly voicing centrist-libertarian views, has spent considerable time on Twitter and Substack defending voter concern over Biden’s age and suggesting that if he can’t sit down for an extended interview with a tough questioner, or if his performance in such an interview is disappointing, he should step aside. (When Biden and Trump agreed to ditch the Commission on Presidential Debates for a pair of debates in June and September last month, Silver suggested that one reason Biden may have proposed the move would be so that, if he had a bad enough performance in the June debate, he could bow out and allow a contested convention.) But in Stewart’s case, this insistence that an open and frank exchange of ideas and being willing to question even the most exalted figures on one’s own side should be sufficient to uphold democracy is of a piece with his attitude during his original stint on The Daily Show, and always served to set him apart even from his most devoted followers. It’s at the root of why he was always so uncomfortable with his place as “America’s voice of reason” as a comedian, it’s why his forceful defense of treatment for 9/11 first responders and veterans was so impactful – for all his mockery of Bush-era figures and conservatives in general, he was never known to take firm political positions himself – it’s what drove the Rally to Restore Sanity, perhaps the peak of Stewart’s influence and a paean to reasoned debate as the pathway to restore democracy, and it might ultimately be the undoing of his legacy.
I always felt that Stewart’s 2004 appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, where he blasted the program for reducing political debate to a shouting match exchanging talking points, ultimately leading to the show’s cancellation, was a mistake; for all its faults, at a time when Fox News had effectively supplanted CNN as the most powerful name in cable news and MSNBC had started down the path to becoming its liberal equivalent, Crossfire was one of the few places where left and right could genuinely expose themselves to and engage with each other’s ideas, without the deck being as stacked as it could be on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes. As left and right have increasingly drifted apart, holding not merely differing values, principles, and opinions, but even different sets of facts, the need for a show where left and right could come together, bounce their ideas off each other, and try to find common ground, has become ever more pronounced. But Stewart’s preferred solution, an in-depth, substantial, genteel exchange of ideas, was never going to appeal to more than the most straight-laced of political watchers, was never going to appeal to the masses that would most need to see it, as evidenced by CNN’s various ventures into the format over the years; 2010’s Parker Spitzer was lambasted by conservatives, treated with complete indifference by everyone else, and ended up going down as a footnote in cable news history, while a 2013 revival of Crossfire didn’t do much better. For most people, those sorts of substantive debate shows are, in a word, boring. A theatrical, staged exchange of shouted talking points is better than nothing, which, for the most part, is what those looking for a genuine exchange of ideas between left and right have had in the two decades since Crossfire‘s cancellation.
This is the problem with Jon Stewart: his commitment to the principle that the news media should dispassionately lay all the facts on the table, present all the ideas for what to do about those facts, and let people rationally and logically consider the evidence to reach a conclusion, in the face of mounting evidence – including the very popularity of his original Daily Show stint – that that’s just not how the majority of people think. To be sure, it’s not like he came up with the notion out of thin air; indeed it’s the very principle upon which American democracy itself was conceived and built, and the lens through which elites and academia have long not only looked at democracy and how it’s supposed to work, but assumed that’s how it does work. So it’s been distressing to see what’s happened in the past decade or two, where people in America and elsewhere have not only embraced seemingly discredited ideologies but gone beyond that to figures and ideas seemingly antithetical to democracy itself, and not only have such movements not gone away, but even many of those that claim to defend democracy have seemingly lost faith in its most fundamental principles and have no better response to the threats to democracy than to betray them, to destroy democracy in order to save it.
This is most obvious in the case of free speech, as Stewart and others have discovered running into those who believe the media should shut up about Biden’s age, no matter how legitimate a concern it may be, and focus exclusively on Trump’s crimes or else be complicit in the destruction of democracy, but which has also animated debates over “cancel culture”, “political correctness”, and content moderation on social media. (A while back Silver explored a survey suggesting that elite colleges, once bastions of free speech, are now quite skeptical of it.) To be sure, no one is suggesting the weight of the government be brought to bear against the media, which, as many will tell you, is the only thing the First Amendment prohibits, and “cancel culture” is explicitly about people and corporations rejecting those with taboo views rather than the government, but it nonetheless seems to go against the spirit of free speech to police what the media says, and when activists call on social media platforms, large and influential enough to have censorship power close to on par with any government, to censor or bury certain viewpoints, it’s hard to say they wouldn’t go against the letter of it if they felt desperate enough. (And just as having the media run nothing but anti-Trump stories while burying anything that makes Biden look bad is likely to feed Trump supporters’ persecution complexes and make swing voters more receptive to the notion that the “deep state” is trying to stop Trump for nefarious reasons, so would having social media sites acting to quash certain viewpoints similarly make people wonder what “they don’t want you to know”.)
To be sure, people will cite all sorts of justifications for why such censorship is warranted while still being consistent with free speech – for example, that viewpoints that call for silencing and suppressing the free speech of others, or calling for violence or death or otherwise making certain populations feel unsafe, should not be tolerated. But here’s the thing: if the assumptions about human nature and democratic debate on which free speech and other principles of democracy are based held, none of that should matter. People should be able to decide for themselves that such viewpoints are anti-democratic and be willing to reject them out of hand. So those that vouch for such viewpoints are able to claim that “they don’t trust you to come to your own conclusions” and ask “what are they scared of?”, insinuating that if those viewpoints are so terrible, there should be no threat behind letting them be voiced because most people would reject them anyway. And the people claiming to defend democracy have no way to respond without admitting that they don’t believe in the principles of democracy, they don’t trust ordinary people to come to their own conclusions, because even if those viewpoints are clearly wrong from a rational perspective, that doesn’t mean they won’t triumph in the hearts and minds of ordinary people – and then you might start wondering, if democracy is built on a lie, how bad are viewpoints that threaten it, really?
The reaction of the establishment to this crisis is, if anything, more disturbing than the fact that we’ve reached this point itself. Some, like Stewart, cling to the principles of their youth like nothing’s wrong; others demand those principles be thrown away for the sake of preserving democracy, without acknowledging that that’s what they’re doing; but all consider themselves defenders of the status quo against those that would tear it down, without considering why so many people have lost faith in that status quo to begin with. To the extent they do recognize that they’re up against real people, they dismiss their concerns and disdain them for not going along with what the establishment says – which only feeds the notion that they constitute a “deep state” that doesn’t care about ordinary people at best and actively disdains them at worst. There is no FDR coming along that can recognize that the present crisis requires serious reform that the establishment might not like; any such figure in the Democratic Party would be swiftly crushed by the establishment. (Supporters of Bernie Sanders would argue that’s exactly what happened in 2016 and 2020, but even Sanders was more concerned with improving the economic system than the political one.) Meanwhile, the establishment’s reticence to effectively use even the checks and balances that are supposed to protect against exactly this sort of situation – and how hollow it seems when they are used – only underscores the brokenness of the system and how woefully ill-equipped it truly is to deal with sufficiently determined bad actors willing to exploit the very norms and mechanisms that allow it to work.
If Joe Biden loses in November, the biggest reason won’t be his age, or people not internalizing the improving economy or everything he’s supposedly accomplished for them, or the media running interference for him and against Trump, or any concerns about the deep state; it’ll be because his presidency was spent trying to restore the status quo ante the Trump era, to return things to the way they were under Obama, rather than fixing the deficiencies in the system that made so many people turn to Trump in the first place. When those that most need to be engaged in any effort to fix democracy are ignorant of its necessity, perhaps its decay is inevitable. Jon Stewart is representative of the denial, impotence, and stubbornness of the American establishment that has led us to this point, more concerned with protecting the prerogatives of those in power and preserving an unstable status quo people across the political spectrum have lost faith in than actually addressing people’s grievances, unable or unwilling to take the steps necessary to eliminate the demand for change or even to recognize the need for it.
The Internet is, perhaps, the most democratic technological achievement in history. Never before have people had such unfettered ability to publish their opinions and have them find an audience without needing connections or needing to go through gatekeepers, and never before has it been so easy to find all the information about the world you could possibly ask for. In the 90s and 2000s, there was a lot of optimism about what the Internet would mean for democracy itself – about the ability for people around the world to compare notes and reach a more informed opinion about what society should look like, or, perhaps, find out what the established powers didn’t want them to know and make society and government work harder for ordinary people, to organize to support people and causes that would improve life for everyone, in short, to accelerate the arc of progress towards justice. For those on the (American) left that were convinced they would be the beneficiaries of this process, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to mark, if not the vindication and culmination of this process, the start of the inevitable leftward shift of society as right-wing viewpoints were exposed for how vacuous they really were and people began being exposed to facts of the world beyond what the 1% wanted them to think.
But since then, the opposite has happened: the right has not only embraced the Internet and the culture that thrives on there but found new recruits and even radicalized them to the point of neo-fascism, allowing those with seemingly discredited viewpoints to find others like them and resulting in those views finding a resurgence. Rather than bring people around the world together towards one view of what the world is and what it should be, the Internet has left them more divided than ever; rather than undermine the power of the 1%, it has been co-opted by them; rather than being a boon to democracy, it may ultimately be its undoing. The Internet has provided the most unfiltered window into the mind of the common man humanity has ever had, and that has exposed how little it resembles what advocates of liberal democracy have assumed, or wanted, it to be.
That the Internet is so democratizing on paper makes the crisis that democracy now finds itself in all the more distressing. America has been the world’s foremost democracy for nearly a quarter of a millennium now, and in the past, its longevity and resilience has been pointed to as a testament to democracy’s superiority over other systems. But at a time when ordinary people are more able to inform and voice their own opinions than ever, democracy not only finds itself in its worst crisis since at least the Great Depression, it almost seems to be falling short by its own standards. It raises the question: has democracy only worked to this point because of how undemocratic democracies have been in practice? Has “democracy” just been the elites manipulating the opinions of the masses to pursue their preferred courses of action all along?
To be sure, most of the countries that seem to be backsliding away from democracy either weren’t that democratic to begin with or were only democracies for one or two generations, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain, underscoring how difficult it is to build a democratic culture in a society not primed for it; the main exception is the United States, whose problems might have to do with structural deficiencies in the American system stemming from a time when political science wasn’t as well understood. While right-wing movements may be ascendant in longer-standing European democracies, there isn’t any real threat of those systems themselves collapsing, nor are there any serious threats to East Asian or Oceanian democracies, though the situations in Brazil and India are more concerning (though the surprisingly strong performance of the non-Modi forces in the recent Indian elections may provide some hope for those rooting against Modi’s Hindu nationalist movement).
Still, the fact that a country with such a long history of democracy finds itself at this point of crisis – and more profoundly, that the defenders of democracy seem so impotent in the face of the threat – should still send chills down the spines of other democracies, especially given how reliant they’ve historically been on the American military for their defense and to maintain the “Pax Americana” that allows them to live in relative peace with little to fear from more belligerent regimes. Nor does it help that there seems to be little hope for any true long-term solution, no path to fixing the problems bedeviling American democracy; the people that most need to embrace the sort of reform that’s needed have little appetite for it, and in any case it’s hard to see a path for reform at this point that won’t just make things worse. American democracy is, in some ways, more democratic than ever, yet it finds itself incapable of fixing the potentially fatal issues arising from that state. And with how much influence the United States has wielded over other “democracies” over the years, it’s fair to wonder how many of the questions facing American democracy also apply to other relatively healthy democracies around the world.
Personally, I still believe in democracy, or at least that people can and should be trusted to run their own lives. But if democracy can’t defend itself against an existential threat without betraying itself, if Jon Stewart can be told that adhering to the principles of democracy marks him as its foe because “the stakes are too high” to engage in any criticism of Biden – and for that matter, if someone as milquetoast and flawed as Biden is our only alternative to Trump to begin with – how good is it? Can democracy be saved, and should it be? Where did democracy go wrong, and how much of it had to do with the practice of it, and how much with fundamental flaws in the theory? If the problem is with the practice, what reforms can be instituted to fix it and keep it from happening again? If the problem is with the theory, where, exactly, did it go wrong, and why? Is it possible to identify what worked so well about modern democracy for so long and preserve it, whether in a reformed democracy or in a wholly new system? What would a democracy even look like that reckoned with human nature as it actually is, or would it even be democracy? To the extent “democracy” must be run by elites, how can it balance people’s legitimate grievances with their ignorance and manipulation, the elites’ knowledge with their arrogance and blinkered perspective, and how can it protect itself from bad actors and corruption from those wielding power outside the system without shutting out legitimate interests or concerns?
I hope to explore these and other questions over the next several weeks and months – examine the flaws behind democracy as presently constituted, where they came from, how they might be fixed, and what an ideal society rooted in the reality of human nature might look like. Of course my history over the past eight years (and even just how long it took me to write this post, only substantially finishing it nearly a month after Stewart’s return) doesn’t exactly engender confidence in my ability to write that consistently, but I hope to take steps to improve my productivity and make time for me to write more, and it helps that this touches on issues that I’ve been thinking about since I was in college. I’ll be looking at various current and recent controversies and crises and what’s at the root of them, while examining the philosophical underpinnings of modern democracy to see where the conflicts between theory and practice lie, and what’s at the root of them. Eventually I may move on to a broader critique of modern democracy, whether there’s a prescription to fix democracy and allow it to better live up to its ideals, or if the rot infecting democracy runs too deep, whether I can at least identify the foundation of a new framework on which democracy can be built – assuming I can maintain the momentum of this series for long enough (or at all). With luck, from the ashes of the current crisis can come a new birth of freedom, and even if we can’t fix democracy in time to save us all from global warming hell, we can at least recognize how we got here and write a fitting epitaph for our civilization.