The Commonality Of Rallies...

...has little to do with the cause but rather that many people have too much time on their hands and the most important factor in the success/failure of the rally is that the weather is not too harsh.

Jonathan Kay: Beck versus Stewart, anger versus irony


Jonathan Kay

We’ve heard a lot about Tea Party fury in the lead-up to the mid-term elections. Over the weekend, I spent time with another, equally fed up voting bloc. But these people aren’t angry. They’re just … bemused.

The event was Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” a comedy and music jamboree on the Washington Mall. It was billed as non-partisan — with Jon Stewart playing the role of “sane” centrist jousting with faux-blowhard, faux-fearmongering Stephen Colbert. But when I spoke to people in the crowd, it became clear that this was a solidly left-wing event. Not so much pro-Democrat — these folks are too jaded for party politics — as anti-Tea Party.

The Rally attracted more than 200,000 participants — three times what Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin got when they played the same venue to much Godly, right-wing fanfare a month ago. All those bodies would seem to translate into a mass political movement. But appearances can be deceiving: Most of the people I saw on The Mall aren’t engaged in politics as most of us would define it. It’s more like cultural commentary.

Like Tea Partiers, the Jon Stewart brigade has a narrative about a country that has been hijacked by extremists. For the Tea Partiers, those extremists are Barack Obama and his big-spending “socialist” allies in Congress. For the Stewart-ites, the hijackers are the Tea Partiers themselves, along with the enabling hard-right media culture spawned by FOX News.

As political movements, what motivates the Tea Partiers is anger and outrage, while the Stewart-ites must rely on irony and an abundance of wryness. Read More »