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 »
