‘Sanity’ rally: Who’s kidding whom?

“Kidding aside,” said The Salt Lake Tribune in an editorial, comedian Jon Stewart’s huge rally last weekend in Washington, D.C., had a serious message “with which we happen to agree.” Speaking to an estimated crowd of 215,000—double the number who attended Glenn Beck’s recent rally—the Daily Show host and his faux-conservative Comedy Central counterpart Stephen Colbert used three hours of satire, video, and music to call for more civility in U.S. politics, and lampoon the outrage-driven media culture that has “cheapened and polarized the national debate.” In an earnest moment, Stewart said the paranoid bile spewing daily from cable networks and the Internet “did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.” The rally “gave me hope,” said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. Stewart was speaking for that “silent plurality, alienated by both parties,” that cares more about finding solutions to our problems than about partisan gamesmanship.

In reality, he was speaking only for “urbane, sophisticated, self-satisfied liberals,” said Yuval Levin in National Review Online. The crowd came armed with thousands of large, ironic placards—“Hitler = Hitler” and “Things Are Pretty OK”—that mocked the very idea of partisan rancor. Stewart and Colbert made a show of evenhandedness—savaging NPR as much as Fox News, Keith Olbermann as much as Glenn Beck. But this was mere window dressing. The “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” was an explicit response to the anger and energy fueling the Tea Party movement—a snarky celebration of the idea that conservatives are “fundamentally irrational.” For all the fake nonpartisanship, the rally’s “message was clear,” said Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle: “If you don’t like President Obama, you’re with Stupid.”

“Jon Stewart blew it,” said Peter Beinart in ­TheDailyBeast.com. I’m a fan of his show, but the rally was based on several false assumptions. The deep division in the country is no media fiction, and Tea Partiers are not insane; their fear of government power, and their belief in individual liberty, have deep roots in the country’s history. Second, while Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, et al., may engage in wild exaggeration, the fear that millions of Americans currently feel about jobs, the economy, and the future is real and legitimate. If liberals want to stay relevant, they’d better not settle for smug, ironic detachment; they’d better find their own “way of acknowledging Americans’ terror about economic decline.”

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