Say No to A Shock-Jock-in-Chief

We aren't an audience to be catered to. We're citizens, and have a job to do.

I wasn’t going to write this piece, because I’m flying back to Santa Monica tomorrow, which means ten plus hours with nothing to eat, and almost nothing to drink (thanks, not-quite-totally-gone mystery illness). Plus, I’m feeling rather weak in general today. “Today is a day to stay quiet, pet the dog, and read The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills,” I thought.

But then I heard about last weekend’s Nazi rally at MSG, and then watched Jon Stewart’s limp-as-usual segment on it, and felt I had to say a few things.

People often ask, “How did we get here?” and I have an answer that, while simple, I’ve never read before: Americans no longer consider themselves citizens of a democracy, but an audience with an unalienable right to entertainment. So we are pondering a choice between a pretty standard, not-perfect-but-not-insane politician, and…essentially a shock-jock. Not even a major-market guy, like Hartford’s version of Rush Limbaugh.

Citizens have duties (to be educated, to vote rationally, to run for office, etc.), which they must exercise responsibly. In return they get rights and freedoms. Audiences have only one duty—to consume media—and only one right—thumbs up or down. If this sounds vaguely bread-and-circuses, that’s intentional.

Increasingly, the only audience-members who are roused to act like citizens are the kooks. Those kooks, if they have a good shtick and the right patrons—Marjorie Taylor Greene, RFK Jr.—get famous, and thus become more entertainment. But they don’t act like leaders, any more than the audience-members act like citizens. Both groups have jettisoned everything difficult, anything grown up, all of the past, only the silliest visions of the future (we’ll all live on Mars!). There’s just now, and a boredom that must be avoided.

You can see it as early as JFK, the President as movie star, and then Reagan, the movie star as President. But this transformation into fundamental unseriousness really accelerated with the end of the Cold War in 1991. The Cold War began before the advent of television, and so TV couldn’t set its rules, only cover the events. The Cold War was very much not entertainment, and even its moments that were must-watch TV (JFK’s speech during the Missile Crisis; Oswald’s death; Cronkite in Vietnam) were deeply unpleasant. While still not made-for-TV, Watergate was closer to what the media and the public—especially the Boomers and younger—not-so-secretly craved. My parents wax nostalgic about the summer of hearings during which everyone was glued to the set. You could be an informed citizen, but still have cliffhangers!

Politics-as-entertainment, citizenry-as-audience is the paradigm that makes maximum dough for the media, and eventually media began aggressively packaging political events (the hostage crisis) or creating para-political events (the U.S. defeating the U.S.S.R. in ice hockey in 1980) to suit themselves. Real politics, like Iran-Contra, didn’t stick if it was too complex or fought with other media narratives. But for as long as capitalism and communism were engaged in a contest for the hearts and minds of the world, there was a core of consequence to it all.

The U.S.’ victory not only removed the old paradigm, it also unleashed media companies to pursue the content they desired, and for political parties to feed them content (the Clinton-Lewinsky affair is a perfect example). Fatigued after 40 years of a boring but consequential binary struggle citizens everywhere welcomed the change with relief. Suddenly it was just a blow-job, not nuclear armageddon.

As the generations that interacted with politics in the old way have died off, the lust to be entertained has become the only thing that matters. What binds the MAGA coalition together is their love of a certain type of story, an apocalypse with a superhero in it. Evangelicals long for when Jesus will come back and kick ass. Gun fetishists are captivated by the tale of A Good Guy With a Gun, protecting the weak and setting things right via his (inevitably his) vast killing power. Everything about Trump—even the “border crisis” and Trump’s frankly horrific plans for deporting millions—is turned into this same kind of carnage-and-savior story.

It doesn’t matter if the story is objectively true; in fact, it works better if it’s not. Christians have been waiting for Jesus for 2000 years. Gun owners are much more likely to harm themselves or their families. As a resident of California, I can tell you that the state has many problems, but violently ejecting all the people who pick the fruit, clean the houses, and prepare the food in every restaurant will not help. But MAGA wishes to be entertained, and these are the kinds of stories it likes, so…

This drives the rest of us crazy. What binds Democrats together—pretty much the only thing—is a belief in politics not as a story, but as a tool to solve problems. But it’s not quite as simple as that; if it were, everyone to the left of Hitler would vote as a bloc, and the lunatic fringe would safely remain away from the nukes, dreaming of The Book of Revelation.

But modern Democrats and leftists also see themselves as an audience to be entertained, especially on social media. What seems to bind them together isn’t apocalypse-superhero-redemption stories, but comedy.

For a bit there, the Harris campaign seemed to be unstoppable, because they had the rest of us laughing. Trump and ilk are weird because Fascists are weird. From Goebbels to Stephen Miller, you have to start out pretty strange to become a Fascist, and being a Fascist makes you even weirder.

Then the Dems stopped being funny, as they always do, and pivoted back to economics and policy, as they always do. And the air left the balloon, as it always does. Simultaneously, MAGA began making fun of Kamala’s laugh—just like they did with Hillary. I think it was Anne Beatts who said, “When a woman laughs, all men are sure she’s laughing at his penis.”

And so…here we are.

•. • •

Ever since the advent of mass media, whenever Democrats are funny, they win. Funny is attractive, that’s why humans do it; funny is how a winner goes through the world. FDR was funny, in an assholish sort of way. JFK was funny, in a self-deprecating way (the only way a person that favored by circumstance could be funny). Carter was decent, not funny; ditto all the losing candidates of the 80s. The Clinton who won was recognizably funny; the Clinton who didn’t, wasn't. Al Gore wasn’t. John Kerry wasn’t. Barack Obama was the funniest of them all, professional-level funny, and were it not for the 22th Amendment, we’d be celebrating the end of his fourth term.

Funny Democrats delight their side, especially young people, and enrage the other (“I welcome their hatred”). But when Democrats run a boring candidate, their base loses interest, Dem turnout declines, and all the people high on hatred and fear win the day.

Is Donald Trump funny? I’d say to his base, yes. And to an important sliver—the undecideds—his meanness and self-confidence read as something a funny person might do. With these intuitive meatheads, Trump gets the benefit of being funny, without taking the risk.

Donald Trump is an entertainer. He is not a politician, nor has he ever claimed to be one. He has no policies because he has no interests outside himself, no passions other than golf. (In an earlier time we might’ve been able to add sex, but one hopes that day has passed.) Freed from policy, he is the perfect candidate for an era where politics is just entertainment. He can generate and relentlessly stick to any story, no matter how outlandish. His followers are entertained, the media is fed, and lots of people who loathe the guy (myself included) cannot help but wonder at his latest craziness. The fact that no one is actually eating pets seems besides the point.

Unless you’re getting death threats.

Donald Trump is a parody, performance art, what Andy Kaufman might’ve done if he’d lived. The fact that he’s dumb, a coward, breathtakingly corrupt, a traitor—that’s like saying Lenny Bruce was a drug addict. Who cares? He’s mesmerizing. He’s not running a campaign; he’s doing a bit. Don’t believe me? Donald J. Trump is a collection of the least-electable traits in the history of democracy; my God—the man even hates dogs.

So how does it work? To 35% of Americans, it looks like he’s taking the piss. That’s why everyone who ever runs against him seems boring, oversincere, not in on the joke. In 2024 America, that counts for a lot; because he who entertains, wins.

•. •. •

So now we come to Jon Stewart’s monologue, his last before the actual election. I’ll embed it below, but here are the highlights.

After noting that the media—square scolds that they are—were appalled by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s calling Puerto Rico “an island of garbage", Stewart showed for the millionth time why he’s been one step behind since Trump rode down the escalator. From Variety:

Stewart then played jokes from Hinchcliffe’s “Roast of Tom Brady” set earlier this year, laughing at the segment and saying, “Yes, yes, of course, terrible, boo. There’s something wrong with me. I find that guy very funny. I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, bringing him to a rally and having him not do roast jokes? That’d be like bringing Beyoncé to a rally and not…,” alluding to an earlier joke he made about Kamala Harris’ recent rally, which featured a speech from Beyoncé rather than a performance.

The problem here is, GOD DAMN IT, politics are not merely entertainment. It’s not wrong to refuse the audience at a rally what it wants, because they aren’t merely an demographic that is owed service. In a democracy, they are voters who need information and persuasion to do something important. The rules of a celebrity roast (not a serious thing), and a political rally (a very serious thing in a democracy during an election year) must be different. The Harris campaign wasn’t being stupid; it was trying, maybe in vain, maybe unwisely, to draw a line between political speech and mere entertainment. (Like The Daily Show at its best, or John Oliver every week.) To give up and say, “It’s all showbiz”—that’s a person not clear on precisely what’s at stake in November 2024. Not least of which may be his continued ability to make jokes at all. Dachau was full of satirists, Jon. Including ones who tried to be even-handed.

Comedy people should be the loudest on this next point: Democracy needs a line between politics and jokery, because it needs its citizens to act like citizens, and needs its political parties to be unable to cloak Fascism in “jokes.” Something that is merely amusing at a roast of Tom Brady—“Jeff Ross is so Jewish the only part of a football game he watches is the coin flip”—is ugly and dangerous at a political rally. Because political speech creates political reality; it’s not a joke, which is precisely why MAGA constantly tells us to treat it like one. Comedian Hinchcliffe opened the event with bad taste jokes, so that the other non-comedic speakers would benefit from the license we give comedians.

The problem is that the license we give standups assumes that there is a whole “straight” mainstream of sober, square adults doing their jobs. When Lenny Bruce broke in, Dwight Eisenhower was President; when Pryor exploded, it was Nixon; when SNL premiered, Gerald Ford was President, then Carter. I defy any of you to find four less scintillating performers than Ike, Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

Comedy claimed for itself, and then was given, license to say the unsayable because there was a mainstream protected by a million gatekeepers enforcing a billion norms, and lots of valuable viewpoints weren’t being heard. But I’m here to tell ya: the more you read about Lenny Bruce, the more you know X would make him puke. 2024 is not 1957, and Madison Square Garden (or X) is not the Gate of Horn nightclub in Chicago. The nation is teetering on the edge of Fascism in a way that even the Great Depression could not cause to happen, simply because there are no adults to be found, anywhere, ever. Just an audience jonesing for distraction, and legions of people willing to “say the unsayable” for a buck.

Stewart knows all this and still goes for the contrarian take. Because, y’know, that’s what a comedian would do. Surprise, even shock—that’s what he knows how to do, what he likes to do, what his writers suggest, what he’s going to do. Maybe coated with a little protective irony…but sometimes you shouldn’t go for “a different angle”? Maybe the only angle is, “When a political candidate is threatening to deport millions of people of color, calling Puerto Rico ‘an island of garbage’ isn’t funny. And, to the people in that arena, not a joke at all.” Maybe the take is something ironic about Fascists’ legendary sense of humor. Surely there are plenty of good jokes to be written. But we know what isn’t a good joke: “Boo all you want, I think the guy is funny.” That’s…an idiotic thing to say. A Trump rally at MSG is not Comedy Central’s Roast of Tom Brady. Right? I feel like I’m going crazy.

Stewart does not realize, has never realized, perhaps cannot realize that giving an audience what it wants—making them laugh—is not necessarily the same as being a helper of democracy. Sometimes a side must be taken, bluntly, overtly. Sometimes, irony must be dropped. Even now, even in this last show before the election, he’s not willing to call this situation what it is, an extremely unfun, unfunny, not-ironic-or-titillating-at-all, completely adult, terrifying political choice between democracy and Fascism. He refuses to do this, because it wouldn’t get a laugh. So he brings on another performer to provide a little anger and sincerity…but even she seems to dissipate into platitudes about “throwing our arms around the people who need us the most, and hang the f*ck on.”

NO! Quit that Target wall-decoration shit! This isn’t hard:
First: be a FREE CITIZEN, and vote for Kamala Harris, and a straight Dem ticket.
Then, if necessary: be a FREE CITIZEN, and utterly reject, in all ways, with all means, the imposition of a Fascist government which the majority of Americans will not vote for, do not want, and is only a possibility because of f*cking electoral shenanigans and bullshit. A second Trump Administration would be government without the consent of the governed.

Believe me, I know our at times regrettable history chapter and verse—but Americans are not Fascists, never were, never will be. When confronted with version 1.0, we kicked their ass, at home and abroad, and we can do it again. But it’s time to stop being an audience, and act like free citizens of the world’s greatest democracy.

First, we vote.

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MICHAEL GERBER is Editor and Publisher of The American Bystander, which is currently (but perhaps not forever) available via the U.S. Mail.