November 10, 2010

• Jon Stewart’s Rally

  There’s been this huge debate amongst progressives and liberals about Jon Stewart’s Rally that took place on October 30, called the Rally to Restore Sanity. Basically virtually every major progressive media figure offline and online to whom I listen to frequently and most often agree with took the time to viciously criticize The Rally for creating a False Equivalence between Fox News and the Left and ridiculing and attacking activism.

  I surprised myself while observing all this in that I discovered myself to be pretty firmly on Jon Stewart’s side. And that’s coming from someone who hates false equivalences and is a huge fan of activism. I definitely got the points of all those critics and I think they made some good ones. However, I think overall, THEY were missing the point. They weren’t seeing the bigger picture.

  There’s this thing the Left does that makes me a little ashamed of being a part of it at times. We have a tendency to viciously attack one another on moral grounds. It’s not solely a tendency of the Left but it is frustratingly common amongst our leaders. Though our arguments aren’t made up or grounded in fiction they are still not always the most fair or the most reasoned.

  For some reason the Left has become pretty bad at strategy too. That’s why at every level the Right has been kicking its ass badly for 30 years. We’re great on specific issues but terrible at seeing the big picture. At every level we fail at that. At the level of Media, at the level of activism, and at the level of politics. Our overarching strategies have been near complete and utter failures. We win battles but we’re losing the war for hearts and minds and we’re losing it pretty badly. (To be fair we have regained extraordinary ground in the last six years or so, but that’s why this past year, and especially the last six months have been so terrifying. It seems like we are losing that ground at an insanely rapid rate)

  But what’s interesting to me is that we weren’t bad strategists during the Civil Rights era. In fact they were pretty great strategists then. They managed to mobilize people in ways the world hasn’t seen since. And they had a huge impact. And that’s not so much in the legislation that was passed or the rules that got changed. That’s in how they changed the entire mindset of the country. We became more inclusive, more fair, more willing to at least TRY to treat one another as equals no matter our race or gender and even in some cases sexual orientation. But the landscape shifted beneath our feet and for some reason the Left never really caught up with the changing times. We kept trying the same old things and we didn’t get any better at doing them either. Our great leaders were shot or locked up or were discredited and those that took their place though well meaning lacked the vision. We never really recovered.

  Meanwhile the Right has developed extroardinarily skilled strategists. Media geniuses like Limbaugh and Beck. Political masters like Gingrich and Rove. They’ve had no shortage of people who are planning for the BIG picture. And they are totally willing and able to use all of the lessons learned from the successes of the Left as well as any other tools of the modern era and build upon them and use them to their ends. And they do. Beautifully. Effectively.

  Here’s the thing. 3 Million people a week watch Glenn Beck. If you think that’s a small number compared to how many people live in the country you are deluding yourself. That’s a massive number to be watching one demagogue. And they talk to people. They interact with people. The message that appears on Glenn Beck doesn’t stop at his 3 Million fans. And that doesn’t even take into account the millions of people who listen to his radio program or the many millions who listen to Rush Limbaugh who are sometimes different people.

  One top of that at least tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people attended Beck’s rally and many more attended the several other conservative rallies and marches that have been held over the past two years. But much more important than the attendance numbers,  everybody knew about that Beck rally.  It was a media events. You couldn’t escape it no matter where you went. That’s why it was a success. Because no matter how many people attended, everybody heard their conservative message. It was everywhere.

  And part of that message is: if you don’t believe as we do, you’re evil. You’re dangerous. You’re stupid. You’re destroying the nation and a direct threat to the well being of the good and true “normal” Americans. They have lots of other messages some good some horrible, but by far that’s the WORST of their messages. The one that tells people that their kids and neighbors and fellow Americans who live on the coasts have something fundamentally wrong with them because they believe it’s possible to create a government that can help people without creating a society run by tyranny. It’s a message that pits people against each other and trains people to accept the practice of othering various groups and peoples from muslims to illegal immigrants to blacks to gays. This tells them it’s okay to be angry at them. It’s fine to hate them. They’re really to blame. Those evil liberals.

  If you don’t believe that’s a fundamental part of their message, I recommend you read some of the comments on my blog. Or ANY blog that gets considerable conservative commentary. Listen to how they react to anything remotely resembling “liberalism”.

  The scary thing is when people are worried and afraid and don’t know what to do that message is extraordinarily convincing. People who worked their whole lives living within what they thought were the rules are looking for someone to blame. They are looking for someone to let out their anger and frustration at. And so they love to hear that there’s this conspiracy of monstrous people called liberals that they can vent at and hate. Not everybody does. But enough do. 

  And many of those who don’t are just confused enough that they’ll latch onto anything that seems remotely plausible as an explanation for their collapsing shifting world. Anybody who offers them a sense of stability and normalcy. Being a part of the Fox News community gives them that. Glenn Beck tells them what’s wrong in simple terms they can understand. It’s the libs. It’s that evil philosophy of progressivism. Stick with me and I’ll bring you back to your happy conservative values. That’s his message.

  Indeed when I watched the interviews with attendees of Glenn Beck’s rally that’s what stood out the most to me. It was how very happy people were to be there. They were having a good time. There was a sense of community and togetherness amongst them. They felt good about what they were doing.

  And I don’t begrudge them that happiness or that sense of community and purpose. I think it’s a good thing. I’m just terrified of Glenn Beck’s message of hatred and ignorance that underlies it. THAT’s the problem. Teaching people to associate these good feelings of togetherness with and unity with hatred of the other and vilification of alternative ideologies can’t be a good thing.

  The only question then that the Left needs to ask is HOW CAN WE COUNTER THAT MESSAGE?

  And there’s no easy answer to that. It’s going to take a lot of different things and a lot of new creative thinkign. It’s going to require a lot of experimentation too.

  But here’s what we know won’t work. Doing what we’ve been doing. And by that I mean having smart hosts on MSNBC that simply shout out the alternative viewpoint. Yes they serve a good purpose and yes it’s great that not everything that Fox News says goes without challenge somewhere in the media. But that doesn’t sway the country either. Nor does it, apparently, motivate sufficient numbers of the disenfranchised or depressed to go out and vote either.

  Similarly the many many many many normal Left wing marches and protests don’t work. That’s not to say that they are entirely a waste of time. They do serve a good purpose of linking activists together and building networks. But they don’t force major legislative changes either. They don’t scare anyone. They don’t get the country behind them. Indeed they don’t even command enough of an audience to cause them to get much press in the News media at all. And as much as we may like to whine about how the Media is being fundamentally “unfair” because many of those marches were bigger and deserved a lot more attention, the fact is media companies probably WOULD cover a rally if they thought it would sell. But no. They think these rally’s and marches don’t rate. They believe that even if they did cover them, they’d be so boring and inconsequential that the television audience wouldn’t even pay them any heed. Just more of the same they’d think. And legislators have learned to studiously ignore these marches too so that can’t be the angle for the story either.

  So you’d need a truly phenomenal number of people to march to break into the modern media scene with a traditional cause. It just doesn’t work anymore like it used to. People need to start to take that into account.

  But Glenn Beck’s rally DID work because he based it off of celebrity and it was something new and different and because it was radically opposed to the position of most marches. That made it interesting to people. Glenn Beck himself is a lightning rod for controversy. Even the timing, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech was a brilliant move to gin up extra controversey and garner more attention. All this brought the reporters out.

  At that point it didn’t even matter how many people Beck got out to the mall. He would have claimed victory even if it was only 20,000. And in a lot of ways he’d be right.  All he needed was for the rally to be big enough not to be seen as joke.

  So what do you do? Traditional strategies don’t work. Beck and Limbaugh are eating your lunch. Who’s innovating?

  Jon Stewart that’s who.

  Jon Stewart took a different approach. What if you answer the core problem of Beck’s message and his undeserved media fame by directly showing how silly it was. Glenn Beck says that everybody else out there who doesn’t think like he does is a monster. So Jon Stewart said, “okay, here we are, 200,000 of us. Do we look like monsters to you?”

  He demonstrated that you could bring together a massive crowd of mostly Left leaning people who were NOT demonic and indeed were ANTI-demonic. They were people who argued for “sanity” and civility and mocked “fear-based” politics.  And they were fun loving joking friendly and above all normal people. Here were your friends and neighbors and children just getting together and having a good time. These were the people Glenn Beck tells you it would be a disaster if you let them take control? Did they seem like people who would bring about the end of the world? Is a world where people watch the Daily Show really so bad?

  The overall theme of Stewart’s rally was that we’re more alike than we seem. Not Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann or Barack Obama and Sarah Palin but maybe a listener to Rush Limbaugh and a watcher of Keith Olbermann.  Maybe a voter for Obama and a voter for  McCain/Palin. We all live our lives the best we can. And that’s EXACTLY the right messgae to counter that of Glenn Beck which is that we’re not all that alike. Those progressive are NOT like you. They’re the enemy. They’re dangerous. They’re trying to destroy you and enslave you and they probably don’t even realize they’re doing it those poor deluded fools. That’s Beck’s message.

  But more important even than the theme of Stewart’s rally was the spirit of it. I don’t even think of Stewart’s rally as your traditional March or Rally. Most of those are protests or advocacy trying to agitate for something specific. Stewart’s wasn’t that. It was nothing like that at all. But it still had meaning. Stewart’s rally was a gigantic sort of national Pep Rally. It was a giant party. It was in effect a way to cheer people up in the exact same way Glenn Beck’s rally did but NOT have that underlying message of hatred. Instead beneathe Stewart’s rally was a message of unity and hope.

  And we needed it. Now more than ever. People were and are really really incredibly depressed. So many of Obama’s voters didn’t turn up because they were in pain and in trouble and depressed and thinking that system is fundamentally broken and they are surrounded by people who hate them. They’re tired of defending Obama, tired of defending the Democrats and tired of fighting to stay afloat in this miserable economy. And most of all they’re tired of the bickering and fighting that results in nothing getting done in Washington. You think you can get these depressed, out of touch, borderline angry people to vote? How? You’re lucky if you can keep them from falling completely into despair and giving up on politics altogether.

  A lot of people complaining about Stewart’s rally are upset because he didn’t ask for people to vote and make it a rally all about electing democrats.There’s two problems with that argument. One do you really think that would have made an overwhelming difference? I don’t. That late in the game it maybe would have shifted one or two seats if you were really lucky. 200K is a good number of people but spread all around the country, I’m skeptical. A huge number of the people there were probably people who would have voted anyway and a good chunk were probably people who weren’t going to vote no matter what Stewart said.  You can’t pretend that a single rally is going to have a sway big enough to undercut a massive unemployment rate and serious dissatisfact over a whole plethora of Obama’s policies. Pretending otherwise is to embue in Stewart a kind of God-like influence I’m sure he wishes he has.

  But worse than that, making this a Rally abotu Democrats might have been decent tactics but it would have been terrible Strategy. No matter how much we on the Left might wish it’s not so a vast majority of the independents and people in the center and even a good large chunk of the leftists are directly turned off by the political infighting that happens on a daily basis. They don’t WANT to be told to vote and who to vote for or to be “mobilized” to serve the interests of a political class they don’t trust. They hate the shouting that goes on on Cable Television and they wish there were resources out there that would give them a real education in political matters without all the bullshit. And they don’t think Republicans are fundamentally evil and they don’t really care about which is better Fox News or MSNBC.

  When Obama ran he mobilized a lot of these people and a part of his allure is becausse he portrayed himself as being above the stupid partisan fray and was not possessed of ideological riggidness that would cloud his judgment. And yet at the same time he gave people a message of hope and the idea that people really could get along and make things better.

  And people really really do respond to that message. They respond to it when it’s Jon Stewart saying it and when Barack Obama was saying it.  No matter how much you don’t like that bi-partisanship message or think it gets perverted into something grotesque in the political sphere (and believe me I do) it still brings people together. The fact is, A LOT of people will simply NOT listen to you if you sound like you are expressing a view that clearly favors one side over another or if you are painted by Glenn Beck as a shill for MSNBC. They will assume you’re “just like all the rest” and tune you off before they even hear a word you say.

  You have to deal with people as they are not as you wish they would be. We do live in a country where 3 million people watch Glenn Beck and we live in a country where the vast silent masses of non-voters don’t watch anything and avoid politics like the plague because they think it’s because sick and twisted and wrong and has no real bearing on their lives.

  You have to win one or two of those groups over.  I don’t know how. Nobody knows really. But the same old tactics just won’t work. We need to think of really long term strategies and start experimenting on how to really make a difference.

  That’s what I think of Stewart’s Rally. It was an experiment in a different kind of mobilizing of people around a different kind of model than traditional activism. And I think it worked reasonably well all things considered. People had a good time and felt energized by the process. Maybe some people were inspired to get involved. Maybe some people just were able to keep the despair and discouragement at bay for a little while longer. Maybe it just made people feel a little less alone.

  And I think that keeps a step further away from the dark place it sometimes seems like we’ve been falling closer and closer to lately. It sometimes feels like were are on the verge of falling into something really really bad and ugly and Stewart is one of those on the edges trying to pull us back up.

  And on top of all that, given all the Good that Stewart and Colbert have done on their shows for the last however many years, don’t they deserve at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt? 

  Do we really think the energy of our Left wing leaders is best spent railing against these two for daring tho mention MSNBC in the same sentence as Fox as if there might be some similarities between the two networks, something that most people in the country already believe? Aren’t there a lot bigger fish to fry?

  I’ve always said you shouldn’t withhold criticize from anyone just because you like them, and I do believe that so I’m not saying Olbermann or Maddow or Maher or any of the rest shouldn’t have criticized Stewart. But I am saying the vehemence with which they went after him was excessive and I’d think so even if I didn’t think their criticism was fundamentally misguided and short sighted. At the very least I think they should take more seriously what Stewart was doing and what he was trying to accomplish.

  Anyway, Stewart will be appearing on the Rachel Maddow program soon and I’ll be very curious to see if or how they hash out their differences.

  Stewart already did a great segment in which he mocked his critics. One line in particular stood out to me.It was along the lines of Stewart’s critics were acting as if the only thing that was important was which side was worse the Left or the Right.

  I think that statement is profound. Which side is worse is NOT the most important thing. That’s the narrowminded of a viewpoint that prevents our movement from growing. Changing this society for the better is going to require more than simply proving the other side stands for something bad. It’s going to require proving that WE can stand for something GOOD and that we can explain that Good to people in such a way that they can be compelled to believe in it.

  • 11:57 pm
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