Where 10-2-10 Meets 10-30-10

Okay, I'm not a funny guy. But even good comedians appear rather staid and stodgy next to Jon Stewart. So it is with some trepidation that I register my alarm at Stewart's call for a “Rally to Restore Sanity” and Stephen Colbert's “March to Keep Fear Alive.” Now, I don't think rallies are bad; quite the contrary, they are both necessary and good – they can expand the conversation and help regular people using their own resources to express their opinions. But there are real problems withthis call. First, it's primarily reactive to the radical right. This leads to the next issue: there are no solutions being proposed at a time when there are genuine problems. A third concern is the traditional media trope Stewart employs: both the left and the right are are fault; the answers lie with the “moderate” middle. Most importantly, a real counterweight to the right is already in the works: 10-2-10, the March for Jobs, Justice and Education.

Given that Jon Stewart will still have me as a fan after this, I have to say that the Stewart-Colbert duo tap into a long-term and durable change in American culture and political life. Their space in the cultural landscape in unlikely to be filled by the often unimaginative crowd that run what should be our oppositional institutions. Other minds - preferably ones with a different and livelier analytic vocabulary than mine - would do well to engage the Stewart-Colbert crew ...

If only because they have a sense of humor, they belong on our side - that's the left, in case there's a doubt - and not the right's. Before returning to what the duo reveal about American culture and at the risk of revealing my prosaic and decidedly unfunny self, let's run through my concerns.

Sure it's true that in late August, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin rallied the Tea Partiers to bring close to a hundred thousand people to the Mall in D.C. And they did so by cynically exploiting the anniversary of MLK's “I Have a Dream” speech. What is really interesting is how few people the right pulled out despite their resources. The most important of these being their big market-share propaganda machine, Fox News. Although Beck & Palin were anti-climactic and their rally had little political impact, Stewart & Colbert seem to be continuing their national pissing contest with the Fox crowd largely as a measure of their own potency. Their planned activity merely reproduces the Beck-Palin Nuremberg moment albeit with different messaging.

This is especially disappointing because there are real issues at stake that go far beyond Obama's religious identity or birthplace (referenced in Stewart's announcement). Long-term changes in the prosperity and life chances of most Americans seem to structure the frustrations of the Tea Party followers. Maybe it's too much to expect of comedians, but we have to speak to the downward mobility thinning out the American middle class. We should never forget that the Klan was at its most powerful as small-property owners went were being driven to extinction with the rise of robber barons and later corporate power. By the same token, that period also gave rise to militant labor movements and a progressive era. The latter was made possible by a lively intellectual engagement between the left and the liberals.

Unfortunately, Stewart undermines the possibility of that kind of interaction by suggesting a symmetry between the “unreasonable” left and right. His announcement portrays Code Pink as a left-wing analogue to the Tea Party right. The unreasonableness of Stewart's analogy is not only plain to anyone vaguely familiar with Code Pink, but likely also to other viewers. After all, the Tea Party has a mainstream TV news channel; Code Pink and other lefties have no such power.

More importantly, Code Pink recognizes that their theatrical moments are just that... In this, their work is no different from Stephen Colbert's own colorful exploits that parody the right. Code Pink's imaginative gestures and civil disobedience are calculated attempts to break into a national media organized to render Code Pink and their issues invisible. Quite the opposite is true for the Tea Party movement where any stirring is presented as a world historical development by the right-wing media establishment and by the center-right mainstream concerned that they must cover the Tea Party types lest there be a challenge from the right.

This behavior is all too common in the mainstream. Evolutionary theorists who saw a great adaptive breakthrough in the development of vertebrae will no doubt puzzle over this period of American history. To take but one example from today's New York Times: Stephen Strogatz, a serious mathematician and pioneer of small world and complex networks theory, mindlessly reproduces this argument when writing about the propagandistic use of statistics: “both sides of the political aisle [mislead with data] though we all know who’s responsible for a vast majority of it: the other side." Cute! But it leads to an amoral relativism. And, given his apparently sincere challenge to the right during the Bush years, we did not expect Jon Stewart to take the same easy out.

Even if one accepts Stewart's parody of Code Pink, there is already a serious march planned for DC that is building a credible alternative to the Tea Party movement: One Nation Working Together and its March for Jobs, Justice and Education organized for 10-2-10. It is a meaningful mobilization built by folks who actually represent real people: trade unions and grassroots organizations. Just as Stewart is right in claiming to represent a reasonable majority, so too is the One Nation Movement right about reasonably representing both the real pains and hopes of the majority.

The greater defeat is that Stewart has not thrown in his lot with the One Nation Movement. To be sure, the traditional pillars of the progressive movement represented by One Nation could benefit from his sense of humor and the constituency that he precipitates out of the mass media ether. To a great extent, the 10-2-10 versus 10-30-10 dichotomy represents a cleavage that opened up during the Obama campaign and that separated the old Democratic Party machine from a new generation of activists who could reach the Comedy Central viewership and new media users. Both rallies together with the Tea Party movement may represent a more enduring and deeper challenge.

These dueling rallies—especially as organized by currents with elite backing—may signal a change in American politics. Back in the sixties, mainstream political science was all about how politics (read: the exercise of power) is successfully institutionalized and conflict managed, if not resolved. In fact, the perverse mind that gave us the “Clash of Civilizations” and advocated forced urbanization during the Vietnam War, coined a term for the breakdown of political development in a work on developing countries: mass praetorianism. It refers to that situation where people stop using or do not have political institutions to express themselves and/or resolve differences with their opponents, but instead use the instruments that come natural to their social situation. So peasants rise up, trade unions strike, the rich horde their money, and the military makes coups. Samuel Huntington wrote this in that most interesting of years, 1968. Notwithstanding the author's biases, the concept points to an interesting problem for our time.

Stewart's appeal is suggestive of floating social base of people who work for living but have no real organizational identity or connection to the traditional forms of solidaristic organizations: unions, churches and political parties. Perhaps there is some post-Web 2.0 networking mechanism to help give form to this group. Or maybe, like the Ecuadoran indigenous people who come together to bring down governments without traditional political instruments, they will invent something new. Whatever happens, we need to connect with these Stewart-inspired folks to make genuine political change.

Unless we do, the era of mass praetorianism is upon us! No laughing matter.