{"id":36343,"date":"2016-11-16T02:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T07:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36343"},"modified":"2016-11-15T09:01:07","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T14:01:07","slug":"looking-back-on-the-golden-age-of-political-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/16\/looking-back-on-the-golden-age-of-political-satire\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking back on the “Golden Age” of political satire"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Flannery Dean<\/a> explains how making politics seem like entertainment may have contributed to the defeat of Hillary Clinton through encouraging apathy among her potential supporters:<\/p>\n

The next evening, during his Live Election Night special on Showtime, Colbert quickly lost his taste for the political absurdity that has defined his success. When it was clear Trump\u2019s victory was all but assured, the amiable host couldn\u2019t summon up the heart to tell a joke. Trump as president \u201cis a horrifying prospect,\u201d he confessed. \u201cI can\u2019t put a happy face on that and that is my job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cue the sinking feeling that you didn\u2019t really know what was going on \u2014 all this time you thought politics was just a big joke that you shouldn\u2019t take too seriously.<\/p>\n

It was a Colonel Kurtz moment for Colbert, his guests, and the audience that had tuned in to be entertained by political humour and not troubled by its complete inadequacy in the face of seismic change.<\/p>\n

You can hardly blame them for being caught unaware of the new dark zeitgeist, though. For the past 15 years, satire has become the preferred mode of left-leaning civic engagement. And The Daily Show<\/em>\u2019s tone \u2014 sarcastic, smug, chiding, and then creepily sentimental \u2014 has infiltrated mainstream media on TV, in print, and online (take this Nov. 11 story on Slate<\/em><\/a>, for instance, that\u2019s suffused with the adolescent eye-rolling that often accompanies troubling political information these days).<\/p>\n

Given satire\u2019s cultural dominance, it is not surprising that many may have naively assumed any real threat to American democracy had somehow been ridiculed into nullity by the likes of Stewart and Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Larry Wilmore and Samantha Bee. But Donald Trump\u2019s victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton revealed the error of the mainstream faith in political satire as an effective form of political engagement. In reality, our prolonged love affair with cracking wise wasn\u2019t a tonic that shook people out of their apathy \u2014 it was a symptom of it.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more liberal you are, the more you see Colbert as a liberal skewering conservatives. But the more conservative you are, the more you see Stephen Colbert as a conservative skewing liberals.\u201d<\/p>\n

What did the Left see in Colbert\u2019s murky mirror? Cute and kind of harmless hardliners \u2014 wind-up toys for them to play with. It\u2019s hard not to see the mainstream media\u2019s approach to Trump\u2019s candidacy as being tainted by that dynamic: They were entertained by him, but few took him seriously.<\/p>\n

That incredulity has legs, unfortunately. Many journalists and thinkers appear to be operating within the old zeitgeist still, assuming American politics is just another genre of entertainment, and that Trump is, at bottom, a soulless entertainer who was only pretending to be a racist, a xenophobe, and a despot in an effort to get elected.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Colby Cosh<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Flannery Dean explains how making politics seem like entertainment may have contributed to the defeat of Hillary Clinton through encouraging apathy among her potential supporters: The next evening, during his Live Election Night special on Showtime, Colbert quickly lost his taste for the political absurdity that has defined his success. When it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[86,1037,670,101],"class_list":["post-36343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-criticism","tag-donaldtrump","tag-hillaryclinton","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9sb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36343"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36346,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36343\/revisions\/36346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}