I think about this tweet every day:
John Stewart taught millennials how not to argue - to dismiss conservative arguments with snark, not to engage at all. He crippled the thinking ability of a lot of people. The freak out to Trump was rooted partly in their inability to understand anyone else. So to see him follow… https://t.co/MuQ7zJygmx
— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) February 21, 2024
Particularly:
John Stewart taught millennials how not to argue - to dismiss conservative arguments with snark, not to engage at all. He crippled the thinking ability of a lot of people. The freak out to Trump was rooted partly in their inability to understand anyone else.
In high school, I was a big fan of The Daily Show with John Stewart. I’m pretty sure I still have a copy of his book, America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction.
I now pray not be like Jon Stewart. It’s something I guard against daily, but it’s hard. I am highly susceptible to smug outrage porn. I have very different politics from Jon Stewart, but I can still be drawn towards Jon Stewart-like people.
Jon Stewart’s schtick feels transparent when you sympathize with the people he’s mocking. He sets up a straw man and burns it down. Even if he has a guest on, he doesn’t really engage with them as an equal, a human being, worthy of understanding and compassion.
But many people employ the Jon Stewart smugness, and it’s easy to get caught up in when there’s so much media you can choose to listen to that will tell you that everyone who disagrees with you is fucking retarded.
There are many negatives to consuming media produced by people with “Jon Stewart brain,” but I think the core problem is dehumanization. It makes me think of a quote from a book I read by Jordan Castro, The Novelist:
Eric doesn’t want his friends to have kids, for the sake of other, less fortunate kids, I typed, appalled. I recalled some Max Schelar I’d read, in which he wrote about the shift from “love thy neighbor” to “love mankind”; the shift, for Scheler, was a violent one, born of suppressed envy. It was difficult, but possible, to love a specific, individual person; but it was literally impossible to love “mankind.” One could “love mankind” while hating every real person he knew. One could “love the environment” and do the same. The move from loving real people to “loving” abstractions was in reality a shift from love to hate. Eric did not love mankind; Eric simply hated his neighbor. He did not love “kids”; he simply hated kids and didn’t want any more of them to exist.
Eric, following his liberal arts school ex-girlfriend, was so full of impotent hatred for the people in his life that he had no choice but to love “the less fortunate”; then he could use “the less fortunate” as a new bat to beat people over the head with, as opposed to his old bat of pure nihilism.