New York Times Magazine interviewed Jon Stewart for his new show, “Irresistible”. The whole thing is quotable. I kept finding myself highlighting and underlining what he was saying. Here’s a few.
Systems capture all who are part of it, even if they can’t see it:
Don’t people know that already? The politicians don’t even know how expletive1 up their system is. Nancy Pelosi2 was on ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ and we were talking about how money has a corrupting influence in politics. I said, ‘‘You raised $30 million. How does that money corrupt you?’’ She said it doesn’t. So money corrupts, but not you? That’s someone within the system.
The two party system as a duopoly:
In June 2019, Stewart spoke before Congress in support of a bill authorizing increased funding of medical coverage for 9/11 first responders. The bill passed in July of the same year.
I learned something that shocked me. We had a program that was working. Bureaucratically, it wasn’t broken. What is broken about Washington isn’t the bureaucracy. It’s legislators’ ability to address the issues inherent in any society — and the reason they can’t address them is that when you have a duopoly, there is no incentive to work together to create something better.
He’s not wrong about the two party system as a duopoly. From Stewart’s standpoint, the two political parities have little reason to work together. If compromise means weakness to the other side, then it’s really important to not give an inch on such and such bill. On social media and Sunday morning talk shows, someone has to eviscerate or dominate or destroy the other side.
But it’s my opinion, that the dysfunctional system is not necessarily rooted in the duopoly of the two political parties, and thereby lack of competition of political parties.
In Ezra Klein’s book, Why We Are Polarized, Klein makes a case that the dysfunctional system has many deeply complicated reasons. One of which is that one political party is captured by the forces of polarization, and has very little immune response to radicalization and self-sabtaoge. They must feed anger and rage to their base.
In 2012, the two scholars published It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, and in it, they minced no words: Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise … Between 2012 and 2018, House Republicans drove John Boehner from the speakership for being insufficiently radical and then made Paul Ryan’s life so miserable he resigned the post after only three years. … Republicans repeatedly shut down the federal government.
[And Donald Trump shutdown the government with his party in power for not getting funding for his border wall]
In all these cases, top Republicans expressed unease with the path they had chosen but seemed helpless to do anything but channel the fury of their base.
Why We Are Polarized – loc 3366
The Democrats cannot afford to abandon the center and simply feed the base alone. Instead they have to appeal to a large range of people.
It [elections] means winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina. It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and the karmically curious in California. Democrats need to go broad to win over their party and, as we’ll see, they need to reach into right-leaning territory to win power.
Why We Are Polarized – loc 3438
Senator Manchin of West Virgina and AOC are in the same party, but they have very different things to say about the climate change. House Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Schumer, having to keep this diverse coalition together, must make appeals from the center to the Left.
Stewart has a good point on the duopoly, though. I, like Ezra Klein, see it through the lens of polarization and identity politics. I’d would include as well, the inability for the two political parties to work together is the result of not only deepening polarization, but also escalating constitutional hard-ball, and disappearing forbearance to the minority political party, To read more about this, look to How Democracies Die.
Stewart continues with the idea that one party is set out to sabotage the very thing they represent:
Plus, you have one party whose premise is that government is bad and whose goal is to prove that, which makes them, in essence, a double agent. All these things coalesce to make problem-solving the antithesis of what we’ve created. We’re incentivized for more extreme candidates, for more extreme partisanship, for more conflict and permanent campaigning, for corporate interests to have more influence on the process, not less. The tax code isn’t complicated because poor people have demanded that it be that way.
On where the burden of this nation’s ideals should be.
There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem.
- I believe, the word is “fucked” ↩
- NY Times footnote: A guest on ‘‘The Daily Show’’ in 2014 while she was House minority leader. The back-and-forth that Stewart describes here is his paraphrasing of the conversation. In retrospect, the interview looks like a preview of the themes of ‘‘Irresistible.’’ ↩