On Moderation: KO, Jon Stewart and the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

I'm usually supportive of Jon Stewart and I like Colbert too, but I want to offer a few thoughts on their rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  And then there are those feisty tweets about the rally by none other than Keith Olbermann, to which I'll refer very briefly below.

The runup to the Restore Sanity event was predicated, I think, on the notion that if we could only get the extremists on both sides to pipe down, we could have a civil conversation about matters that are important to individuals and to the country as a whole. That's unavoidable as a justification of Stewart's brand of comedy -- he can't appear to support one political party or movement exclusively. He talks to people as if they were rational adults with the capacity to appreciate the silliness of political posturing and cheap rhetoric. While I don't for one minute credit the notion that an overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens are rational adults -- too many of them seem poised to vote for manifest imbeciles, ignoramuses, bigots, homophobes, and wild-eyed promoters of secession or worse to make that supposition believable -- if one doesn't posit something similar at least as an ideal or goal, we might as well admit that we can't hope to govern ourselves, that the grand experiment of the Founders was pointless. I don't suppose many of us would be pleased to make such an admission. Churchill's witticism about democracy being "the worst form of government except for all the others" still resonates with us.

One brief segment of Stewart's The Daily Show during the runup was instructive -- a series of vignettes in which six people chosen to go on a bus tour to the rally fail to transform themselves for the cameras into the sort of hacks and ogres whose ranting makes for good political fare. (Nice people may go to the theater just as Ian McKellen says, but they don't make for very good theater themselves.) Staged as it was, the series made Stewart's point: whatever the percentages, many people, at least, aren't ultrapolitical goons or raving fanatics; they're willing to treat their fellow citizens like equals and would prefer not to savage or dehumanize them. They have decent manners, want others to like them, and don't care for confrontation or violence. That characterization applies to the people in my own circle, and honestly, I haven't run into any full-on crazies lately (outside my television screen).

Still, if you don't mind a bit of contradictory meandering, another segment of the same show seems equally instructive: the one in which Stewart's editors put together an audio-video montage of all those supposed extreme-talkers on the left and right, neatly equalizing them. The trouble is, they are not anything like equal. That is where I must agree with the audacious KO, Keith Olbermann and his persnickety tweets about the logic underlying Stewart's rally: Olbermann and Company are not the equivalent of the motor-mouths coming at us from the extreme right. Outspoken liberals sometimes exaggerate and make much of little, but the right-wingers fabricate without conscience or remorse; liberals are in general eminently sane and humane, while the rightists are little more than squirming bags of appetite, irrationality, and, at times, even bloodlust. They betray no signs of consistent lucidity.

In this sense, the Great Middle Hypothesis is flawed because it posits that you can calculate a genuinely moderate position between two extant extremes raving at you through your TV box or laptop screen. If you follow this notion, you'll end up doing rhetorical battle with both hands tied behind your back. If you denounce or mock the patent absurdities of the other side, you'll be labeled an extremist, and of course (as KO reminds us) that other side will by no means "tone it down." It will just scream louder and play the bully with ever greater ferocity. Whenever the far right sounds reasonable, it's merely a tactic, sort of like a boxer's feint just before he clobbers you. Fundamentally, these people's worldview is cruel, paranoid, and illogical; for them, reason never is, nor can it be, anything more than a ruse. We forget that at our peril.

So while I like Jon Stewart and appreciate his wit, his persistent calls for middle-America-style "sanity" and moderation seem to me too easily transformed, tamed, or translated into our fabled liberal wishy-washiness in the face of an ill-intentioned opponent. Nice people are petrified of being labeled radicals, while rightists embrace such definitions. They have that over low-talking, reasonable libs. All of this is why I'm careful not to put too much intellectual stock in the rhetoric of civility and moderation, even though I don't want to dismiss it.

But I'm just a predatory dinosaur with huge, jagged teeth. What do I know about civility? What do you think?