Splinter: Jon Stewart Is a Symbol of America’s Crumbling Democracy

Jon Stewart is one of the more important political figures of the 21st century, a truism that is both a compliment to his abilities and a damning indictment of American politics. That we let a comedian become this politically influential is a commentary on us, first and foremost. I can already feel a lot of liberals recoiling at attacking a sacred cow like this, but understand that going after Stewart as a symbol for American collapse doesn’t make me feel great either. In many ways, I was raised on The Daily Show, and after graduating from college in 2009, I didn’t miss a single night of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report until the latter went off the air. But sitting here with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to see Jon Stewart as anything but a disappointment.

Stewart is in the news again for a recent transgression that is a depressing marker of our times, but I want to go further back and examine how this dynamic has followed him his entire career first. A 2007 scientific Pew poll found that Stewart was the favored journalist for people under the age of 30, and a famed 2009 Time unscientific online poll found him to be “America’s most trusted newsman.”

There is no such thing as a healthy democracy where people’s favorite journalist is a fucking comedian. Stewart’s ascension to the center of American politics during the W. Bush era could only come in a world where the mainstream media had abdicated their core responsibility. Playing videos of Republican politicians constantly contradicting themselves only felt like a revelation because of the vacuum created by America’s so-called elite journalists. While TV show hosts cosplaying as Walter Cronkite’s successors asked softball questions to the powerful with no follow-ups, Stewart’s very basic journalistic practice of fully quoting those same people stood out as a refreshing injection of verifiable truths, and it made him a superstar in American politics. His great triumph in the 2000s was accidentally being the first to clear the immensely low bar set by a failed age of American media.

To be clear, none of this is Stewart’s fault. As he famously said on his 2004 Crossfire appearance that doubles as Tucker Carlson’s Joker origin story, The Daily Show came on after puppets making prank phone calls for Pete’s sake. Those holding Jon Stewart to the same journalistic standards as a show on CNN were dramatically lowering their own. Jon Stewart is just a man who successfully hosted a political late-night show in an era where elite journalism completely gave the game up and transitioned into full-fledged stenography and superficial entertainment, and by comparison, his nightly exasperation at the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs looked like Edward R. Murrow’s award-winning journalism.

That young people like me made Stewart appointment TV while treating the rest of TV news as a sideshow to be ignored is just proof that a generation of so-called journalists failed at their jobs, helping to pave the way for our catastrophically corrupt world ruled by liars and pedophiles. When the 2008 Great Financial Crisis hit and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Stewart’s critiques of Bush were on point, the dam truly broke as Stewart became a kingmaker of sorts on the left.

But just as Stewart became America’s most trusted newsman, he demonstrated his own political limits with the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in the summer of 2010, perhaps the most vacuous and superficial political rally in modern American history. It was like a time capsule that predicted the failure of Barack Obama’s pivot to the respectable center after winning on populist rage fueled by an age of breakdown narrated by Stewart. The story of post-2008 liberalism is one of betrayal, as the ideals forged in the collapse of 2008 proved to just be a passing fad with many in the liberal commentariat who clearly just wanted to return to a 1990s status quo that is one of the most obvious political anomalies in American history. That this brand of liberalism centers its triumph in an age where its Epstein-adjacent standard bearer never won 50% of the popular vote is quite telling about the echo chamber it resides in.

The white-hot rage at a crime spree that forced millions of Americans from their homes and permanently fractured the economy in 2008 evaporated among the liberal elite, and in its place was a virtue signaling ideology bereft of any north star beyond the belief that we should all be nicer to each other. In the Obama years as The Daily Show grew increasingly stale, Stewart proved himself to be the voice of a generation of well-off American liberals who primarily experience politics through their televisions. The West Wing is critiqued for having a poisonous influence of politics as entertainment that permeates the Democratic Party and has led it down the road to its least popular moment ever, but Stewart deserves every bit of blame for this dynamic as well, and perhaps more. At least many of The West Wing characters were intimately familiar with the hopelessness of Washington before they launched their fictional idealistic crusades. Stewart spent two very real presidential administrations ginning up well-earned hysteria around Republican criminality and government mismanagement, then the moment a liberal came into office, he organized a rally celebrating political moderation while chastising people for being too mean. It simply didn’t matter as much to many like him that millions of Americans were still struggling from the Great Financial Crisis under a Democratic president failing to live up to his campaign promises, the real issue was that some people were calling other people Nazis on TV.

If you wanted to look into the future of a feckless, rudderless Democratic Party with no strongly held ideals other than virtue signaling towards an imagined broad centrist coalition, it’s hard to find a better example than the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in 2010, Stewart and Colbert’s response to the Tea Party protests on the right that successfully elected their desired president. Look closely enough at these protest signs from it and you can see into Hillary Clinton’s future in 2016.

And now Stewart has provided us with another example of how his career has tracked along the major themes in this era of collapse. First, he was the unwitting avatar for the failure of media, then he was the voice for an utterly failed vision of kumbaya liberalism, and now he’s a cynical podcast bro. He hosted Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau and Jeb Bush’s 2016 Communications Director and current writer for The Bulwark Tim Miller on his podcast earlier this month, and they made fun of people still wearing masks, five-plus years into a pandemic that has killed over 1.2 million Americans and over 7.1 million people around the world.

Disappointed to see Jon Stewart & co joke about masking in public. I do it for my medically fragile daughter (Batten Disease). People not masking properly led to her getting pneumonia, which led to her being on life support, which led to me getting price quotes on her cremation just in case.

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— Philip Palermo (@palermo.bsky.social) December 28, 2025 at 8:31 PM

Many people talk about the pandemic in the past tense, which my armchair psychoanalysis reads as a deep-seated trauma response, but people are still dying from Covid to this very day. It’s not over. The United States is no longer reporting Covid data to the World Health Organization under RFK Jr., which I assume all three talking heads above are fine with because apparently only progressives care about Covid now, but the WHO dashboard has over 59,200 reported Covid cases around the world in the last 28 days. That these three podcast bros associate wearing a mask with a political ideology both demonstrates how superficial their politics is (apparently the millions to billions of people still masking in Asia are all woke progressive scolds now), and it serves as just another marker in the ongoing collapse of American democracy. A bunch of well-off men who are not very affected by politics making fun of people who very much are is the short story of how we got here.

We live in an age of vice signaling. Virtue is woke and gay in America now, and so every dudebro with a microphone in front of his face has to show how tough and based he is to the world. Gone are the days of caring about your immunocompromised neighbors and their children who could easily die if they catch Covid, and now shaming them as weak pink haired scolds is en vogue. It’s the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear just outfitted for our modern era where everyone in the mainstream is peacocking for Nick Fuentes’ incel audience.

“Research also shows that Long Covid is very much a working-class problem. A study looking at people in Spain found that workers who had close contact with colleagues at their job, did not mask, and took public transit to and from work are more likely to have Long Covid, thus also highlighting Covid as an occupational problem,” wrote Julia Métraux in an excellent takedown of Stewart for Mother Jones. “The United States Census Bureau also reported in 2023 that Black and Latino adults were more likely to report experiencing Long Covid symptoms than white people.”

Podcast bros like Jon Stewart, Jon Favreau, and Tim Miller function as entertainers for a more comfortable and provably out-of-touch kind of liberal and centrist that has been constantly rejected by the American electorate this century. Their coalition has proven that they cannot win a presidential election without the left (see: 2016 and 2024 vs. 2020 and 2008), all while they condemn the left for supposedly costing them elections because we have the audacity to care about our common man’s basic needs and think we should use politics to fix them. They virtue signal to their comfortable audience for whom politics is mostly tone and affect, while downplaying the material harm their coalition’s policies have created for the less fortunate, to say nothing of how they all got embarrassed in front of the whole world by Trumpism and act like they are still authorities on politics. These supposed bulwarks of democracy failed at their stated goal, and now we live in a world shaped by the consequences of their actions and inaction. They have long proven they know very little about post-Clinton and post-Bush politics, so this recent clip from Stewart’s podcast is just following in this elite coalition’s tradition of jumping on yesterday’s trend while claiming to speak for Real Americans™.

It’s especially dismaying to see Stewart go on the attack against masks when his lone direct foray into politics was heroically fighting for 9/11 first responders’ health care coverage in Congress. The carcinogens they ran towards to save people’s lives on that fateful day ruined theirs, and Stewart was their chief advocate in the public sphere and in the halls of Congress for a decade, being the squeaky wheel on Capitol Hill that finally got the grease to help bring some measure of comfort to their lives. If anyone in elite liberal politics could understand the basic health benefits to masking, especially for people who are immunocompromised because they ran into crumbling buildings filled with cancer-causing chemicals, it should be him. But as the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear demonstrated, Stewart’s politics at their core are superficial, and this kind of TV-driven politics on the left has long proven it can only understand what it sees on TV. Stewart’s career has tracked alongside the major themes of American democratic collapse, so why should he stop now that he’s a successful podcast bro?