Partisanship is a phenomenon, much like political correctness, that appears to be both highly prevalent and nearly universally opposed. Jon Stewart’s 'Rally to Restore Sanity', held last year, marked a highpoint of what one might call ‘liberal anti-partisanship’. It is ‘liberal’ though only in the sense that it makes its appeal mainly to liberals; its character on the other hand is, in several key respects, a regressive one and it is important to recognise its dangers. This is because it encourages us to narrow political discourse, cutting off the more radical left and right - and it sows confusion by suggesting this restriction is necessary because the ‘partisan’ fringes are the ones guilty of “shutting down debate”.  

Jon Stewart is America's leading satirist and, through his satire, one of the country's most respected political commentators – an exception to H.L Menken’s rule that America fails to take its comedians seriously enough. For various reasons Stewart has tried to avoid being this exception, reminding everyone that his program comes on after one based around “puppets making crank phone calls”. Yet there have been two occasions where Stewart admits to making something like a conventional political intervention. First, when he devoted an episode of his program to promoting the passage of a Bill which aids the ‘first responders’ to the 9/11 attacks. And second, his Rally to Restore Sanity against partisan hyperbole. [1]

Stewart sees cable news as the driver of political partisanship. What are little more than rivalries between cliques of the Washington establishment have been popularised in order to liven up 24-hour news. The effect of this is that every political issue is turned into a proxy in the never-ending war between Republicans and Democrats - in which battle victories go to whoever can most effectively impugn the motives and character of the other. Is Christine O'Donnell a witch? Is health care reform going to “pull the plug on grandma”?   

The basics of this critique seem sound. Stewart’s view is certainly a great deal more attractive than the anti-populism of self-proclaimed ‘centrist’ opponents of party loyalty. The problems with his critique come first because he accepts too much of the partisan view of politics. And second because he uses his populism to more credibly attack those who reject nationalistic assumptions.

Our guide to the first problem ought to be Glenn Greenwald. For him, the partisan system closes down debate, in the most serious cases, not by shouting it down but by passing it over in silence. If the only debate is between two sides then there can be no controversy when they agree. Take the issue of the debt ceiling. Over the course of the dispute Obama gave up on defending stimulus and began to champion the need for austerity. [2] Where once the need for spending cuts was a position within the debate Obama turned it into a bipartisan consensus upon which the whole debate was based.

Opponents of partisanship should be on the lookout for such assumptions - which are only protected from scrutiny by the workings of the partisan system they oppose. Instead many tend to reason that any position which unites such bitter rivals - who seem eager to disagree on anything - must be close to a truism. At one point in Stewart’s interview [3] with the liberal news anchor Rachel Maddow he seems to leave himself room for a critique of just this problem with partisanship. He argues that “Republican [versus] Democrat” is not really “the main conflict in our society”. If so perhaps both parties find themselves on the wrong side of some other conflict – between classes, perhaps? Yet Stewart's own examples of the “right fight[s]” that the partisan system misses – “corruption versus not corruption, extremist verses regular [people]” – and his idea that all political journalism should do is “keep… them honest”, suggests that he isn’t much concerned with the consensus on ideological matters.

Moreover, Stewart is particularly guilty of making a parallel mistake; he often supposes that to depart from the bipartisan consensus in a rightward or leftward direction is to take a particularly partisan position. This is the idea that reached absurdity when Senator Jim Webb accused Greenwald of being “on the partisan flanks” of the Democratic Party, precisely because the journalist criticised that party, from the left. In Stewart’s case he objects to Maddow calling George Bush a war criminal and giving coverage to others like Code Pink who do the same. This is his example of the “lefty way of shutting down [debate]” and a sign that politics has become “tribal”. [4] As such, we are led to believe that the more radical one’s position the greater one’s investment in the Establishment idea of politics as a war between Republicans and Democrats. Yet it is surely Stewart, not the radical, who orientates political discourse around the two party system - often using liberal/conservative and Republican/Democrat interchangeably and emphasising his assent to both liberal and conservative beliefs when explaining his lack of party loyalty.

Stewart also resorts to the worst arguments of the centrists in order to defend his claim. He reminds us that Obama too may “technically” be a war criminal and leaves us to suppose this means we should condemn neither man instead of both. Note that this argument appeals to just the kind of loyalty to party over principle it claims to reject; don’t attack their guy in any way that might leave your guy vulnerable.

Stewart’s claim that one shouldn’t label Bush a war criminal is also an example of the second way in which his view narrows debate - in its purported effort to widen it. Commentators like Stewart have objected to the harsh tone of political debate, but have done so by conflating strong criticisms with ad hominem ones.[5] Stewart is worried that people cannot debate and cooperate if they think each other “Marxists actively subverting our Constitution” or “homophobes who see no one's humanity but their own…”.[6] Of course we shouldn’t refuse to consider an argument just because it has an objectionable proponent – or is deployed in service of some objectionable project. But there is a sleight of hand here whereby what starts off as a methodological point - 'play the ball and not the boy’ - comes to mean that one has to positively affirm that one's opponents have the motives and goals they claim. Yet politicians don't just advocate for policies, they enact them and are, as such, proper subjects of debate in which criticisms are sometimes rightly directed towards their person. So when Stewart says we shouldn't call Bush a war criminal, in part because the President “really believed that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous madman and had weapons of mass destruction” he is giving a new anti-partisan spin on the old imperialist trope about our leader’s noble intentions. [7] We start by granting that Bush cannot be a ''bad man'' (Stewart’s caricature of those who doubt Bush’s motives) so that we can ''debate on the most proportional grounds possible'' but soon find that we are already committed to exonerating him of war crimes because war criminals are, after all, bad men.

And of course ‘official enemy’ leaders aren't part of the public debate so civility doesn’t require us to accept their stated goals. At the end of his interview with Maddow Stewart brings up the Iranian government’s arrest of the journalist Maziar Bahari and rightly dismisses - in fact doesn’t bother to mention – the government’s claim that it was trying to defend the country from a Western backed counterrevolution. This case, Stewart says, is an example that “There are… real enemies in the world and really just bad evil things. But there are [a] lot less of them than we probably, from watching all this stuff [on cable news], think that there are. ” It turns out, then, that part of the threat of the partisan media is that it can give us the idea that our leaders can do worse things than merely  “wrong for the country”; their actions may be among the “really… bad evil things” “in the world”. 

Stewart’s fear brings us to what is particularly problematic about liberal anti-partisanship in the post-Bush era. Sometimes, partisan inspired rhetoric can break taboos about certain criticisms of politicians and policies. Late in Bush's presidency even mainstream Democrats criticised his domestic, and to some extent his international, law breaking in fairly strong terms. Among the ‘base’ it was quite common to regard Bush as a criminal and to demand his prosecution. To some extent this was due to the particularly brazen nature of Bush's abuses but a lot of it was a function of the partisan system. As Vivek Chibber, among others, has shown, Bush's foreign policy was not much of a departure from that of previous administrations and the Democratic Party's narrative of Bush as a radical was largely a myth used to suggest that their election would mark a return to a decent and peaceful norm. [8] So the Democrats found themselves legitimating serious criticism of policies which are in fact mainstream (and usually bipartisan). This opened up a space which Greenwald and others exploited; likely radicalising many Clinton-type liberals. As one would expect, the same partisan system has acted to close things down again now that Obama has taken up so many of Bush's policies. But here anti-partisans play a part as well. While the likes of Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald encourage those liberals who agreed with their criticisms of Bush to apply the same standards to Obama, Stewart uses the arguments described above to suggest that such strong criticism could only be a kind of partisan hyperbole which reinforces a phoney establishment game. The sort of person who thought that Bush was a war criminal is unlikely to be moved by the centrist arguments about the value of compromise; they spent eight years bemoaning Democratic ‘capitulation’ to Republicans. Stewart’s argument, by contrast, has likely had a significant effect; what better way to narrow debate than by claiming that it is the fringes that shut it - by shouting it – down? 

Robert McLaren is an undergraduate student at King’s College London, reading Philosophy.

 

References

[1] On the 'Rally to Restore Sanity', Stewart told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that "[in] 12 years [of doing The Daily Show], I’d earned a moment to tell people who I was”. NPR covered Stewart’s intervention on the ‘first responders’ bill here. The H.L Menken is cited by Bill Hicks: p.246 of Hicks, Bill (1993), ‘Letters of Response’ in Harlock, Matt. (eds.), Love All The People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines, Constable & Robinson, London. The Menken quote is “America’s Biggest failing is its inability to take comedy seriously”. (Hick’s added “I couldn’t agree more”).

[2] To be sure, Obama had supported policies of austerity previous to the debt ceiling debate but he was also defending his stimulus program and so couldn't completely endorse the cruder economic theories and rhetoric of austerity - sovereign debt equals credit card debt etc. But by the time of the debt ceiling debate Obama had largely stopped talking about the Recovery Act - and therefore about how “government [has] a role to play” - so that he could lend his full support to austerity programs.

[3] Stewart’s quotes are, unless otherwise stated, from his interview with Rachel Maddow. A partial transcript is here; a full video is here.

[4] The quote “the lefty way of shutting down [debate]” is from Maddow’s question to which Stewart answers with the example of Maddow having called Bush a war criminal.

[5] Norman Finkelstein points out that there are some “statements that might appear uncivil but which are nonetheless factually grounded”.  He gives as an example Allan Nairn’s (single) appearance on Charlie Rose in which the journalist said of fellow guest Elliott Abrams that he should be prosecuted under the Nuremberg statutes (and said to Abrams that Abrams “supported the massacre of peasants and organisers [in Guatemala]…. and that’s a crime – that’s a crime Mr Abrams – for which people should be tried”.).  As Finkelstein says “that’s a factual statement – whether or not, under the Nuremburg statutes, [Abrams] would be guilty of war crimes – that is not an ad hominem. If Milosevic had said at his trial that ‘I oppose ad hominems [such as] your calling me a war criminal’ he would [have been] laughed out of court.”

The first quote from Finkelstein is taken from his paper ‘Civility and Academic Life’ here [PDF]. The second is from the talk of the same name, here (at 17mins, 30sects to 19mins, 30sects). The quote from Nairn is here (at 15mins to 17mins). 

[6] Quote from Stewart’s closing speech at the rally.      

[7] Cf. Mark Curtis on ‘The Concept of "Basic Benevolence”’.

[8] Greenwald discusses the partisan nature of Mainstream Democrats’ opposition to Bush’s law breaking here (38mins, 30secs). Chibber’s paper, ‘American militarism and the US political establishment’ is here; His talk on Obama’s foreign policy which draws from that paper is here.