Jon Stewart is back at it again, playing the role of political chiropractor, desperately trying to realign the spine of a party he helped fracture. The New Yorker recently offered Democrats a fresh 2028 campaign slogan: “Overcome the stink.”
It’s classic Stewart — sharp, crowd-pleasing, and seemingly wise. The kind of quip you’d see on a bumper sticker next to “Coexist.” And yet, the stench he’s gesturing at — the political decay, the public disillusionment, the loss of coherence on the Left — didn’t just drift in from elsewhere. It festered under his watch. And whether he’ll admit it or not, he helped create it.
If Democrats want to “overcome the stink,” they’ll need more than a clever line from a once-half-decent satirist.
Now, let me be clear: Stewart isn’t wrong that the Democratic Party reeks. It does. The media blackout over Biden’s cognitive frailty, the coordinated silence around his son’s laptop, the inability to speak plainly to working class Americans — it all reeked. But Stewart throwing up his hands now, acting like a wise elder disgusted by the filth, also reeks.
For years, when TV actually mattered, The Daily Show was the moral compass for millions of liberals — and eventually, far too many treated it as their only compass. Stewart wasn’t just mocking Republicans; he was reshaping how Democrats thought, spoke, and saw the world. He introduced a generation to the idea that being smug was synonymous with being right. That sarcasm was substance. That having a punchline was the same as having a point.
Even his comedy, once hailed as clever, incisive, “for the thinking man,” was always marinated in elite arrogance. Stewart didn’t just poke fun at politicians. He mocked belief. Mocked faith. Mocked patriotism. Mocked the very idea that tradition might be worth taking seriously. To him, these weren’t pillars of a shared culture — they were punchlines. Red meat for Manhattan elites.
And it worked. For a time. Stewart’s smirk became the face of smart liberalism. He gave a generation permission to roll their eyes at anything that smelled vaguely of God, country, or duty. His jabs didn’t just reflect progressive sensibilities — they sharpened them into weapons. Into blinders. Into a worldview where irony replaced inquiry, and anyone with a flag pin was automatically a joke. He helped solidify a distrust in middle America, fostering a culture of ridicule and sanctimony disguised as satire. That’s his legacy. He didn’t just host The Daily Show. He helped write the script for the very political dysfunction he now claims to diagnose.
That mutation gave birth to a pretentious class of Democratic operatives, consultants, and digital influencers who think politics is mostly about getting claps from the right people — fellow blue-checks, podcast hosts, and Beltway cocktail circuits. It also gave us a generation of liberal “wonks” who treat policy like a graduate seminar — over-intellectualized, emotionally sterile, and completely detached from the lived reality of working Americans.
For them, it’s all about optics, metrics, and reprimanding those who dare to differ. They speak in charts, not language, and moralize through models. Meanwhile, flyover voters are cast as NPCs — passive, stupid, or bigoted — obstacles to be managed or avoided, rather than citizens to be heard. Their pain is reduced to polling data. Their values, pathologized. Their anger, dismissed as ignorance.
Stewart helped create this cultural osmosis. He taught liberals to see themselves as the only adults in the room. To laugh at nuance, scoff at dissent, and weaponize certainty. It’s no coincidence that the party of Stewart became the party of condescension. That posture became doctrine. And it’s part of the reason why Democrats today can’t speak to ordinary Americans without sounding like they’re reading a disclaimer off a bottle of Lexapro.
Just because he went away for a few years and returned to save The Daily Show from its descent into the ludicrously left-wing abyss doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten who he was at his peak. In fact, it’s when he was at his most influential that he was often the most nauseating — taunting Christians, mocking middle America, belittling anything outside the New York Times bubble. That’s the version of Stewart that shaped the culture, not the elder statesman with graying hair and postmortem clarity.
To be fair, Stewart does have moments of clarity. His advocacy on veterans’ healthcare and his defense of free speech in recent years are glimmers of the man he could have been. But when he tries to paint himself as outside the system, as a truth-teller disgusted by the very establishment he helped glorify, we must push back.
If Democrats want to “overcome the stink,” they’ll need more than a clever line from a once-half-decent satirist. They’ll need a reckoning. One that admits the party became addicted to cheap applause and lost the ability to speak like a normal human. One that confronts how media figures like Stewart helped shape a party that confuses moral superiority with actual morality.
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