Austin, December 2049

Today, state officials held a massive parade and public barbecue to celebrate official federal confirmation that Texas is America’s greatest and most important state.

The occasion: The U.S. Census Bureau released estimates showing that the ever-growing Lone Star State, with more than 40.3 million people, had surpassed stagnant California, stuck at just under 40 million people for 30 years.

As Texans boasted about their new status—“We are the greatest civilization of the greatest country on earth,” declared 79-year-old U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, now in his seventh term—Golden State leaders issued well-practiced denials.

“Population isn’t a true measure of greatness,” protested California Gov. Meghan Markle. “California is still the land of the grandest dreams, of the most embarrassing celebrities, of $10 million two-bedroom starter homes.”

But most longtime observers of the Golden State shrugged at Texas’ triumph.

Some noted that, as early as 2023, estimates from demographers predicted that Texas would surpass California in population by 2050.

In retrospect, 2023 was also the year it became obvious that California would willingly cede national leadership to Texas, signaling its surrender with a total lack of response to a startling and historic drop in population.

California’s population had always grown, often dramatically, ever since statehood. And when California passed New York to become the most populous state in November 1962, the moment launched an era in which the Golden State was seen as the nation’s leader in culture, economy, and policymaking.

That era started to end in the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2020 to July 2022, it lost more than half a million people. Many pinned the cause on COVID deaths, and Californians leaving the state. But deaths and departures were part of the population decline.

The real problem was the lack of new Californians. The birth rate fell to a level that made old Europe look fertile. Immigration plummeted too, in part because of cruel and restrictionist federal immigration policies. And Americans all but stopped moving to California, with its rampant homelessness and expensive housing. How could they afford to?

In a saner time, such a rapid reversal of population in a state synonymous with arrival and growth—“California, Here I Come”—would have been considered a crisis. State and local governments would have come forward with new programs to encourage births, to keep existing Californians in the state, and to attract new ones. Budget surpluses could have been devoted to big new tax bonuses for starting families, to loan forgiveness for California university graduates who settled in the state after graduation, and to massive new affordable housing and infrastructure projects.

But 2023 was a very peculiar and unsettled time. People were depressed and anxious. Society was divided and in conflict. The public conversation, diminished by the decline of independent media, offered few visions of the future. Instead, the state and the country were consumed by loud and angry debates about racial and gender identity, and how to reinterpret the past.

So, Californians never seized on population decline as a reason to remake and rebuild the state.

And they never did the democratic math and recognized that losing population would mean losing power and influence.

Instead, Californians used population decline as an excuse not to do new and hard things.

This denial was most prominent on housing. Communities countered state pressure to build more housing by arguing that housing wouldn’t be necessary because there would be fewer people. This was a cynical bit of illogic—there couldn’t be more Californians without more housing—and it ignored the hard fact that California’s housing stock was the oldest in the West (and as old as housing stock in much of the Rust Belt).

But it worked. Media amplified the argument. State courts began embracing an argument that people themselves were pollution under the state’s main environmental law. And housing production, which had dropped by nearly half between the early 2000s and the early 2020s, continued its fall. The housing shortage became permanent, freezing California’s population at 40 million.

A similar dynamic froze California in other ways. With the population of children declining rapidly, school districts shut down schools and programs, instead of expanding educational offerings and building new schools to draw more kids. The state’s university systems, consumed by culture war and workplace conduct controversies, did too little to counter declines in enrollment. California’s powerful environmental groups and labor unions kept fighting efforts to build new, climate-resilient infrastructure in water, energy, and transportation.

The message sent by California to the rest of the world was clear: If we don’t build it, you won’t come.

And you didn’t.

In truth, today’s news on state populations was just the latest in a long series of declines. The Texas economy became bigger than California’s in 2040, which was not much of a surprise. Texas had been the nation’s leader in exports and renewable energy since early in the 21st century. For a couple of generations, Texas invested a higher percentage of its budget in education, and delivered better student outcomes, than California.

Meanwhile, the Digital Age ended the primacy of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The entertainment and technology sectors could operate anywhere and no longer required headquarters in California, or anywhere else.

California’s slide down the economic rankings came quickly. In 2023, California’s governor liked to brag about the state becoming the world’s fourth largest economy. The state is down to 14th place today, and dropping.

Which leaves us with questions. If California had focused more on growth and the future back in the 2020s, could it have remained bigger and richer than Texas? Or could the state at least have forestalled its decline?

Maybe. But we’ll never know, because California never really tried.

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Google brings us page after page of Trump cartoons. He was skewered on two raucous South Park episodes, and Trump parodies and imitations appear nearly as regularly as the NBC logo on Saturday Night Live. John Oliver tore into him on his Sunday review. Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, and other columnists mock him. The Onion thrives on Trump material. The humor website Funny or Die streamed a 50-minute biopic with Johnny Depp in “Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal.” Satirists in several European countries and Mexico have jumped on the subject with glee.

All these sources agree: Trump is ridiculous, and ludicrously ill-equipped for the presidency. But satire has not stopped him. One enthusiastic critic declared that John Oliver’s show on Trump was an “epic take-down”; but as Australian comedian Ben Pobjie pointed out, it did not take Trump down.

Satire, of course, is hardly the only weapon that has failed to make a difference to Trump’s success. On May 3, he embarrassed those who predicted his downfall when he all but clinched the Republican nomination. But comedians face a particular challenge with Trump: His behavior and proposals are so outlandish as to make it difficult to distinguish satire from reality. The Trump phenomenon confounds political ridicule.

In this, the candidate offers the perfect illustration of just how satire works—and doesn’t. We can see in Trump the three features that define this type of humorous critique.

First, distortion and exaggeration are standard tools of satire. But how to distort the distorted, how to exaggerate the exaggerated? As an Economist writer points out, Trump “already speaks in superlatives and hyperbole. He’s already a walking caricature of himself.” Everything about him is oversized. He is a billionaire with many and various businesses—giant towers, golf courses, casinos, a (defunct) university—all buoyantly marked as TRUMP enterprises. He celebrates his accomplishments with superlatives—“great,” “amazing,” “incredible,” “unbelievable.”

His promises, too, are unbelievably “huge”: He will smash the Islamic State group, bring China and its 1.3 billion people to heel, and spend more on defense while cutting taxes. Also, he will protect Social Security without raising the deficit. Then there is his modest proposal to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and make the Mexican government pay for a “beautiful” wall across the entire southern border.

Second, satire is an offensive art—impertinent and impolite, sometimes angry and even cruel. But Trump has ventured into areas of verbal cruelty and insult where no satirist would dare to go. Trump declared that John McCain is not a war hero “because he got captured. I like people that weren’t captured, okay?” (This from a man who avoided the Vietnam War by several student deferments and a medical deferment.) Mexican immigrants, Trump said, include many “rapists.” Trump even did a crude imitation of a physically disabled New York Times reporter; responding to criticism by the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who is paralyzed from the waist down, Trump complained: “I get called [names] by a guy who can’t buy a pair of pants.”

Then there are his comments about women. Challenged by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly over past derogatory remarks about women (“fat pig, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals”) Trump complained of Kelly: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her whatever” (presumably a reference to Kelly’s menstrual cycle). Defiance of normal social constraints is also evident in his language: He boasted that he would “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State group and gleefully repeated an assertion from the audience that one of his opponents was a “pussy.”

So in these first two aspects, satire of Trump is self-defeating. But the third and final aspect offers an opening: Political satire directs its vitriol at the danger of concentrated power.

There is more than a whiff of despotism in Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim visits to America, his belated repudiation of David Duke and the KKK, his approval of torture against terrorists, his admiration of Vladimir Putin, and his angry reaction to disrupters at his rallies. (“In the good old days this didn’t used to happen, because they used to treat them very rough.”) Some, noting Trump’s jutting jaw and bellicose statements, saw a comparison to Mussolini. Bill Maher found Trump if not Hitlerian, “at least a little Hitler-adjacent.”

Still, though, satirists cannot touch a strong core of Trump support. If some of his claims and promises are oversized, to supporters they hold the promise of bold solutions. Though many Trump voters are from the working class, they are not put off by the candidate’s vast wealth because it frees him from special interests and super PACs. If some of his statements are a little intemperate, Trump in their view “calls it like he sees it,” articulating anger at the political elites for the loss of decent jobs through benighted trade policies and pandering to racial and ethnic minorities. As for Trump’s raunchy language, which especially troubles evangelical supporters, he promised not to do it any more. Where others fear Trump as a despot, supporters see the kind of leadership needed to “Make America Great Again.”

They laugh not at him, but with him as, in Tweets and at rallies, he mocks rival candidates, the party establishment, Obama, the liberal media, and—his favorite target—“political correctness.”

Yet the very factors that endear him to his supporters alienate him from many others within the Republican party and in the larger electorate. Polls indicate that Trump is the most unpopular major-party presidential candidate on record.

And satirists, meanwhile, have not given up. Trump remains a prime target of ridicule in every medium. The Boston Globe, for example, produced in its Opinion section a parody front page from a Trump presidency. Headlines include “Deportations to Begin,” “Markets Sink as Trade War Looms,” and “New Libel Law Targets ‘Absolute Scum’ in Press.” Trump did not see the joke: “They made up a story… I mean, the whole thing is made up.”

But this was not entirely made up. The story was an extrapolation, with some exaggeration, of what Trump had actually proposed. The question is whether its version provides a useful and witty insight into the reality it parodies. The Globe considered the paper’s fake front page “an exercise in taking a man at his word.”

It could be that his word will change—that he will now act in a less outrageous, more “presidential” manner. But satirists are likely to keep trying to find a way to get Trump. Their strongest warning may be that, in the light of his record thus far, a Donald Trump presidency would transport us into an alternate universe where the distinction between the satire and the reality would be all but completely extinguished.

The post How “The Donald” Trumps Satire appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Daily Show started in 1996 as a parody of conventional newscasts with a focus on pop culture rather than politics. So when Comedy Central announced in 1999 that Jon Stewart would be taking over with an increased emphasis on political satire, I was delighted. I looked forward to the new Daily Show as a continuation of a strong tradition of political satire in America.

That tradition dates back to the very outset of the American democracy. Ben Franklin, often called “the first American humorist,” entertained and inspired a broad public with his essays mocking the British and his cartoon of a multi-parted snake urging the colonies to “Join or Die.” Since Franklin, jibes at politicians and their supporters have been featured in newspapers, magazines, novels, editorial cartoons, stand-up performances, and movies.

Yet satire was slow to establish itself on the new medium of television. Sponsors and the networks were reluctant to support programs that might upset powerful political and economic interests as well as substantial segments of the public. This became clear when the Smothers Brothers introduced political themes in their weekly show—President Nixon’s Vietnam policy was a particular target—during the politically fraught late 1960s. They battled with censors at CBS, and were eventually canceled. The success in the 1970s to ’90s of NBC’s Saturday Night Live demonstrated there was a large television audience for political satire. By 1999, Comedy Central had the evidence to convince its sponsors of the wisdom of offering political satire four nights a week.

More than 16 years later, as Jon Stewart prepares to step down from the program, the decision to launch The Daily Show appears to have been a good one—its current audience is estimated at over 2 million.

What accounts for the popularity of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? In addition to being an experienced, accomplished comedian who is fast on his feet, Stewart knows his audience. Though the program reaches people of all ages and genders, its core audience is the demographic group beloved of advertisers—affluent young males between 18 and 34. Stewart describes his persona on the program as a “more adolescent version of myself,” and he and his colleagues are particularly good at mocking conventional attitudes and shibboleths in a cheerful, insolent way, and telling sophomoric sex jokes laced with (bleeped) expletives.

By combining his disrespectful exuberance with sophisticated observations about the American political system and foreign crises, he managed to avoid talking over the heads of most of his audience. There are studies indicating that some people get most or all of their political news from The Daily Show, which has suggested the possibility that the program may be increasing Americans’ cynical view of politics, especially among the young. Still, the studies also indicate that most young viewers are—like the many students with whom I have discussed Stewart—quite well informed about politics. As I know from my own avocational experience composing and performing satirical songs at the keyboard, this is a critically important factor for any political satirist, indeed for any humorist, for the ability to evoke laughs is utterly dependent on the audience’s understanding of the jokes.

Another crucial element in Stewart’s rapport with his audience is his point of view. Periodically he seems compelled to tell us that he is an entertainer, not a pundit, and that potential targets for his wit include everyone with political power. He has mocked George W. Bush as well as Barack Obama: Whereas Bush was “incredibly disciplined in persuading us to do the wrong thing” in the Middle East, Obama “would like us to do the right thing, in as chaotic and confused a way as possible.” Yet Stewart’s witty rants, and the parodies by his talented cast, have clearly been framed in a left-of-center, liberal perspective—which puts the program in tune with its younger viewers, who tend to be considerably more liberal than their elders. In a segment mocking the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations are people, he fired up his base: “If only there were some way to prove that corporations are not people, show their inability to love … to see what they do when you walk in on them masturbating.”

The more serious side of Stewart comes through in his deeply felt observations on American TV news. He has a bone to pick with the increasing tendency of newscasters to prefer noisy confrontation rather than careful analysis. When Stewart was invited to appear on CNN’s Crossfire, he lambasted the hosts for promoting meaningless political brawls and demanded that they “stop hurting America.” Largely because of Stewart’s appearance, Crossfire was canceled soon after. But Fox News maintained its shrill, ferocious tone—a criticism Stewart also directed at some of the hosts on Fox’s leftish rival, MSNBC. As he saw it, exaggeration and distortion were appropriate techniques of satire—but not of news reporting.

Still, if Stewart is calling for a more measured, less sensational mode of news presentation he is not suggesting that political satire should be toned down. Indeed, The Daily Show brought a remarkable degree of satirical bite, urgency, and relevance to television. We’ve come a long way from the fearful attitude of networks and sponsors that forced the Smothers Brothers off the air.

Moreover, Stewart’s impact is not limited to The Daily Show. Former cast members Stephen Colbert and John Oliver have moved on to create their own successful shows. And The Daily Show segments are watched via YouTube and other social media in several countries, and the format has been emulated in Germany, Hungary, and India.

But of course, Stewart is not welcome everywhere. Authoritarian leaders are not inclined to emulate America by heaping applause, honors, and financial rewards on satirists. Rather they impose various forms of censorship, including bans, jail, and all-too-serious death threats.

Egypt’s Bassem Youssef modeled his TV program on The Daily Show. But when he said President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader, provided so much comic material that he could cut his staff of joke writers, he was informed that “satire should be more refined, not offensive or vulgar,” and his show was banned. He was back on the air in 2013 after a coup replaced Morsi with a military leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, but again his program was taken off the air when his jokes were disrespectful of the new regime. There are several brilliant Chinese political satirists—but they’re located in Hong Kong or in exile in the West. And, even in democracies, the terrorist murders of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists provide a sobering reminder of the fury that satire can provoke in the minds of fanatical believers.

Yet this does not mean that political satire is everywhere in retreat. In America and elsewhere, an expanded TV presence has been joined by a great eruption of satirical “fake news” magazines and websites like The Onion. So while I await the news of Stewart’s successor on The Daily Show with great interest, that decision is less crucial to the future of political satire than the one in 1999 to appoint Jon Stewart. Certainly a new host will change the show in some respects. But The Daily Show will undoubtedly continue to fulfill the role of the jester through the ages—telling truth to power and making the constantly depressing news of the day a little more palatable through the priceless gift of laughter.

The post Why American Satire Doesn’t Need Jon Stewart appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Getty’s Nancy Perloff, a co-curator of the exhibition, showed the crowd at the American Film Institute a selection of cartoons from World War I that appeared in satirical journals, posters, and prints. The purpose of these cartoons was to elevate a particular culture and denigrate the enemy, said Perloff. The most widely satirized figure of the war was Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German emperor. But how he was depicted differed from country to country. Perloff showed one image by a French artist depicting him in a cape, surrounded by bats; a Russian artist depicted Wilhelm writing in a black book, “I will destroy all of Europe.”

The jingoism, nationalism, and patriotism of World War I cartoons were echoed decades later, when the U.S. entered the war on terror. Marty Kaplan, director of USC Annenberg School’s Norman Lear Center and the evening’s moderator, asked Chris Lamb, author of Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons, to talk about the role cartoonists played in early 21st century American culture and politics.

Lamb said that cartoonists fell into three camps: Some gave President George W. Bush and the Iraq invasion their full support; others wanted to hold onto their jobs and offered tepid support; and “a few brave cartoonists” came out criticizing the president and got hammered by the media.

Turning to cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, who creates the syndicated “La Cucaracha” strip and is a writer on the upcoming TV series Bordertown, Kaplan asked if he feels as though he’s wielding or aspiring to any kind of political power or influence with his cartoons.

“I always say I do this to amuse myself, primarily,” said Alcaraz. “I have strong opinions, and that’s why I do this job. I just want to say the truth.”

Perloff and Lamb both answered yes to the question of whether cartoonists, caricaturists, and satirists have actual power. Alcaraz demurred, but then admitted that a cartoon he drew after Disney tried to trademark the term “Dia de los muertos” (of a large, skeleton version of Mickey Mouse) may have played a role in Disney withdrawing its trademark application.

Alcaraz saw the headline and posted his cartoon on Facebook and Twitter a few hours later. A few hours after that, Disney stood down. World War I artists were in a totally different place in terms of technology, said Perloff. But though immediacy was lacking, the journals in which the cartoons appeared had huge audiences. The home front was “becoming increasingly desperate” over how long the war was lasting. The cartoons “were supposed to uplift people,” she said.

But were those cartoons—and are political cartoons in general—funny? What kind of funny are they, exactly?

Alcaraz said his goal is to be “brutally funny” and “impolite.” He doesn’t draw to be offensive and get a rise out of people, however.

Cartoons are “wincing funny, uncomfortable funny,” said Lamb. They’re “supposed to wake you up and say, ‘You idiot, why haven’t you been paying attention?’”

Cartoons rely heavily on symbols to get a larger idea across. Kaplan asked Alcaraz to three of his cartoons that used the Statue of Liberty in different ways. One, explained Alcaraz, was meant to criticize Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, and depicted a family of immigrants crossing the border as a family of Statues of Liberty. Another, supporting the immigrant students getting an education under the DREAM Act, depicted a brown college student in a robe and graduation cap posed as the statue. The third, on gay marriage, showed two statues holding hands.

“We have to use shorthand symbols to communicate because the primary function of the cartoon is to communicate a very succinct message,” said Alcaraz. Just as Mexican restaurants use guys in sombreros with giant moustaches, cartoonists tend to use the same images over and over again.

Cartoons “can reduce a complex issue into something you can digest in just a few seconds,” said Lamb. “Some of the best cartoons are those that have the fewest words.”

Perloff said that many World War I-era cartoons relied more on pictures than words. The words offered context, but the images—which became codes, in the form of certain animals or body types representing certain countries—were crucial. “What interests me is, how long does a cartoon last? How long do its visual codes stay relevant?” said Perloff.

What happens when the state tries to push back against a cartoonist?

Lamb said that in the years leading up to World War I—the golden age of cartoons—about 500 or 600 cartoonists worked for daily newspapers in the U.S. They were split on whether or not the U.S. should enter the war, but once the country jumped into the fray, President Woodrow Wilson said that criticism was not going to be tolerated. Newspapers shut the door to cartoonists, and Congress passed the Sedition Act. About 2,000 people were indicted, and editorial cartooning was essentially shut down for the next few decades.

After the war, however, cartoonists were able to be more critical. In France, said Perloff, Marianne, the country’s emblem, appeared on a newspaper cover surrounded by wounded soldiers. A drawing of a destroyed village showed a landscape so decimated it looks “like a moonscape.”

Quoting from Lamb’s book, Kaplan said that, “An Israeli cartoonist once called the editorial cartoon the most extreme form of expression that a society will accept or tolerate.”

Alcaraz said that when he reads the hate mail he receives, he feels “I’ve already won the argument.” His image has gotten inside someone’s head—and it’s not going to come out, ever. He even professed to feeling a bit of sympathy for his detractors.

Before turning the discussion over to the audience question-and-answer session, Kaplan asked the panelists if they feel magazines and newspapers should have reprinted controversial cartoons from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the wake of a terrorist attack.

“It was an awful thing that happened, and I felt as a cartoonist, I stand behind them 100 percent,” said Alcaraz. “However, I don’t stand 100 percent behind the material they publish.” He added that as a member of a marginalized group himself, he understands why Muslims in France—another marginalized group—are offended. He has no sympathy for the men who shot his colleagues, but he does sympathize with the Muslim community. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Perloff added that in working on the Getty exhibition, she and her colleagues were appalled at the viciousness of the cartoons. The Russians in particular had no limits and would turn the Germans into pigs and other animals. Those images, however, were internal to their nation. Now, cartoons are circulated to a global audience.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked if a truly effective cartoon is ever in danger of being misinterpreted.

Lamb said that in his view, truly effective cartoons shouldn’t be misinterpreted. “But that’s what makes the art form so difficult,” he said. “It requires so many skills.”

Alcaraz recounted a cartoon he drew called “How to spot a Mexican dad” that was based on his own father, and depicted a man sitting in an easy chair and drinking beers, with chorizo stains on his undershirt—with these various elements labeled with captions. Alcaraz described a pained letter to the editor from a woman who called the cartoon anti-Semitic; she pointed to 1930s Nazi cartoons showing Jews with exaggerated racial characteristics and labels.

The criticism was off-base—but both cartoons do depict stereotypes. Kaplan asked Alcaraz if he finds stereotypes to be dangerous and explosive.

Alcaraz said he tries to take stereotypes “head-on.” His mother cleaned houses, and his father was a gardener; he feels it’s his right to draw cartoons that deal with those stereotypes of Mexican-Americans. But he also feels that if a cartoon of someone with a different background rings true and he can defend it, he can draw it. “I don’t put anything down on paper that is careless,” he said. “That’s my responsibility as a writer and an artist.”

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