LA Weekly: Liberal pop-culture propaganda has failed in politics

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I’d rather discuss how the celebrities and fictional characters who stumped for Hillary, even unofficially, helped sink the ship faster.

During the campaign, the vote-shaming social media blitzes and testimonials we were bombarded with by Hillary’s celebrifriends seemed grating and tacky. Now their smugness is tangible evidence of a larger problem within the Democratic Party: Its image is controlled and marketed by a very narrow group of corporate interests, tech libertarians and affluent celebrities. A few years ago we'd have called them the 1 percent.

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This year will be remembered for its toxic fluff. Provocateurs and dime-store Howard Beales such as Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Lena Dunham and Andy Richter have demonstrated zero political efficacy. If anything, we'll never know how much their smugness ostracized potential allies and inflamed the opposition’s base. No one — even the undereducated and marginalized — enjoys being condescended to. And yet, part of the Democratic strategy was to talk down to the citizens of America or to shame them into not voting for Trump. This sort of satire was arguably successful earlier in Jon Stewart's run on The Daily Show, but it was fresh at the time. It had teeth and seemed to matter. But that formula has been rinsed.

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The most damning of these unintentionally hilarious postelection missives is this obituary of HRC’s political career, published by Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter, in which Hillary is described as an infallible deity and no mere corporeal form but, instead, “light itself." That’s not all. The first graph ends with, “She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen.” But this isn't Clickhole. It's the marrow of liberal confusion and hysteria.

The fictional Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation wrote a bewildering open letter (is there any other kind) the day after the election in which she pulled out some PG invective, calling Trump “a giant fart monster." That’s a perfect example of the type of doughy, undercooked humor Parks and Rec coasted on for more than half a decade.

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And that sort of fictional ideology trickles down to cloud the thoughts of actual people, such as New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum, who then float inscrutable nonsense like this (note that this tweet was later deleted):

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And there's the well-intentioned-but-tough-to-swallow cadre of humor-news talking heads such as John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers. At best these spicy take-makers help blur the lines between fiction-as-news-as-entertainment. At worst they're radicalizing independents against their cause.

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