John Oliver Knows Why Americans Keep Voting Republican. Democrats Aren't Enough to The Left

 

In  the aftermath of the 2024 election John Oliver continued to act like every other progressive I've heard on line from Daily Kos to the Nation: the reason that the Democrats are have such horrible approval ratings with the public is because they haven't gone far enough to the left.

Perhaps one should only be shocked its taken Oliver more than a decade to reach this conclusion, consider that the average episode is little more than the deconstruction and despair that makes up the bulk of all progressive academic writing that he clearly admires. Admittedly during the era of Trump he has at best only been able to damn the Democratic Party with faint praise even as he argued that Trump would destroy America as we know if he was elected and reelected. At best he argued that voting Democratic was a better alternative then someone he described as a fascist but he never seemed that happy to argue in favor of it. By and large his approach to American politics was to excoriate the Republicans and by and large ignore the Democrats running for Congress over this last decade.

Giving everything last Week Tonight has been through during the past decade, given how much the average audience and ratings for late night across the board have dropped, given how many elections Democrats have lost and – not for nothing – given that the entire country is not made up of Hollywood liberals or people who watch his show, at the very least you'd think after last November he'd be willing to put himself under the same deep dive that he puts every one of his subjects.

But no, like the college age viewer that makes up the bulk of his audience John Oliver has reached one inescapable conclusion: the Democrats have made a mistake by trying to reach out to middle American voters and must make an effort to continue to double down on progressive values which he and his viewers are convinced America wants no matter how many elections the Democrats lose proving him wrong.

Oliver, it's worth noting, never does corrections, never argues that outside the bubble he lives in (not the one he inhabited during the pandemic) progressive values might not be popular not just with America but the rest of the world.  To use what might be the most glaring example of this expatriate he ignored the fact that after the snap election of 2017 Labor had the biggest defeat in 84 years under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. This never made any part of his coverage of British politics in the last ten years; he never discussed them in the lead up the Labor elections last year and he left that part out when he asked why Johnson managed to rise the power anyway. If Conservative politics were as horrible as he makes it clear in his description of them and there was so much chaos at the top, then the obvious question is why couldn't Labor under Corbyn win against it. Why was the most left-leaning leader of Labor given such a hard rejection from the polls just three years after Brexit? All the years he raged against Conservatism he never argues why its popular with the British voter. Typical from a man who would be part of the 'Loony Left' (as he would be considered in his own country and consider of a badge of honor)

We see this same mindset in so much of his arguments leading up to 2024 when he spent so much time arguing how horrible it would be for Republicans and Trump to win again but never commented on Biden's health for the office. Nor did he ever seem inclined to give Biden much credit when he was President for anything he did. That doesn't make him different from every other late night host who's made it clear Republicans are evil incarnate. But at least most of them are willing to be shills for the Democrats in exchange. Oliver couldn't even work up that level of enthusiasm.

John Oliver has spent a lot of time raging against the horrors of America and the world and making it very clear how badly our society has screwed things up. Yet he continues to believe sincerely  and foolishly that the solution is, as always, for the world to go more to the left. As it has been said over and over Harris lost white working class voters and rural Americans by enormous margins and Trump made inroads into much of the Obama coalition. But  Oliver chooses to argue that they only voted for Trump because  - like so many progressives - he has always equated the status quo with things getting actively worse. For a man who seems to clever, that's a kind of naivety that the only most blind progressives argue.

In a recent show John Oliver chose to target Chuck Schumer for choosing to make part of his audience an imaginary Long Island family. Long Island, as any New Yorker knows, has always been more conservative then Manhattan. Schumer was elected to serve New York State, not just New York City and the state has a fair amount of conservative voters. Because those kinds of voters are not Oliver's intended audience – in large part because he's been openly mocking them at best and shooting venom at them at worse in basically every episode of Last Week Tonight for the last decade -  he feels free to mock Schumer for trying to appeal them.

Yet it is that very blind spot that is why Oliver and late night shows have been struggling for the last several years, another reality Oliver chose to ignore when he openly berated Jay Leno for saying as much in an interview. Leno didn't call him out by name but Oliver had no problem attacking him and calling him a villain. The fact that Oliver almost certainly wouldn't have his job if it wasn't for Leno shows the blindness many liberals in Hollywood frequently did. And considering how much of his own show is about pointing out how certain people who are popular have flaws in their logic, it's particularly telling that Oliver chose to ignore it when it was delivered to him. This is, sadly, common ground with many on the left who don't thank previous generations for allowing them the privelege to have what they do, only damn them for their failings.

I won't argue that Schumer did it well but it does show the disconnect between  the left and politicians that Oliver seems to think that a man who has been in office and a Democrat longer then Oliver has been a US citizen might know more about the average voter than a comedian. That Oliver is arguing that it is the job of Democrats to go to a different sort of imaginary friends – those supposed progressives who the left is certain is out there but either refuse to come out to vote or are choosing to vote Republican because they prefer what he considers a fascist state to a functioning democracy – is frankly the kind of logic only someone who never talks with anyone outside of Hollywood or engages with anyone who isn't a peer could think.

And that's keeping with how while every episode he argues how conservative policies both in America and around the world are destroying it, he never once delivered an alternative argument that the world wants progressive ones. That makes him guilty of the same cherry picking he accuses everyone else of doing. He will argue for the policies of the Justice Democrats but ignores the statistics that beyond the bluest districts in the blue states in America – including with one exception, his own state of New York – the voters have rejected those candidates and the policies they represent. Similarly while he regularly lambasted red state America as being everything wrong with the country, he ignores how in red states like Kansas and Kentucky Democrats were able to win during Trump's first term.  He won't accept the idea America is purple or that there is red even in his home state. No America is dark blue and only the idiots keep it red. Those people who even try to argue the existence of the red – as Schumer has to do just to keep holding office  - deserve to be mocked mercilessly.  

Oliver mocked Schumer by saying he chooses to write his show for an imaginary family of his own. This isn't funny because Oliver is essentially arguing the same thing all progressives do: rather than try to reach out to existing voters who my vote Democrat by going to the center, the solution is to go further to the left where he is convinced that untold millions of Americans are just waiting for them to show up.  If the President tweeted something like that Oliver and his colleagues would mock him as it further proved his lack of reality.  That Oliver is saying that doing the same thing is not just a sound electoral strategy but the only one that will earn his and his viewers vote shows how far up on his ivory tower he is.

For John Oliver his opinion of Trump hasn't changed. Everyone he knows thinks that he is a complete and other fascist monsters who is going to be a dictator if somebody doesn't do something to stop. Everyone he doesn't know is an illiterate idiot stupid enough to be fooled by a New York millionaire and doesn't deserve to live in this country because they like him. Elected officials, as Oliver has never said once n the ten years before I stopped watching him, have to have a broader sense of the voting public both at a local and national level. They don't have the advantage, as Oliver does, of being able to see how things will play out in hindsight. They are elected to serve the voters, not the viewers of a TV program. And the state of New York almost certainly has more registered voters then there are people in New York who watch Oliver's show.

And the fact that Oliver doesn't really think democracy is the best way to solve the problem's society faces really doesn't make him that different from all the other talking heads on Fox News. Except they have a solution to the problem and their viewers are more than willing to follow them off a cliff. They also have a much larger reach than Oliver on his best day, something he and his colleagues also refuse to acknowledge even now.

I stopped watching Last Week Tonight in the aftermath of the 2024 election because it was becoming increasingly clear how disconnected Oliver, like all of his late night counterparts,   are from what the voters have made clear multiple times. It's now clear that in the last year Oliver has basically done what so many of his fellow liberals in Hollywood have done: double down on their positions and refuse to acknowledge that they might have made misjudged the American people's perspective on their view of the world.

Even this week's Emmys showed them in denial. There were fewer competitors in every late night category than even last year, a result of how the medium is beginning to disintegrate. Yet they went out of their way to cheer Stephen Colbert for his win after being cancelled by CBS earlier this summer on what they considered a middle finger to the corporate overlords. The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight won multiple Emmys as always with the former taking awards mocking the Fox News viewer for their own liberal audience.

I suspect that in this regard it will increasingly look like a last hurrah for those in late night, still blaming the enemy without what they have done to isolate the audience that was once the only thing that mattered. That John Oliver used his latest show to openly mock the Democratic leadership shows that for all his perceived intellect; he still doesn't understand politics any more than he did when he got started in late night twenty years ago. That didn't used to be a fatal flaw in an entertainer. Now it's wrecking late night, Hollywood and clearly is a part in the partisan divide.

Yet Oliver and his colleagues have done nothing to change their material. Why should they? As I said, they have an exit strategy the rest of us don't. They're wealthy and in a liberal industry. Most of the people they claim are suffering don't have the same options they do and might think that they're doing the opposite of helping. I can't help but be reminded of one of the best joke of Nikki Glaser's hosting of this year's Golden Globes. "Hollywood can do anything except convince people who to vote for." You'd think Oliver would have learned that lesson before he criticized someone who is trying to convince people to vote for him and his party. Apparently he still hasn't gotten the joke.