Jon Stewart and John Oliver Aren’t Convinced by the 'Too Woke' Blame Game

It's cheap and lazy. Look at the ads Democrats ran!

These two clips from the two of the nation’s political comedians of record, Jon Stewart and John Oliver, are a sharp reminder of the hollowness in mainstream punditry’s latest buzzword: “too woke.” Stewart and Oliver dissect the narrative pushed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and columnists at The New York Times, who paint Democratic losses as the fault of progressives at the helm of the party gone wild.

But the comedians flip this idea on its head, exposing a Democratic strategy that, far from embracing the left, echoed GOP talking points—harder borders, more law enforcement, distancing from transgender rights. Stewart takes aim at the absurdity of this scapegoating, pointing out how Democratic ads hardly whispered the language of social justice, while Oliver notes the campaign’s almost comical effort to placate moderates. In their critique, Stewart and Oliver lay bare a party trying so hard not to be itself that it’s losing track of its own purpose.

JON STEWART: ”I only have one problem with the woke theory. I just didn't recall seeing any Democrats running on woke shit…They acted like Republicans for the last four months. They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions. “

JOHN OLIVER: “First, if what you want is a centrist campaign that's quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed, and she just lost.

Guess how many trans speakers there were at the DNC. I'll give you a hint. It is a very round number. Also, I'm not sure how you reach out to moderate Republicans more than appearing with Liz Cheney multiple times. Unless you literally dig up Henry Kissinger's corpse and prop it up at a rally in Michigan as Katy Perry sings Rolling in the Deep. It's okay not to have the range for a song, Katy. And finally, regarding youth sports, there were a lot of attack ads on that one issue. And it was frustrating to see the Harris campaign fail to formulate a response, especially because it's pretty easy to do.”

Here are some screenshots from actual “woke” ads run by swing-district Democrats in recent weeks.

When pundits and politicians accuse Democrats of being “too woke,” they should be pressed to clarify: which specific elected officials, policies, or campaign messages are they referring to from recent months? Otherwise, it’s just a lazy caricature and doesn’t help move a serious conversation forward.

Anyways.

In a lively conversation on NPR yesterday, I had the chance to engage with Paul Begala—a Clinton-era campaign strategist and White House advisor—and Adrianne Shropshire, founder and executive director of BlackPAC, about the future of the Democratic Party. Here’s the audio and a rough transcript.

ARI SHAPIRO
Will you each begin by giving us a one-sentence headline of where to start? What is your top-line prescription for what Democrats need to do now? Who wants to take it first?

PAUL BEGALA
This is Paul. I’m the old guy, so I’ll start. Democrats have got to rebuild their connection to the working class. The most heartbreaking result of this election is that the Democrats lost the middle class.

ADRIANNE SHROPSHIRE
I think that maybe a little bit of what Paul just said, but there is some party building that actually needs to take place. I mean, there are parts of the American working class that the Democratic Party lost and there are parts that actually held strong. We need to have a conversation with folks, certainly the folks who did not, and understand that. But I just think there’s a lot of conversation to be had. I think the Democratic Party actually doesn’t understand its base.

WALEED SHAHID
I think most working-class and middle-class voters can’t answer the question, “What did Democrats do for me in the last four years?” And in that vacuum, you’re going to get far-right messages about migrants, trans people, conspiracy theories from the far right. And I think that’s the number one question that voters had: in the last four years of Democratic rule, what tangibly improved my life?

ARI SHAPIRO
Let me ask: for as long as I've been covering politics—20 years or so—Democrats have preached “demographics is destiny,” believing that as the country gets less white, it will move left. This election showed that to be false. So what replaces that as the new paradigm, the vision of where the party goes from here?

WALEED SHAHID
My parents and many people—pretty much everyone in my family—has voted Democrat every single year since they've been citizens. My family is Pakistani American, Muslim American. And this was the first year that people in my family voted for Trump. People entertained the idea of voting for Trump.

And it was largely about two things. One was the war in Gaza. Second thing was they didn’t feel like their number one issue, which was the cost of living, that Democrats had done anything for them. And so what they heard from the Democratic Party is “vote for us, we'll protect democracy.” But they don’t really believe that democracy is working for them.

And in that vacuum, unfortunately, strongman authoritarians like Donald Trump, who say “I alone will fix everything,” kind of works because the current system that the Democrats were defending, the status quo that they were defending just wasn’t the mood of the country and wasn’t the mood of a lot of Democratic voters.

ARI SHAPIRO
Adrian, Paul, what’s the new paradigm?

ADRIANNE SHROPSHIRE
Yeah, this idea that demographics is destiny, I think was never real. I think that the challenge for us right now—I think I agree with Waleed about the sort of vacuum that has been left in communities in terms of that vacuum being filled with misinformation, disinformation, outright lies, and propaganda.

You know, we think about what is the new paradigm when you have real conversations with people and not just sort of gloss over and have knee-jerk reactions. I think that we're sort of seeing right now in the post-mortem that's happening about, you know, have we gone too far? Did we go too far left? I think the Democrats need to decide what they are fighting for, and they need to fight for those things.

PAUL BEGALA
We’re fighting for you. If you work for a living, okay, if you actually got to show up for work, we’re a friend of yours. You see, the Democrats have this huge, diverse, fractious coalition, which is a very good way to prepare to govern a huge, fractious, diverse country. So we need web issues, not wedge issues. The other side uses wedge issues because their coalition is not as difficult to manage, and they want to divide ours.

ADRIANNE SHROPSHIRE
I mean, if there was a message the Democrats could say, this is who we are, and here are the policies we're going to put forward, it is those things, Paul. I do think that there’s my concern is that the party does not lean too much into “it is just the economy.”

It is not economic anxiety that causes a woman to go to the polls in her state where there’s a ballot initiative for abortion on the ballot and vote to protect abortion rights. And then it goes to the part of her ballot where the man who was responsible for putting justices on the court that would eliminate Roe and vote for that person. That's not economic anxiety.

PAUL BEGALA
I think it is. See, I think it is. I think she's pissed that her carton of eggs is twice what it was four years ago. And while she stands for choice, she’s like, “Well, at least this guy is going to make my eggs cheaper.”

ARI SHAPIRO
Well, I’d love you to jump in here because Paul distinguished between web issues and wedge issues. If Republicans continue to lean into the wedge issues, should the Democrats run away from that? Should they ignore it? Should they talk past it? Should they lean into it?

WALEED SHAHID
I think that Democrats need a “both and” approach around delivering real economic results to working-class Americans and not shying away from real societal changes that are happening around us that we can’t just pivot away from. We need to humanize trans Americans. We need to contextualize trans Americans. We need to do the same thing that we did in the struggle for gay rights, which is fight these battles and persuade not just in election season, but in the years before election season.

I think we lost to the oldest playbook in human history, which is divide and conquer. And one place I would push back on Paul is that Democrats are too conflict averse. We're trying to be everything to everyone. We need to create villains, you know?

Part of the thing is, the Democrats have gotten too close to the boardrooms of Uber and Facebook and Wall Street, some of the grocery companies, and we need to take on those villains. Otherwise, the Republicans will create and manufacture villains every single time.

ARI SHAPIRO
Last time Democrats were in the wilderness for 12 years, Ronald Reagan for eight years, followed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton got back into power by saying “It’s the economy, stupid.” We’re going to tack to the center. Is the same answer going to work for Democrats four years from now, two years from now?

ADRIANNE SHROPSHIRE
No. We’re in a fundamentally different world than we were then. Again, I would say to Waleed’s point, like, the country has changed, right? Not just in terms of its complexion. And we have to address the issues that are fundamentally dividing Americans. That is not just the economy. You know, we can’t, as a country, we are incapable—unable, unwilling—to address the sort of central issues that have created our inability to get to a more perfect union. And that is absolutely racism. The Democratic Party absolutely cannot run away from that. And I know that for myself and my community, we've been dealing with this for a very long time. I think when we look at Black folks right now, the sort of general sentiment is like, okay, here we are again.

ARI SHAPIRO
Paul, do you think the Democratic pivot looks the same as it looked 30 some years ago when Clinton was running?

PAUL BEGALA
No, no, not really. Sorry, political journalists always think that lives move on a left-right spectrum. And in America, they mostly move on an up-down spectrum. OK, so we got to move to the middle, by which I mean the middle of the middle class. Why are we losing? I think because we've lost the middle class.

WALEED SHAHID
I don’t think we’re that far apart as it may seem. But the thing I’m sitting with is, we do need to be able to speak to Americans in the mood that they're in. And the mood that they're in today is one of change, one of wanting to understand the cultural changes that are happening in the country around race and gender and sexuality. And also their pocketbooks, their pocketbooks are empty; things cost too much. And so we need to do all of the things. I think what I’m frustrated with is there’s been all this talk this past week about how Democrats need to abandon the “woke” part of their party and very little talk about abandoning the billionaires who are part of their party, who are harming our ability to speak in terms of class warriors and not just cultural warriors.

ARI SHAPIRO
The Republicans had Elon Musk, and they managed to do it.

WALEED SHAHID
But they are running, they are running a campaign based on, again, the oldest playbook, which is, Elon Musk is somehow a victim of American democracy rather than a success story of how the economy and democracy works for people like him. And so I feel so ashamed that the Democrats were unprepared for the onslaught of what was going to be attacks on the lines of migration, the border, transgender Americans when we knew this was coming years ago. And yet we didn’t develop a strategy to explain to the American people what this was designed to do, which was to help elect Republicans and people like Elon Musk and get them more power.

PAUL BEGALA
I’m smiling, Waleed, because not only do we not explain it, we rub their noses in it if they dare use the wrong word. I’m sorry, there is a woke, censorious, preachy elitism in our movement. And we gotta flush that. You don’t go to someone who’s busting his ass at seven bucks an hour and tell him he’s privileged just because his skin is white. I’m sorry, you don’t do that. Not if you want to get his vote, okay? And I’m not naive. I understand there’s racism and prejudice in this country. I want to build bridges to those folks. I want to reach out to them. And the easier way to do that is on these economic crises that they’re all facing, irrespective of race, gender, and religion.