Tag Archives: Article

Has the Colbert Nation Occupied Wall Street?

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Sophia A. McClennen, Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women’s Studies at Penn State University, and author of “America According to Colbert: Satire as Public Pedagogy” has written a new op – ed piece of the current ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement and the ‘Colbert Nation’.

Across the globe and from US city to US city, we watch daily as waves of protesters, many of them young, take to the streets. Such images seemed impossible five years ago. Back then the mainstream buzz was that the youth were “stoned slackers” — too narcissistic and tech obsessed to engage in real protest. Where did all of this young activist energy come from?

The Colbert Nation.

Think that a loyal fan base for a cable television personality can’t have anything in common with a young, politicized group of activists? No doubt there is a difference between the OWS protesters and the Colbert Nation, but they have more in common than you might suspect.

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The New York Times: “Comic’s PAC Is More Than a Gag”.

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Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow may be a running gag on “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, but it is spending money as it sees fit, with little in the way of disclosure, just like its noncomedic brethren.

Comedians, including Mr. Colbert in the last election, have undertaken faux candidacies. But his Super PAC riff is a real-world exercise, engaging in a kind of modeling by just doing what Super PACs do.

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“I am much taken by this and can’t think of any real parallel in history,” said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution. “Yes, comedians have always told jokes about elections, but this is quite different. This is a funny person being very serious, actually talking about process. What comedian talks about process?”

Mr. Colbert not only talks about process, he has become a part of it. The current law governing political action committees was laid down in a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, which lifted many restrictions on how corporations, unions and others could spend money on behalf of almost any cause.

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