Welcome to the Decade From Hell, our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.





Appearing at a San Francisco comedy festival last year, Jon Stewart looked back at his legacy. When a clip of him “eviscerating” a politician on The Daily Show went viral, Stewart said he would think, “Great. What happens next?” While liberals were cheering on comedians for humiliating the right, the Tea Party was “off the highway by Stuckey’s taking over school boards.”



Stewart turned The Daily Show, which he hosted from 1999 to 2015, into a satirical juggernaut. But nine years ago, on October 20, 2010, he tried to go beyond satire to answer the “What happens next?” question. The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which he hosted with his then–Comedy Central colleague Stephen Colbert, was an attempt to shame a media industry addicted to theatrical conflict and shallow analysis. It was also meant to showcase common ground typically lacking in political coverage. “This is not a political rally in any way, shape, or form,” Stewart told CNN’s Larry King. “It is a visceral expression of a people fed up with the reflection that they are shown of themselves as a divided people.”

The rally was a huge success: 200,000 people crowded the Mall in Washington, D.C., to watch Stewart and Colbert do their bits on stage, accompanied by musicians like John Legend and Kid Rock. But it hasn’t aged well. Stewart’s call for Americans to transcend party lines and concentrate on their shared aspirations is embarrassing to watch in 2019. Though largely forgotten for good reason—it is, aside from Rosewater, probably the least funny thing Stewart has done—it serves as a milestone in recent political history: a nadir in the left’s years-long refusal to reckon with the extremist right.



The rally was initially conceived as a parody of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally on August 28, 2010, itself a version of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, but for angry white people. Right-wingers across the country had turned town halls into shouting matches about the deficit and the Affordable Care Act that were really thinly veiled attacks against the first black American president. That energy had turned into the loosely connected Tea Party movement, and Beck’s event was a grace note to the Tea Party–fueled GOP takeover in the midterm elections later that year.

