Consuming Politics: Jon Stewart, Branding, and the Youth Vote in America

With an ongoing war overseas and the controversies of the Bush years, we might expect the young people of the 2000s to take to the streets as they did in the 1960s to vent their political frustrations at the failures of the political system. But the angry youth, though, just don’t seem to be there anymore. And while they can be mobilized - as they were in the elections of 2006 and 2008 - their political world is very different from those of young people in the past decades. In this book, the authors use a combination of methods to understand how young people in the early twenty-first century see the political world, and why they are choosing not to be engaged in it. Rather than treating young people as a monolithic group, the authors look at three groups of youth in turn: Republicans, Democrats, and independents. While all of them see politics largely in terms of consumption, they also differ in terms of what aspects of the political world excite them, and what changes would be necessary to bring them into politics. Special attention is paid to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the one political outlet that young people of all political stripes can agree on. Minimizing academic jargon and translating statistics into plain language, Consuming Politics is accessible to anyone who wants to know what happened to the angry youth and what can be done about it.