It was a one-word answer that said it all. “What are you driving to Washington D.C. for”? asked a gas station attendant outside Youngstown, Ohio who had overheard my traveling companions discussing our destination. “Sanity,” I said. With a nod, the millennial smirked. “God, I hope you find it,” he said.

We were driving across America’s heartland, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, into our country’s political epicenter, hoping to experience something, anything really, that could restore some semblance of faith in our good ‘ol U-S of A. Alongside throngs of the similarly disenchanted, we were on a quest to restore Sanity and/or Fear. Unfortunately, the rally was just as discordant as its name.

I was initially thrilled to see the national outpouring of support for whatever the hell this was supposed to be. I still had no idea, and I doubt anyone else in attendance really did either, but it didn’t matter. This was significant. How could it not be? I met someone who came all the way from Alaska to be there.

Somewhere in the shadow of the Washington Monument, lost in a crowd of faces that were each a direct reflection of the others, the clarity began to take hold. This was utterly insane.

In what one can only assume was at least in part a response to Glenn Beck’s rally held this August, Comedy Central’s Daily Show host Jon Stewart championed his rally as a clarion call for sanity; a concerted effort to give voice to the marginalized middle in American politics and bring rationality back to our national dialogue.

I’ll offer a hearty “Amen” in my best religio-conservative voice for that goal, but in reality he was doing exactly the opposite.

It’s not difficult to recognize that polarized extremes have come to control American political discourse. Would a full third of the country really believe President Barack Obama was not a US citizen if extreme-right talk show hosts weren’t whispering such suggestions over the airwaves?

Do a sizable block of liberals actually believe the Tea Party is some overblown Republican conspiracy to wrest control of the Capitol from the Democrats? Or is that just a liberal brain-fart turned viable theory by the likes of Rachel Maddow, and other extreme-left commentators?

Some of the blatant buffoonery we saw in the election serves as testament to Stewart’s point. With over-gassed rhetoric about big government spending, Democratic boondoggles and backwardly racist Tea Partiers, the self-proclaimed rational middle really did seem to be stuck in the ditch, spinning its wheels in the muck of American politics.

Frustrated that I had driven across the country to attend a rally for a cause I still couldn’t discern anymore than I could the faint voices coming from the stage at the other end of the National Mall, the unsightly reality began to sink in.

Despite his noble goal, Stewart was really only shoveling more muck into the ditch, and the disenchanted in attendance were stepping on the gas.

By branding his call the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” Stewart suggests anyone not on his side is patently insane, effectively putting himself and his followers far out on yet another polarized limb of the liberty tree.

While Glenn Beck and his followers seem to have most of the momentum on the far right, and Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher flop around on the far left like fish trying to escape a pond poisoned with conservative ideals, Stewart is creating a whole new extreme.

This new extreme could very well prove to be the most destructive of them all. The far right and left usually polarize themselves on grounds of political disagreement, accusing one or the other of being regretfully misinformed. Stewart takes it a step further, setting himself and his followers up as the only group with sanity in a political battlefield otherwise overrun with insane and irrational sociopaths.

Rational people can agree to disagree, but sane people will seldom even look for, much less find, common ground with those they see as certifiably insane.

Personally, I tend to agree with Stewart that our political discourse has been degraded to a point where it sometimes is hard to call it rational, or even sane. But rational discourse and a politic marked by sanity will never be possible without mutual respect for all parties involved. And this is exactly what Stewart is making nearly impossible right from the start.

Sanity comes when distinct entities in the mind are in agreement about the true reality of the world. Sanity in politics is no different. It can only be achieved when individual parties and voters from the periphery extremes to the massive middle recognize the real problems facing the country, and agree to work together to fix them.

Stewart did hit this one idea in his closing remarks, and some might argue this was really the point of the whole thing.

“We know, instinctively, as a people, that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together,” Stewart said. “And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promise land. Sometimes, it’s just New Jersey.”

Unfortunately, with a crowd that was hardly more politically or culturally diverse than the one Glenn Beck drew, and a platform that was far more polarizing, Stewart’s ostensibly laudable message was lost in the very muck he was trying to transcend.

I think a good majority of the people who attended the rally really did think they were coming to the promised land in a way. Unfortunately, they didn’t even end up in New Jersey. They ended up on yet another political limb, just as isolated from collective sanity as their Right and Left antitheses.

Kyle Mianulli ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism, philosophy and political science.