Satire as a response to censorship: The satirical boom in the US

In Amber Day's outstanding book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate (2011) I finally got an answer to a question I have been pondering for quite a while now. The question reads: "Why has satire become so widely used in the US over the past few decades?" As mentioned earlier, an increased use of satire in a country can often be explained by that the country has become slightly less democratic (by introducing censorship or becoming less transparent) or more democratic (by reducing censorship slightly). This has led me to wonder if there were any specific processes (undemocratic or democratic) behind the upsurge of satire in the US. Day's response to this question seems to support the idea that satire thrives in a "middle-ground" climate, between democracy and censorship. She writes that the satirical boom of the US can be traced to the presidency of George W. Bush and his administration greatly "expand[ing] presidential power while simultaneously limiting transparency and access". Bush's staff started to become skilled at using "political doublespeak designed to obscure", something which sparked a satirical renaissance.

However, even though satire might have grown in the US over the past few years, due to undemocratic measures being taken by George W. Bush, it is still important to remember that the political climate in the US is far more liberal than that of many other countries. As an example of this, I want to discuss this satirical cartoon of Obama, showing him raping the Statue of Liberty. I found this cartoon recently, while researching satire made on Obama, and I think that it is rather weird that I had not heard a word about it previously. In South Africa, a similar cartoon of South Africa's president (then soon-to-be president), Jacob Zuma, has sparked a lot of debate and even a defamation claim. The reactions to these two pictures in their respective countries show how different their political climates are (of course this also has to do with where the cartoons were first published and the publicity they got as a result of that). This does, of course, also say something about the difference between the leaders of the two countries. Personally, I think that the cartoon below is taking it too far, while I think that the drawing of Jacob Zuma in some ways was justified, as I have argued before. One of the key characteristics of satire is that it should not be libellous, and, therefore, by painting an undeserved picture of Obama, the Obama satire misses its mark in a way that the cartoon of Jacob Zuma does not.