“The West Wing” Was All Too Real
The West Wing has been my favourite show for almost 20 years. Aaron Sorkin writes with one of the most male and most privileged perspectives you will find anywhere, and while I am very cognizant of this, I can’t pretend there wasn’t a five year window in my twenties when it felt like he was crawling around in my brain and turning what he found into network television. Whether it was the production crew of a nightly sports highlight show trying to tell the difference between cookie-cutter stadiums in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, or the staff of a fictional liberal President of the United States listening to a pitch from the Cartographers for Social Equality about why our maps our wrong, early Aaron Sorkin was Me TV.
This was a common feeling around the new millennium. The West Wing shaped a generation’s lens on American politics, for better or worse. These days a lot of people will tell you it was for the worse. It seemed to depict a fantasy world where a liberal president was electable, and in the early Bush years, the show was a welcome escape for people on the centre and the left who felt America slipping away from them. The show was popular at a time when the decay in America’s political culture was starting to show, and a world where the Leader of the Free World was an ethical and decent if flawed person felt like wish-casting.
With the show’s cast reuniting this month for a HBO special stage performance of the third-season episode “Hartsfield’s Landing”, 20 years on from the show’s heyday, it’s a popular axiom that The West Wing didn’t age well, or that it gave a generation of progressives the wrong idea of what fighting for what you believe in looks like. Specifically that quieting bigots with a flawless argument or soul-crushing zinger was how you beat them. The universe where Josiah Bartlet was President was one where you could cathartically make your political enemies vanish in a puff of logic. Now a generation later, liberals seemed puzzled when Nancy Pelosi ripping up Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech didn’t magically put an end to his aspiring authoritarianism.
It’s also been rightly pointed out the gender politics of the show have aged terribly, and were rather stunningly out of sync with even the era in which it aired. Aaron Sorkin’s worlds are places where women were exceptionally professionally competent but damned if they could figure out how to keep a man. And the number of times you heard the President or Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman speak about “behaving as Men do” made it clear the men of the Sorkinverse weren’t fully on board with the evolution of gender roles in society. Overall though, it’s the shows depiction of an incredibly normal White House that makes it feel most dated in the Trump age.
Despite all that, I actually think the show has aged very well, just not for the reasons you would think. During its run, viewers tended to think of The West Wing as a little bit of escapism, where a President who was genuinely liberal could move their agenda forward. But that was never really true of the show. If you watch The West Wing now, what you will see is a fairly true-to-life triptych of all the ways the Democratic Party ran away from its supporters and tried to turn itself into a centrist Republican Party-lite.
When you watch the second season episode “The Midterms” and see Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn recruit a college buddy to run for Congress because he’s a tough-on-crime district attorney, only to have him turn out to be a racist frat boy who picked all-white juries for black defendants, you understand why so many cities that saw protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death were run by Democratic mayors who refused to even consider cutting police budgets.
In season after season we see President Bartlet, a nobel-prize winning economist, obsess over balancing the federal budget. So when current progressives tear their hair out as Nancy Pelosi stays devoted to the House Democratic caucus’s standing “Pay As You Go” rule that requires new programs to be matched with budget cuts elsewhere, you can at least understand where the obsession came from.
The fantasy wasn’t that a liberal President could get things done; the fantasy was that the administration depicted in the show was liberal at all. The West Wing was in fact a remarkably accurate portrayal of the only ostensibly viable progressive movement in America’s embrace of neo-liberalism. It’s value now is serving as a fair dramatization of the foundational choices the Democratic Party made that lead them to where they stand today, beholden to moderates and pollsters who think that mimicking Republicans is the way to win votes.
President Bartlet’s eventual replacement, Matt Santos, was framed as even more radically liberal than his predecessor while championing the end of teacher tenure as one of the central planks of his election campaign. With the distance of time one easily groks why unions gave up on the party.
The show’s writers display some cognizance of the progressive lobotomy they were depicting. In the early days of Bartlet’s re-election campaign, the staff try to piece together an answer to the inevitable press question “Why do you want to be President?” While they stumble over a bunch of catchphrases about training people for 21st century jobs and new advancements in research, Josh’s assistant Donna (who, like many women in Sorkin’s shows, often stood in for the audience in asking expository questions) openly scoffs at their draft: “That’s why somebody wants to be President? Medical research and the internet??” When the White House is preparing to secure congressional support for welfare re-authorization by agreeing to a conservative demand to fund marriage incentives, the exasperated head of the women’s lobby who is trying to torpedo the bill cuts off Josh’s patronizing attempt to explain the need to keep independent voters onside by telling him to “please say ‘white men’ instead of ‘independent voters.’”
The show captures the Democratic Party’s embrace of “innovation” to solve the problems of the disappearing middle class and social safety net in lieu of spending actual money on the existing programs that built a stable middle class in America. In the heat of the campaign for a second term, Josh reminds Communications Director Toby Ziegler, “sustainable growth in Michigan, new economy in Ohio, information technology in Pennsylvania; that’s what you talk about in September.” With the distance of a couple of decades, it becomes clear how this electoral approach of little more than catchphrases paved the way for Donald Trump to sweep all three states.
Perhaps the most distilled version of The West Wing as dramatization of the party’s neo-liberal embrace can be found in the second season episode “Somebody’s Going To Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail”, in which anti-globalization protestors are presented as dilettante anarchist spring-breakers. Any pretence of subtext is abandoned when Toby goes on an explicitly pro-free trade rant, explaining that “food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, cell-phone service is cheaper…it lowers prices and raises and incomes” before finishing with the full eviscerating flourish: “free trade stops wars…then we figure out how to fix the rest!” While deploying his skills in “the science of listener attention” (as he patronizingly explains to the black female police officer who is forced to listen to him), the one tactic Toby forgot was alliteration, which would have allowed room for “austerity breeds authoritarianism.”
The closest the Bartlet administration comes to embracing genuinely progressive policy is when the staff are inspired to make fully tax-deductible college tuition (paid for by closing a loophole that makes corporate CEO bonuses tax deductible) a central plank of the President’s re-election platform. This concept is presented as being uncomfortably radical, when it would still require students (and their families) to shell out tens of thousands of dollars up front. Spending actual money to help working people is never on the table.
It’s not that the Democrats in this world (or in the contemporaneous real world the show was drawing from for inspiration) were misdiagnosing the increasingly racialized, unequal, and corporatized country around them, or were uninterested in tackling those issues. When Jed Bartlet is under attack for concealing an MS diagnosis and ready to cave to pressure from all sides to not run for a second term, he reinvigorates himself for the rough and tumble of politics by rhyming off the laundry list of challenges he wants to confront: a child born in this minute has a one-in-five chance of being born into poverty, 3 million Americans in prison, 44 million Americans without health insurance, and homicide being the leading cause of death for young black men.
But the generation of Democrats depicted in The West Wing, and the generation that has followed, are so paralyzed by the spectre of being labeled pro-big government that they can’t think of, never mind muster the political capital to enact, real solutions that would make a dent in those problems. 20 years on, only Obamacare, a pastiche health care scheme modelled on a moderate Republican concept in Massachussets that still lets private enterprise extract profits from the sick bodies of Americans, has made a noticeable dent in any of those numbers.
Back in the early 2000s, it was easy to forget what genuine progressivism looked like. By the same token, it may be hard today to remember why progressivism was out of fashion at the time, as we see the stark results of several decades of tax cuts, union busting, and austerity. The ascendancy of neo-liberalism was sealed by Bill Clinton’s declaration that “the era of big government is over” in his 1996 State-of-the-Union speech. Any politician who genuinely wanted to use the levers of government to help people was committing themselves to attempting to draw water from an increasingly desiccated rock.
I think this is why The West Wing is a realistic and useful historical artifact. While it feels dated in many ways now, it is of a time that is important to comprehend right now. For years I regularly re-watched The West Wing. Right up to and including Election Night, 2016. As I watched the forever-cursed New York Times election dial edge towards Trump’s name, I put on an episode of The West Wing, I suppose to try to cling to a somewhat sane and recognizable political world. But it was like tasting milk that had gone sour. Something had shattered and I couldn’t enjoy the show or disappear into the world it depicted. Indulging in The West Wing’s universe felt almost delusional in the wake of the shock we had just absorbed.
Four years on, I’ve come to recognize the fantasy wasn’t what turned me away. It was the verisimilitude. To look at The West Wing now isn’t to hand wave and say “that could never happen”; it is more akin to a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic watching the first act of James Cameron’s dramatization where the tall foreheads won’t shut up about the boat’s indestructibility. If you can get past the feeling of watching the middle stages of a catastrophe, The West Wing is very useful for understanding the choices Democrats made how we got American to this current moment. But it’s also understandable if that no longer sounds like many people’s idea of escapist television.
