On Monday, the cast of the TV show “The West Wing” appeared at the White House, with President Joe Biden posting a photo saying “Always a pleasure welcoming President Bartlet and his staff back to the White House.”
It was like seeing two fake presidents at once, and neither the fast-fading current commander in chief nor the make-believe one have been anything but terrible for American politics.
In life there are many things that are fun, or tasty, or stimulating that really aren’t very good for you. It is now clear that “The West Wing,” Aaron Sorkin’s seminal drama set in the White House was one of them.
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What Sorkin, and a supremely talented cast, tapped into back in 1999 was a new way of looking at politics in which the two major parties were no longer seeking common goals through different approaches and policies.
Instead, each party was first and foremost a team, one of which represented moral goodness and progress, and almost always won, while the other was regressive, and even sometimes tinted with evil.
The pretend Democratic president, Jeb Bartlet and his tireless, plucky staff are unquestionably the heroes of the show, and in a way, were like a shadow presidency during the rocky eight years of George W. Bush, which it more or less coincided with.Â
This was how it was supposed to be, with the good, decent people in charge, not the Donald Rumsfelds or Dick Cheneys of the world, and miraculously, unlike real life, there was usually a solution to the crisis or problem if only the Bartlett administration did the right thing and stuck to its moral, neoliberal worldview.
Even lying could be justified for these fictional high priests of the Democratic Party.
In an incredibly prescient example of this, Good ‘Ol Jeb Bartlet, it turned out, was hiding the fact that he had multiple sclerosis from the American people during his first election. Season two ends with him being asked if he will run again, despite the lie. Sound familiar?
Well, he ran again. And won.Â
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Yes, he accepted Congressional censure and there were other mild punishments, but the clear message from Sorkin was that telling the truth is irrelevant, it only matters that the good guys win and the bad guys lose.
The political realignment we have seen this century, with the Democrats lurching to the left, especially on social issues, is in part a product of this quasi-religious view of the parties. New orthodoxies emerged around gay marriage and trans treatment for kids, abortion, became something to be celebrated, not to be kept safe, legal and, rare.Â
Two years before “The West Wing” launched, in 1997, the movie “Wag the Dog” came out, written by Hillary Henken as well as David Mamet, in whose shadow Sorkin has long labored. What is telling in this behind the scenes look at covering up an election scandal, starring Robert De Niro, is we are never told which party the president he works for represents. It’s irrelevant.
In a way, “Wag the Dog” is far more realistic than “The West Wing” in this respect. Political operatives are driven by a desire to win. That’s also what they are paid for. Their job is to attain power, not “do what’s right,” even if they believe the two are one and the same.
Today, for many Americans, politics is not about what is effective, but is more like an identity.
Most of the voters I have met across the country couldn’t even dream of voting for someone of the opposite party, the mere notion hits them on an emotional level.
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One could argue that the West Wing was a 7-year ad for the eventual presidency of Barack Obama, the series even ended with the election of the first non-white president. Since then, especially with the arrival of Donald Trump on the scene, this personal and emotional relationship with politics and politicians has persisted.Â
But in my conversations with voters this year, unlike the two previous presidential cycles, I see more cracks in the West Wing worldview of the political universe.Â
In Ohio, recently, I met Nick, a knife maker in his 30s from Maine on his way to a convention in Indiana. He told me “We agree on 85 percent of things, but instead of doing anything about them, we focus on the other things.” He’s far from the only American I’ve met who just wants nothing to do with party membership being a big, intimate part of his life.Â
The last actual presidential candidate that Nick voted for was John McCain, in 2008, just two years after the West Wing went off the air, now he always writes in Willie Hugh Nelson.
If either of our parties can move beyond the destructive us vs them politics of the last 25 years, exemplified by the West Wing, there are voters who might be interested again, voters who can win elections.
But for now, too many of us are still stuck in Sorkin’s black and white world of politics, still enemies of our own fellow citizens, and still frustrated that everything doesn’t simply work out how it should because of our high morals and good intentions.Â
