Democrats Need to Wake Up From Their ‘West Wing’ Fantasy
Ever since President Biden’s debate performance sucked Democratic leaders and political operatives into a looping vortex of panic, people have been debating how we got here and who is responsible. The president himself? His handlers? The media? All of the above, but I’d like to focus on a different factor: Aaron Sorkin.
A whole generation of political professionals are so enamored of “The West Wing,” Mr. Sorkin’s show about the travails of White House occupants, that they now suffer from what I think of as Terminal West Wing Brain.
The show, which ran from 1999 to 2006, portrays politics and policy not as ruthless powermongering pursued by nihilists (that’s “House of Cards”) but as a higher calling that flawed but idealistic people engage in from a place of civic pride. It depicts America as a place that is divided but that yearns for consensus, for the good of the country. Jed Bartlet, the fictional Democratic president, is often reaching across the aisle to a wrongheaded but often well-meaning Republican. It’s an attractive fantasy that bears little relation to the world we live in, where partisan animosity is about more than policy disagreements and is rarely resolved via civil debate.
Most voters will go to the polls in November not to vote for their guy but to vote against the other guy, a phenomenon known as negative partisanship. Voters say they want Americans to be unified, but Republicans mean they want everyone to be a Republican, and Democrats want everyone to be a Democrat. And partisan obstructionism in Congress has deadlocked policymaking in ways that appear to be getting worse. Working across the aisle isn’t easy when your colleagues are telling their constituents that you’re demonic, and pushing conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking in pizza parlors. Bipartisan cooperation requires a shared idea of reality that exists in “The West Wing” but not in the real world.
Adherence to this fantasy is preventing the Democrats from functioning effectively in the current political climate. In response to Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s road map for a second Trump presidency, which includes agenda items so extreme they would be sent back to the writers’ room in Sorkin-land — Mr. Biden offers mostly dry policyspeak. On reproductive rights, the president defaults to talk of rights and reason, while Donald Trump makes utterly false but compellingly graphic statements like, “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.” The Democrats talk about facts and analyses. The Republicans talk about a holy war in which civilization hangs in the balance.
In the “West Wing” paradigm, problems can be workshopped and strategized, sometimes into platitudes that neither offend nor inspire. In President Bartlet’s White House, the very busy characters dispatch tasks with ruthless efficiency. They’re smart, the issues they work on are important and everyone means well. But Democrats are not going to be able to diligently and efficiently workshop their way out of the current dilemma or test all of the potential scenarios. There is no way to meaningfully poll alternatives to Mr. Biden and clinically weigh costs and benefits. There’s no precedent for this crisis, we don’t know what the contextual environment will look like in November, and if the leaking is any indication, not everybody means well.
