"Most fictional depictions of D.C. life show it as a super cynical place full of power-hungry schemers who don’t care about anything. This is a convenient device for a certain kind of thriller, but it’s extremely fake."
I want to see a high quality dramatization of the Iran-Contra affair. That was a very interesting time, with the CIA waging brutal covert wars in Central America, and the US President getting away with stuff that merited his removal from office. And the people who plotted and planned Iran-Contra were not power mad cynics but people who were willing to do terrible things for what they saw as the good of the US.
What’s always struck me as bizarre about Iran-Contra, beyond the fact that it’s basically a form of true conspiracy theory, is how absurdly contrived the whole thing sounds. Like, if it were a movie or thriller plot I would have sent it back for editing.
“Really, you’re telling me that the generally unaccountable and secretive CIA, typically funded by the enormous resources of the *Federal Government Fisc,* had to hold the equivalent of a bake sale to *Iran* of all places in order to fund a rightist insurgency in a banana republic? Why couldn’t they just cut them a check?”
I seem to recall Chomsky arguing that the CIA saw cozying up to Iran's armed forces as a good in itself, because the armed forces are what do the coups, and the CIA wanted a coup. I can't vouch for that analysis, though.
Unpopular opinion, George H.W. Bush pardoning his literal co-conspirators in the Iran Contra affair is more corrupt than anything Trump ever did in office. It's one of those, I can't believe this happened in a developed country things. Bush 1 was an actual, indictable member of a criminal conspiracy, won the presidency, and then pardoned other conspiracy members from Reagan's cabinet at the time. Totally wild
Personally, I think this is where the kernel of truth about cynical politics has always been.
It’s just very true that the GOP is dominated by actual cynical schemers. They believe earnestly in the goals of those schemes and they’re not merely for self-enrichment. Bush no doubt believed passionately in an America ruled by the noblesse oblige of society pages types!
But beyond him, there is a whole class of political operatives for whom politics is just a game where the only thing that matters is winning. I think that worked when institutions still had a lot of strength, but you can see how much it’s unraveled in how ineffectual the GOP has actually been since Bush.
One of the problems of the imperial presidency is that I don't think there was a president from FDR onward who didn't try and do some really shady stuff. The two exceptions maybe Eisenhower and Carter, but candidly I would be more shocked if there wasn't than if there was and I just didn't know about it.
Heads up - Trump also pardoned his co-conspirators, Manafort, Bannon and Stone. Its just they’ve similarly gotten away with it. Manafort is guilty as sin having passed confidential campaign info to a Russian spy he’d worked with the previous decade in Ukraine also boosting Putin’s preferred candidate.
But I don’t disagree that’s a really f’ed up episode that doesn’t get enough attention , one that Bill Barr was very much wrapped up in personally. Neither does the similarly f’ed up episode regarding the Valerie Plame affair, retribution for pushing back against cooked intelligence to justify the Iraq war,
ended with a similar set of pardons. You could also mention the episode regarding the 2000 elections and Roger Stone’s Brooks Brothers Riot, as one of the more under appreciated f’ed up moments in US national politics, that greased the skids for Trump’s arrival and all this elite criminal impunity we see today.
If you were to ask Oliver North today about his motivations regarding his role in all this, I'm pretty confident that he would say he was a Patriot doing what he needed to do to protect America and defeat evil Communists intent on destroying America. It's one of the reasons he became something of a celebrity after the Iran-Contra hearings. He almost sincerely believed in what he was saying*.
Which in a lot of ways proves Matt's point. What Oliver North did (and more importantly his superiors) was insanely corrupt and quite worthy of prison time**. Even on realpolitik policy merits, you're telling me that the Contras (and Nicaragua more generally) were some immediate threat to America and warranted such extraordinary attention? And yet, I'm pretty sure North today would tell you he was proud of what he did and did what he did out of love for America and I'm pretty sure he believes it.
*Give a listen to the Slate podcast about this whole fiasco. It's wild. Including the detail that a major figure in this whole enterprise was a repairman in Suffolk County Long Island. The podcast highlighted the hoopla and celebrity around North. But also pointed out that if you listen carefully to his responses, his answers are pretty evasive and mostly amount to "you have to ask my superiors".
**It's a comment below, but wholeheartedly agree that GHWB pardoning all the senior people is not highlighted enough as an extremely corrupt act; especially considering Bush's personal relationship to both the CIA and the people involved. Something the podcast points out that I think is instructive (and something Matt has pointed out) is that in a lot of ways the late 80s and early 90s was an extraordinarily right wing time in America and a high point of Reaganism (although interestingly enough, not Reagan himself). So much of why Iran-Contra did not lead to more consequences is that many ways, the partisan lean of the country was so decidedly in the GOP favor at that time.
If anything, the earnest types can be worse than the opportunists, because if you really believe in the ends, it's easier to justify the means. A careerist may be more likely to play the odds rather than taking ideological risks. Of course, a true desire to make things better is ultimately important, but sometimes it feels like we're screwed either way.
You bring up an excellent point: there is a huge quantity of riveting fodder for drama in the annals of US political history, and Hollywood has barely scratched the surface. Obviously the rise and fall of Trump will one day be one of those stories. I hope they do it justice: truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes.
Snowall does this a litte. It's about the crack epidemic in LA but (spoiler) the supplier of cocaine into the US is the CIA, which is doing it to raise funds for a war in Central America, and the CIA agents discuss their motivations a fair bit.
> it rapidly became an article of faith in the Berniesphere that Sanders himself was wrong about this and the West Wing fandom in fact represented everything that was corrupt and bad about the Democratic Party
I think this faith results from the enticing simplicity of the corruption theory as well as its congruence with our intuition about human affairs. Our brains evolved in an environment consisting of small tribes where a few people could have a significant impact. We therefore naturally want to identify the key actors and their motives that conflict with our goals when society doesn’t function as we desire.
Hence these conspiracy theories have an intrinsic advantage in the “marketplace of ideas.” In contrast, the failings of well-intentioned bureaucrats requires understanding the management structure and incentives of complex, non-intuitive institutions.
Similarly, we struggle to comprehend the diverse interests and sincere beliefs of our country’s legislative representatives and their ever-shifting alliances. It’s hard enough for us to understand how individual people can have radically different models of reality than ourselves, yet alone project that onto large groups of people.
So we fall back on simple narratives centered on a few corrupt villains.
Basically *all* of our intuitions about the way the world works are rendered obsolete by industrial civilization, nationalism/imagined community, or a combination thereof.
Whenever my parents cite “gut,” “common sense,” or “intuition,” my reply is “Your ‘gut’ evolved 200,000 years ago under starvation conditions in a tribe of 50 people. Please explain why it still matters?”
When I was a teen and my dad would cite this kind of stuff, I would (jokingly, of course, with a smirk) tell him that instinct told me that I should crush his head with a rock while he slept and take my place at the head of the tribe.
In defense of the gut - I think you should check out “thinking fast and slow.” Often times intuition is pattern matching based on years of experience. A structural engineer can have a gut feeling on whether a bridge will collapse, and that has nothing to do with evolution. That intuition can often be more reliable than triple-checking your calculations. So the follow-up question to “I have a gut feeling” is what relevant experience do you have from the past to draw on? If someone has no experience in an area and is still trusting their gut, then you have a problem.
If you're going to check out "Thinking Fast and Slow", you need to be aware that it's pretty much at the center of the replication crisis in psych research. Some very, very large grains of salt to take with most of the experiments cited, which casts a lot of doubt on a book based on interpreting the results of those experiments.
The problem I have with "gut feelings" is that it's the same thing that makes old ladies clutch their purses a little tighter or drivers avoid stopping their taxis when they see certain people, just trussed up in prettier language.
You could take any decision making process and judge it by it's worst possible outcomes.
Is your intuition about strangers always wrong and useless? You've never seen a guy on the street and thought "better avoid him"? Or thought, "this restaurant doesn't look good"?
It's interesting that you bring up the Taxi driver example. I have a friend from Morocco who works in North America. He was telling me that last time he was back, in a taxi, the driver was blowing by "black" immigrants from south of the Sahara, and he called him out on it. The driver said something to the effect of "the reason I'm not stopping is b/c they stiff me on payment all the time. I'd like to pick them up and make more money, but through experience I've learned the odds are not good"
I have no idea, from 3,000 miles away if that's accurate or not. But the friend's takeaway was that maybe it's a tougher problem to solve than he thought and he should be less judgmental of a guy who drives a barely AC'd cab 16 hours a day near the Sahara for poverty wages. I'd like if that Cab driver was less racist, too, but I don't have to feed my family driving a North African taxi all day.
And yet if many/most people are led by their 'gut instincts', it can become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"I think most people are drawn towards various forms of tribalism, and if they all accrue the advantages of a tribe, I had better do the same or I will lose out."
Also, in terms of narrative (both IRL and TV) 'villains' are easier to defeat than 'complicated situations'.
There's a reason no one wins office by sending out a bunch of mailers saying that "I'm gonna do my best but these are complicated problems that I will only have a marginal impact on! Vote for me!"
I object to the “evolutionary” hypothesis it’s sort of irrefutable and more importantly unhelpful. The best data we have is of the past century, and we can really see that people’s perception of government and trust in institutions shifts radically across time and place. Thus there may be some universal (“evolutionary”) baseline tendency or cognitive biases to be aware of but they are clearly less significant than historical (cultural, social, economic, political) factors. It is moreover those historical factors that we can hope to change. So what’s the use to keep theorizing about the “natural state” (albeit dressed up in more modern terminology)?
I’ll admit that evolutionary theory is likely insufficient to fully explain our draw to the simple explanations of villains.
I also agree that historical factors matter. That includes leaders being rewarded or penalized for their delivery of tangible results or failure to do so, respectively. Or at least the appearance of doing so from the perspective of voters. E.g., I partially explain Reagan's blowout victory in the 1984 election due to the end of inflation and the improving economy, even if he might not deserve much credit.
I mainly find such evolutionary psychology hypotheses useful in helping us to accept our frequent encounter with other people who are captivated by simple, conspiratorial explanations. I myself find it quite frustrating to frequently encounter these false narratives online (occasionally even in SB comments). I find that I can better manage my irritation and resist the urge to respond with a correction when I accept the enticement of such simple stories of villains.
The theory is also useful in getting me to challenge my own simple explanations based around a few bad actors.
I think modern studies of cognitive biases have their uses. I don’t know that we need the framing story about the pre historical basis for said biases- except if we take it kind of metaphorically. It’s important to understand that as actual explanation it’s rather flimsy.
P.S.
Let me explain what I mean. Ideas about cognitive biases etc. are actually based on studies of *modern* people (the sample moreover disproportionately the very culturally-specific subset of American college students). Out of these studies pyschologists and other presume to make claism about "human nature". The problem is then compounded when others try to use the highly tentative and rather schematic models we have about what prehistoric human socieiteis may have been like, to find in those reconstructed proto-socieites an *explanation* for these moden finds, thus compounding possibilities for errors. Things get worse when often people go further with the fantasy to find in the imagined "hunter gatherer societies" justifications not even for highly specific cognitive biases but simply for basic popular stereotypes (men want sex women want protection etc.). Similar offenders are those who use cherry picked misinformed and outdated studies of animal behavior for similar purposes (most infamous is the debunked "alpha male" wolf model).
My point is that all these extra layers seem heuristically counterproductive. It's sufficient that behavioral psychologists seem to identify cognitive biases affecting *us* here and now. No need to go further.
>>Thus there may be some universal (“evolutionary”) baseline tendency or cognitive biases to be aware of but they are clearly less significant than historical...<<
I believe your "clearly" is doing massive heavy lifting. On one side of the scale we have ten thousands years of post-hunter gatherer society. On the other side of the scale is perhaps six million years since we started walking upright. My money's on the latter.
Eh. I think the story of human progress is one of developing institutions and norms that counteract our "natural" instincts, for the most part, and I would argue that's for the better.
One thing that drives me nuts about the Rogan/Peterson crowd is there's always this appeal to some sort of state of nature which they act as advocates for (or at least peddle the idea of), when in reality they both would've been eaten by bears. Rogan was a dorky kid who got bullied and Peterson is a dorky adult. Lunchmeat, both of them.
My problem is that "the state of nature" tends to reflect contemporary ideas more htan any thing else. It could be a *foil* to contemporary norms, but it still is *based* on them, even if by negation. I am very skeptical that we actually can know much about "human nature" per se. Or rather - that it is a useful way to go about things. The worst offender is of course discussions of gender and assumptions about what men and women (or males and females) are "really" like.
You saw this when Matt was on there promoting his book, and Rogan was like, "Oh well, when they put mice together in studies" or whatever, and as Matt pushed back, rightly, human beings aren't mice. We aren't wholely driven by instinct alone, and we can, and should, go up, around, under, and through those instincts in the drive for a more sane and equitable future.
Certainly. But moreover I have grave doubts that we know much about "instincts" if by instincts you don't mean literal instincts (adrenaline rush in certain stiuation etc.) but in fact are making assumptions about supposed primordial social structures .
We see that trust in government isnsttuions can be as high as 90% or as low as 10% depending on the situation. If the historical factofrs have such huge influence, what's the use to hypothesize about some "state of nature" (assuming such state ever existed!) ?
P.S. your 6 million should be amended to 300 thousand (per wikipedia) unless you think earlier literal species teach us more about human behavior (or indeed human nature) than actual human history.
How can you justify that? You think the meager evidence we have about a literally different animal says more about people than the study of actual people, especially people about whom we know many orders of magnitude more and who are in settings far more similar to our own?
Yup, not to make everything about housing but you can see the search for a villain on display when people claim BlackRock is the cause of the high housing costs in major cities. It is a lot easier to blame nefarious financiers than a broad coalition of groups that oppose housing for fairly banal reasons:
If someone thinks Obamacare never should have become law in the first place, then taking a chance that “repeal and replace” would instead become “repeal” is a good gamble.
Americans, of course, want the federal government to do more than what the Constitution says. But they do not agree on what those things are. It may be impossible to square a particular circle. (As Kevin D. Williamson says about the Bill of Rights, it was the Founders saying, “This is the shit you guys don’t get to vote on.”)
I think “The West Wing” is for a certain generation of political types like what “Law & Order” was for lawyers of my generation.
Although its depiction of the practice of law was completely unrealistic, it was the first law show I can think of where the lawyers actually *practiced law.* Perry Mason and Matlock and so on were basically just detectives in the Holmes/Poirot model, with the trial simply a forum for the detective-novel denouement, and shows like LA Law were basically just soap operas. The “lawyer” portion of L&O at least resembled what lawyers understand themselves as doing—there was real focus on the individual elements of the crimes (issues like intent and causation, analyzed totally separately from “who fired the gun”), on how the evidence satisfies each of those elements, and on procedural stuff like motions practice, or the fact that so many of the cases end in pleas. Was it realistic? Of course not—but it was still light years from what was previously depicted. And whenever I talk to fellow lawyers, they’ll acknowledge that yeah, the vibes are nothing like L&O…but they all watched the show when they were young.
I suspect there’s something similar in “The West Wing” for politics. Prior depictions of the practice of politics, esp. on TV and movies, are basically “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” type stuff, or inevitably they introduce some CIA black ops BS or it all boils down to some torrid love affair. TWW actually went into some of the nuts and bolts of how policymaking—both substantive stuff like real policies that were being considered at the time and procedural stuff like the role of people like WH Chief of Staff or congressional leadership. So forget about whether it was a “good show about American politics”—it was recognizably “about American politics”, period, in a way that only a few shows before or since have been. So of course political people loved it.
I loved the West Wing and was the right age for it to have a deep impact on what I thought an American President should sound like. One of my favorite things about the show was that the speeches made me proud to be an American, an idea that parts of the Democratic Party has since firmly disavowed.
The Obama years felt like I was finally living the West Wing. Every major speech that Obama gave was something I’d either watch live or tape to watch with friends/family later. His ability to inspire is profoundly missing from politics today. Obama felt like the last Democrat patriot. He, like Bartlett, espoused the idea that Americans had a troubled past and fraught present, but that we were uniquely aspiring for something better and that our practical ethos would allow us to continually move toward a better union.
The early season Sam Seaborn character was also unbelievably inspiring to me. Rob Lowe at his absolute best playing the type of character that I’ve always hoped filled out the offices of every able politician.
"Obama felt like the last Democrat patriot. He, like Bartlett, espoused the idea that Americans had a troubled past and fraught present, but that we were uniquely aspiring for something better and that our practical ethos would allow us to continually move toward a better union. "
Ehhh, I mean, neither Clinton or Biden had Obama's (or Martin Sheen's?) rhetorical skills but that seems to be like almost every Biden's speech. Remember the 2020 DNC? There might be a part of the Democratic Party that doesn't want you to be proud to be an American, but I'm pretty sure its contained to like, Cori Bush's office.
I am sure a person of your reading comprehension can see that this isn't a sociology professor proclaiming that AmeriKKKa is an evil empire. He praises previous Republican presidents.
"And if you do that, you will not be alone. That’s because the struggle to protect voting rights has never been borne by one group alone.
We saw Freedom Riders of every race. Leaders of every faith marching arm in arm. And, yes, Democrats and Republicans in Congress of the United States and in the presidency."
I don’t believe that is the message I’ve heard from people. I’ve heard the message that Jim Crow isn’t completely gone, but not that there has been zero progress.
As a long time New Orleans Saints fan, I can tell you it’s entirely possible to be very proud of something (braggadocios even!) and also be very critical.
I think the contemporary Democratic Party scores pretty high in terms of present- and (especially) future-oriented patriotism. Happiness and pride about what the country is and where it's going.
I also think there's a plausible conception of patriotism that's mostly about the past. How you relate to the institutions you've inherited as a result of a history you share with other citizens operating and being affected by those institutions.
What Democrats lack, IMO, is a clear answer to what they love and wouldn't willingly let die about American politics, culture, arts, religion, etc., as of 1795 or 1815 or 1835.
Hear, hear! I came to the The West Wing a few seasons late, having been one of those lefties who would not listen to ANYTHING that threatened my belief in the Progressive Rapture, which I was sure going to happen as soon as enough “Neocons” had been berated out of their moderation. I imagine that what the Rapture Left hates most about TWW was the show’s effectiveness in forcing comrades like me to confront how little they actually knew about the country they were born in.
Yes! Exactly. I was about to write the same comment, having gone from growing up on the West Wing with the final season being my senior year of high school, to entering college and all of a sudden Obama is on the scene. Those early Obama years really made me think we could have a Bartlett presidency, and I dashed off to intern at a Congressional office with that mental model. We were going to create a real social safety net! And stop global warming! Reality really slapped me in the face lol, though I'm one of those who thinks Obama did the best he could do given the circumstances.
Now I work at a state govt affiliated private entity, and we're all sincere normie cringe libs, but we actually get to make progress because most people don't know we exist. Sometimes the speeches, no matter how good, make progress less likely.
Obama was the only President ever who made me feel like State of the Union addresses were a worthwhile usage of my time. I didn't always agree with him, or the things he believed in, but asserting that it's okay to believe-in-believing-things is pretty powerful. Hope itself has become rather uncool since then, which is quite depressing. This is a big part of why I don't begrudge Trump as much as many others; people in chronic desperate withdrawal from hopium addiction need a fix, sooner or later. If the establishment won't provide it anymore, they'll look elsewhere.
I also remember McCain's concession speech being quite moving. Strange to think of a time when a politician told an audience heckler to shut up and show some damn respect for a worthy opponent. I know he had to run far to the right to secure the nomination (as Matt has written about a few times), but, boy, there were elements of that former GOP I surely miss today. Rhetoric really does have an outsize effect on the national "vibes", policy notwithstanding.
I'm surprised that Matt didn't mention what I've seen as the overwhelming criticism of the show on-line for the past 15 years or so -- it fails to show Republicans stomping puppies to death while simultaneously cudgeling doe-eyed orphans in each and every episode.
This comment is good enough standing alone, but it really does get at a deep resentment that I've sensed from left wingers with regard to entertainment: the lacking of (and strong desire to see) a high profile and successful movie or TV show that is unapologetic in demonstrating just how bad and evil Republicans and right wingers are--maybe especially due to entertainers typically leaning left as a whole.
Isn't that what the Daily Show, Last Week Tonight etc are? Of course they aren't "TV shows" in the sense you mean here, but it seems like Comedy News should be enough to placate them
Right, and that kind of furthers my point, they'd really like to see a major mainstream movie or TV show both be highly lucrative and unambiguously anti-GOP/right wing, and are frustrated that it isn't happening.
Yeah and it's a reason why it's pretty flawed. David Sirota was determined to "draw and quarter" every aspect of the political system he didn't like to the determinant of narrative coherence.
It's a shame because there are parts of the movie that worked well (thought the Ariana Grande cameo was especially inspiring), but just became a vehicle for all of Sirota's grievances instead.
I think it could perhaps be done in a very limited run. But it must cost a lot of cake to produce a full length 10ish episode streaming-worthy series with high production values and at least one or two lead loss famous actors. And that's gotta be hard to pull off, financially (or is in general risky) when you're pissing off 48% of the country.
What does that show cost to produce? THAT was my point. The discussion was (initially, at least) about WW-style shows. Leftist content certainly makes the small screen, but I believe the economics of this are harder to pull off in the context of a prestige television, scripted show of the variety HBO, Amazon, Apple etc are known to produce (a few high profile actors, glossy production values, etc). Not saying it couldn't happen, but an unrelentingly "left is good right is horrible" vibe, I think, is hard to pull off in an expensive genre...
This makes me think of the US House of Cards show, where the main character was a South Carolina Democrat whose main legislative push was a federal jobs program paid for by gutting every single entitlement program.
They could have just written him to be a Republican, but then that would make Republicans look like corrupt, murderous villains, and then Republicans wouldn't watch the show and would whine about it.
I watched the first few seasons, and thought it was reasonably entertaining. But it was apparent after about 15 minutes into the first episode that the show bore virtually no resemblance at all to DC. Similar to "Vice" (the Dick Cheney biopic). You come for the performances. Not for a realistic depiction of how things work.
The US House of Cards just wasn't a very good show, though the first couple of seasons were entertaining enough.
Also, Matt's point about TWW's White House being too small really really applied to House of Cards: the Underwood administration seemed to have, like, two people. It was ridiculous.
It really lost the plot after season 2. The plot threads were all there in season 2 for season 3 to be Frank's downfall, but instead they had Not!Putin and AmericaWorks and whatever else happened I couldn't begin to care about. I'd bet Netflix saw the success of those first two seasons and told them to keep making more instead of wrapping it up, forcing major rewrites that made the show just... incomprehensible. Then they dragged it out for too long and Spacey's past became a liability.
If they kept it to three seasons, I'd bet the show would be remembered as a great political drama, if a bit tainted by association with Spacey.
Alpha House kind of does this. It's about some Republican senators and is a comedy. So the characters are different caricatures of various Republicans in the Obama years. Theyre not totally evil,, but usually bumbling oafs. John Goodman is in it.
Man I loved Alpha House. My favorite character was always Matt Malloy, the obviously closeted anti-gay Republican. It felt like they really tried to explain a worldview there I had never been able to understand.
The show did a pretty good job of showing Republicans stomping puppies to death.
The very first episode I saw, which hooked me on the show, was the one where Toby and Josh go to Indiana and are shown to be out of touch with "real Americans" etc. At one point Toby mock-quotes the GOP presidential candidate as saying "Don't worry, we'll get some Jews for the money stuff."
Here's Trump from the same era, as quoted by a business associate: "The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
You just can't beat that for art imitating life imitating art!
I saw that comment, but I still thought it was worth remarking on Matt's lack of discussion of the point that the show is heavily criticized these days for being insufficiently cartoonish. I mean, I guess "too earnest" covers that position, but I'm completely serious when I say that I see the, "It failed to portray Republicans as unambiguously evil villains at every possible occasion," critique at least an order of magnitude more frequently than any other critique of the show and have for many years. (Heck, since 2018 or so I think I've seen the, "Aaron Sorkin is a misogynist and/or racist so therefore anything he's ever been associated with is bad" critique for the show much more frequently than "too earnest.")
"It’s typical for a television show to focus heavily on a small cast of characters. The very best television shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” tend to break free of this constraint and use the long runtime of television to tell sprawling narratives that wouldn’t fit in a movie."
I think that no TV show did better and was more revolutionary in having a large cast of characters than The Simpsons. The ability of animation to spit out tons of characters that were nonetheless high quality paved the way for South Park and others to do the same.
“It’s a somewhat unappreciated quirk of American history that all three of these presidential deaths shifted public policy in a pro-slavery direction. There is more contingency at work on this issue than most people realize.”
It’s a massively under-appreciated quirk of American history that much, possible most, political change comes from ad hoc reactions to crises. Slavery is the best example of this. It was not abolished through the slow and steady boring of hard boards by abolitionists. Lincoln was not an abolitionist when he took office. In his first inaugural, he offered to amend the constitution to protect slavery in the states where it existed. Slavery was abolished because planters lost their shit over the election of a President who opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories and the transportation of slaves like Dred Scott into free states. The masters refused to compromise, overplayed their hand and lost their human property and, in some cases, their lives.
Northern opinion was radicalized by the war, there weren’t even a significant number of abolitionists in Congress in 1861.
Maybe this is a quirk of American history. But it's worth pointing out that Slavery was abolished in nearly every other country in the world by something closer to "the slow boring of hard boards" than to civil war. Maybe our political system is the only one which required a crisis to get rid of it, but I tend to suspect that it would have died one way or another by the end of the century even if the planters hadn't lost their shit.
slavery was abolished in haiti because of the french revolution. it was abolished in brazil after abolition in the US. the slow boring of hard boards may explain abolition in the british empire, though i think backlash against rebellious slave owners is a better explanation. Never forget that 10% of New Yorkers were slaves in the early 19th century, and the proportion was higher in New Jersey.
"slavery was abolished in haiti because of the french revolution" - indirectly. Directly, it was abolished by the Haitian Revolution. They are actually the 1 example I had in mind when I wrote "nearly every other country".
"Never forget that 10% of New Yorkers were slaves in the early 19th century, and the proportion was higher in New Jersey." Isn't that evidence for "slow boring" given it was abolished in the North w/o civil war?
In re your second paragraph, this is definitely one of the, "have your cake and eat it too" aspects of the 1619 Project and many similar "revisionist" takes on the history of American slavery: if slavery was widespread, common, and genuinely of major economic importance to a bunch of states that unambiguously abolished slavery through ordinary political processes, then why, supposedly, could slavery only ever be abolished in the southern states through cleansing fire?
And then in 1802 slavery was reestablished in Guadelupe. So you can understand why Haitians realized they'd need to fight against the French for real independence from 1802-1804. It wasn't until 1848! (well after the Haitian revolution) that France finally ended slavery for good.
Our country was the only one where the slavers had enough political power - sure, there were powerful slavers in the UK, etc. but none of them controlled a whole region of the nation. Manchester (to pick a random part of the UK) wasn't going to secede over slavery ending.
Europeans massively participated in the human slavery economy. They just outsourced the externalities to the Western Hemisphere. Nice folks those Euros!
Google tells me there are 195 sovereign nations in the world today. There were probably a similar number of self-ruling political entities in the 1800s. The majority of them had slavery in some form, especially outside of continental Europe and East Asia.
Our country was surely not the only one where slavers had 30-40% of the political power, or more than that in some subregion. Study this list a bit for reference:
I've also noticed that, while people seem to think you need a communist revolution to get public healthcare, in most countries it seems to have happened because a bureaucrat decided "we have public healthcare now" and there wasn't a revolution in sight.
Yeah but the Southerners were correct strategically. They'd been boxed in and slavery was going to end in the US. They took a process that might've taken several decades and forced a reckoning immediately. This is actually kind of the opposite of Matt's point
Southerners who wanted to own slaves and live off the profits they created could have milked their rents for decades. They chose to go to war with a nation with four times their free population, while subjugating 4 million slaves who had good reasons to support the Union. Did they forget that Lord Cornwallis had emancipated slaves willing to fight for the crown? They were not maximizing the present discounted value of their rents!
Many noble classes have chosen self immolation over compromise, see, eg the German military in world war one, Sparta, and the bolder elements of the French aristocracy. The planters preferred an ancient form of “honor” over concession. The quirk is that this strategy sort of worked during reconstruction, and, other than half a decade during reconstruction, racial conservatives ruled the South until 1964.
Whether or not southerners "maximiz[ed] the PDV of their rents" is besides the point.
Slavery ended not because of a crisis, but because abolitionists were slowly boring their way through the board of American politics. The crisis obviating much of the boring because it snapped the board in half, but the southerners wouldn't have snapped the board at all if rising abolitionist power hadn't pushed them to it.
I do not think this is a very good example of contingency. Yes they could've lasted a few more decades, but by the early 20th century slavery was going to be illegal everywhere and everyone knew it. The story ends the same way
"It’s a massively under-appreciated quirk of American history that much, possible most, political change comes from ad hoc reactions to crises."
I think that's at least somewhat true of history generally. It might be more true of American history. But most of the time, where you see a big change, there's a crisis (real or perceived) behind it somewhere.
Maybe crisis is the only thing strong enough to push past all of our veto points, and parliamentary systems don’t have to be as reactionary. But I don’t know non-US history well enough to say.
"To be clear, I am not particularly concerned about deficits right now, just as I wasn’t in 2010. But I took Ryan seriously when he said he was... But now, as Ryan prepares to leave Congress, it is clear that his critics were correct and a credulous Washington press corps — including me — that took him at his word was wrong. In the trillions of long-term debt he racked up as speaker, in the anti-poverty proposals he promised but never passed, and in the many lies he told to sell unpopular policies, Ryan proved as much a practitioner of post-truth politics as Donald Trump."
As Ezra points out, this is exactly what critics of Paul Ryan said would happen. Paul Ryan disagreed. But then he became speaker and we saw what he actually did. The critics were right.
To say this means Paul Ryan was selectively "sincere" feels like a weird use of the word "sincere" to me.
Paul Ryan sincerely believes the US would be better off if we dismantled the welfare state and he took actions he thought would advance that goal. I would contrast this with people like Kevin McCarthy or Lindsay Graham, who do not really seem to have sincere ideological beliefs but are merely in it for the power.
1. Paul Ryan talked a good game, but his revealed preferences were exactly what you'd expect if you paid no attention to what he said.
Even worse for the "Paul Ryan was sincere" argument is that if you took what Paul Ryan said at face value, your predictions about what he would actually do would've been worse than just guessing he wanted tax cuts for rich people.
So I'm not really sure what help the word "sincere" is. Or in Matt's case "extremely sincere."
2. Contra Mccarthy or Graham, I personally know people who are genuinely squishy ideologically, but sincere nonetheless. But they're not elected politicians!
To be clear, I think Matt's argument really does hold up for the people who staff congressional offices (they're usually taking pay cuts because they believe in their work!). Just don't think this works with Paul Ryan.
I think you're parsing the definition of sincere correctly, but I still think you're missing a key difference that Matt is pointing out. Perhaps he should've used a different word.
Paul Ryan has actual beliefs about how the government should be run. He thinks there is a purpose to all this. He is willing to lie in order to achieve those ends.
Kevin McCarthy (using as an example, someone might disagree with me about Kevin specifically) has no actual beliefs about how the government should be run. His political incentives lead him to a similar outcome as Paul Ryan, but Kevin McCarthy would be happy to raise taxes on rich people if it would help him in the smallest possible way. He doesn't think running the government is actually a thing that matters one way or the other, it is only a means to personal power for him.
I'm not saying that makes him worse than Paul Ryan, in some ways it makes him better in terms of outcomes. But there is a belief in actual purpose that does make Paul Ryan more "sincere" in some sense
If your goal was the reduce the deficit and slash the welfare state, which party are you going to join? Republicans.
And will that party generally accept higher taxes? No.
FWIW, I subscribe to the 'almost all politicians are power-hungry monster' school of thought.
So I don't think that Ryan is really very sincere overall.
Just that it is feasible, and that y'all are unwilling to engage in the same level of nuance for his views and actions as you would with democrats or progressives that hold similarly conflicting views. =)
If I wanted to reduce the deficit, I would be a Democrat. If you think Republicans are interested in the deficit, well, it's fine not to pay attention to politics but it's also fine to sit out discussions of topics you're not interested in.
Paul Ryan wasn't just against higher taxes, and he wasn't some back-bencher along for the ride. He was speaker of the House when it passed a $2 trillion tax cut. Then, his work done, he resigned.
So no, it's not feasible that he was a secret deficit hawk. That's the opposite of what actually happened in plain sight.
"If your goal was the reduce the deficit and slash the welfare state, which party are you going to join? Republicans"
"If I wanted to reduce the deficit, I would be a Democrat."
YES! History shows that having a Democrat president and Republican congress is the best way to reduce the deficit. Republicans in congress generally don't increase spending as much, and a Democratic president vetoes their tax cuts.
Did anyone else who did not watch the West Wing but enjoyed this post get really confused when Matt brought up “Santos”? I kept thinking George Santos and didn’t know why Matt was so complementary to this description of an Outsider.
Yo Matt, there’s a new Congress that could barely choose a Speaker of the House and might default on the national debt. More importantly, there are a lot of extremely pedestrian takes on said Congress and I’d like to hear a smart one from you. Off news cycle posts can be fun, but please step up to the plate when when there are big events that beg for smart take slinging.
I agree hot takes are a problem on todays news cycle and media environment.
I’m just totally confident the thesis I’ve pushed in these forums the past month regarding Elon’s dangerous oversight of Twitter is being borne out here. (And would like to drive that point home in real time)
No one should use the phrase “I’m totally confident” in analyzing current events after *two days*, especially when their analysis amounts to “now, more than ever...”
A lovely logical fallacy that because Telegram exists, Twitter (and lack of decent moderation) could not have been a driving force for this insurrection easily avoided.
It is not “either/or.” Its that Musks irresponsible leadership allowed for this event to be worse (or to perhaps reach the critical mass necessary for it to get off the ground at all.)
According to this survey, Twitter (48%) and Telegram (55%) usage within Brazil is pretty similar.
According to early reports, experts are including Twitter as one of the main social media engines most responsible for allowing for the organization of this mess.
You might brush that off. I won’t. Those who have benefited so much from our free society should be interested in protecting that freedom, not unravelling it. And Musk’s actions, purposefully or not, are pushing chaos, radicalization and terrorist violence. This is the first clear evidence of this but will not be the last
> According to early reports, experts are including Twitter as one of the main social media engines most responsible for allowing for the organization of this mess.
Who? How could they possibly know, less than 24 hours after this even happened?
Your survey doesn't establish usership; it's a list a of the proportion of people that "access" a service. Technically I "accessed" twitter just now, even though I don't have an account. Also you clearly just googled this and didn't have any info at hand before making your claims.
> Organizers on Telegram posted dates, times and routes for “Liberty Caravans” that would pick people up in at least six Brazilian states and ferry them to the party, according to posts viewed by The Washington Post. One post said: “Attention Patriots! We are organizing for a thousand buses. We need 2 million people in Brasília.”
We can't possibly know yet the extent of this, but that's actually evidence, rather than unnamed "experts" you claim to have read.
I think the biggest liberal critique of The West Wing is that it has no space for McConnellism (the GOP strategy for accruing power by obstructing Dems at every turn, saying no to any deal, and simply trying to run out the clock). By 2010-11 it was pretty obvious that this is how Republicans would behave towards Obama, yet he still kept trying to make deals with them. Hell, some D members of Congress still haven't gotten this message, hence we're heading for another debt ceiling showdown!
Watching the show now makes it seem hopelessly naive.
I wonder if there just isn't a great way to make this compelling television. Usually the protagonists are presented with an obstacle and the tension comes from trying to overcome it, but with something like McConnellism, it'd just be characters talking about there being nothing they can do, at least in any realistic portrayal. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Probably true! As entertainment, The West Wing has some strong moments and nobody really likes watching McConnellism in real life anyway, so why would they want to watch a fictionalized version?
I suppose the critiques usually center around the aides who came of age during the West Wing Era and went to work for Obama (or other Congressional Dems) and became disillusioned to learn that Washington wasn't really like that. Maybe that narrative is a little too pat, but the punditocracy used to act this way during the Obama Era ("if only he invited Orrin Hatch over for dinner, they'd be able to make deals like LBJ did in the 60s!").
The left certainly has a weird tendency to see 1933-34 and 1964-65, four years out of 400, as the "norm" of our politics and the other 396 years as deviations from the norm. However I recommend Gabler's biography of Ted Kennedy. He DID invite Orrin Hatch over for dinner, and the DID make deals.
To be fair, Joe Biden kinda said a version of this in 2020 and then he...proceeded to pass a bunch of legislation, with nontrivial bipartisan support.
I'm sure it's way more complex than just inviting Senators over for dinner or whatever (and it's worth noting that Dems had narrow majorities, of course). But I'd score Biden's first two years as a modest win for the "relationships and dealmaking matter" theory of politics.
Obviously the GOP has gotten very obstructionist, especially in certain key areas like judicial nominations and executive staff. But the Biden admin has proved that it really is possible for bipartisan dealmaking to work in the current environment, so I think the idea that attempting cooperation is prima facie unwise is sort of overstated.
I think a yet underappreciated fact is how the early Biden years are really challening the Obama-era narrative of "GOP obstuctionism". His *repeated* bi-partisan successes, with McConnell still leading the Senate GOP, strongly suggest that Obama shares the blame for the congressional dysfunction under his administration. OF course, this persepctive might shift agian in the coming years, but should Biden *continue* to succeed to handle the GOP relatively well in the next couple of years (and hopefully also the next term after that!) it would really be a serious additional factor that would make the Obama legacy age poorly in retrospect.
But again, Biden has been operating with Democratic majorities, albeit incredibly slim ones. Obama had 60 D Senators and a large House majority to start his presidency, then faced an R House for the remaining 6 years (and an R Senate for the last two). Biden's achievements have absolutely been impressive, but we're entering a new era. Let's see how things change.
I partially agree. But considering the filibuster is intact, Biden *still* needed GOP votes for a bunch of stuff, and hit *got them*. Obama on the other hand failed with bi-partisanshipboth when he had far better and worse numbers in congress than Biden. However I agree that the latter half of Biden's term might shift our perspective once more.
I didn't say it was unwise, just that it was not reality. We'll see what happens now that the Republicans have control of the House. Based on the Speakership fight, I'm not optimistic.
To be clear, I am very worried too. I think the Dems were fools not to elminate, or at least raise, the debt ceiling when they could. This game of betting the very life of the country for short-term political gain may have worked in the midterms but at some point we will pay very very dearly for this Russian roulette.
While default is possible, I think the chances are miniscule. The nuclear option is that the Biden administration just blows right through the ceiling, and then we wonder why we all believed it was a real thing in the first place.
I've commented before that I don't understand why the Obama administration didn't take the position that spending authorizations work an implied repeal of the debt ceiling to the extent Congress fails to make any other arrangement to pay for the increased spending. It's very defensible from a legal standpoint (arguably more so than the platinum coin option Matt favors).
Congress has the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and, separately, the power “To borrow Money on the credit of the United States.”
The president cannot do either of those things. The president can only spend the money on hand to do the things Congress has told him he may or must do.
That's super interesting! Maybe they think it's safe to leave the Damocles sword hanging to make the GOP see reason? That trying to take it off the table any other way would at best give the GOP some rhetorical points and at worst will create additional headaches (e.g. lengthy litigation, even if Biden wins it in the end)?
I hope you're right. I am super worried however. I'd also add the worry that should the deadline pass without congress approving the ceiling rise that can trigger panic that may lead to great economic harm on its own, no? i.e. if the markets *believe* the US is going to default, isn't that already more than half the damage?
In other words, if you're correct, can't that be too late? Unless Biden provides sufficient assurances *before* the deadline, which would disincentivize the gop to compromise to he presumably won't?
At the end of the day it's up to the sanity and/or competence of congresspeople and their leadership. Thus I am very concerned.
What does a market freakout look like? I guess it would matter most at the next auction of US treasuries, by which point it will be resolved one way or another.
To some extent the show just failed to anticipate how bad things would get, which isn’t that great a failing--as late as 2009 liberal commentators were still saying that yes, Bayh and Nelson might vote against parts of the ACA but of course they’d vote for cloture. And TWW didn’t totally whiff on obstructionism and hardball; in one scene Leo tells Toby some old anecdote from the House that ends “the Republicans aren’t the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate’s the enemy,” but then concludes, “it’s not like that anymore.” Characters like Ainsley Hayes were not typical.
It's truly disheartening remembering how long Democrats were strung along trying to pass anything when they had 60 Senators (and then 59) in the 2009-2010 Congress.
It was fairly obvious from the Gingrich Era that the GOP was trending in that direction. Even Bob Dole dismissed Clinton's election as being illegitimate since it came with less than 50% of the vote.
I guess I should clarify that I personally really enjoy the best moments of the show, and that it's fine to enjoy a fictionalized version of reality for entertainment (also for the reasons MY highlights in his comment). It's more that there really were people in positions of power and/or influence who should've known better who thought the show was more reality than fantasy.
This was my gut reaction to Matt’s piece, as well. Certainly by the time of Bernie’s 2016 remarks it was clear to even the most casual of observers that cynicism and nihilism really *were* the ascendant order of the day in Washington? (See also: title of prominent McConnell biography.)
(Matthew S.’s point that it’s hard to make good TV out of that is well-taken. )
My sense is failure to get a debt ceiling increase was mostly a matter of political self-interest on the part of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. I doubt many Democrats on the Hill have any illusions at this point about their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I don't know if my take is widely shared or not. Maybe there's a better explanation.
They both face tough reelection bids (assuming they both run in 2024), and both of those Senators have tried to cultivate a centrist, non-partisan brand. Voting with 48 of your Democratic colleagues and zero of your Republican colleagues to turn us into Zimbabwe (/s) is something you might be reluctant to do.
It was less unreasonable then as "really old guy in the Senate from a now-blue state who has always been a moderate and holds on by the power of incumbency".
Not a million miles from, say, Olympia Snowe (from that time), or a mirror-image version of Manchin now. Heck, if Arnie had run for the Senate when he left the Governor's mansion, he'd have had a chance.
The Presidential nomination, though? Completely outside the possible world.
Yeah. I don’t doubt there are real-life Republicans who inspired the Vinick character. But they had been declining in influence for decades even then.
While it’s entirely plausible that such a Republican would have been highly competitive in a national election, the idea that they a) would have won the primary, and b) through their example reoriented the party, strained dramatic credibility even then and looks even more laughable now.
Hm, the quote was from during the '08 election, and was something to the effect of TWW predicting the entire election (Obama as Santos and McCain as Vinick). It might've been someone other than Sorkin.
I've written about the West Wing in these comments before, not sure how it came up, but I'll once again say that nearly everyone over 30 I spoke with while working in politics/politics adjacent fields as cited the West Wing as inspiration or a favorite show.
In terms of their radicalness, Barlett at one point made some large changes to foreign policy, in a more interventionalist direction, and Santo's education plan was not particular incrementalistic.
That Millhiser piece seems a bit misguided. The Barlett administration having few accomplishments is just the text of the show. He asks: "Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college?" That was the point of their refundability plan, to help reduce the cost of college, and they do so by removing a tax loophole on CEO compensation. He also says Barlett is inattentive to economic justice but Josh's intro to his campaign is him telling his constituent that he voted against a Dairy Compact because of child poverty.
I agreed that "The Surpremes" is very overrated, I think people just want to like a late season episode, but thats mostly because the writing of the conservative justice, Justice Christopher Mulready, was kind of silly. They want him to seems super objectionable at first and then just kind of hand wave that to get at the idea of a smart liberal and smart conservative arguing about ideas being cool. The point was that Glenn Close's character was that she was the "Liberal Lion" that they could replace the chief justice with rather than just get some middle of the road liberal. The abortion thing was a liability not the point of the nomination. Fun performances but doesn't hold up on later watches.
"A conventional knock on the show is that it makes it seem as if substantive political battles can be won with nice speeches. I think Aaron Sorkin’s movie “The American President” really does that. But “The West Wing” doesn’t — Bartlet simply does not achieve many big changes to American public policy because giving nice speeches doesn’t win substantive political battles"
I think this is correct (and similar to the take I had previously posted here). The speeches people remember are mostly embarrassing conservatives or reacting to great tragedies like the car crash or the bombing. Santos gives the most impactful, plot-wise, speech of the show at the convention.
It should also be mentioned that the West Wing often comes out in support of passionate people on the fringes. Justice Mendoza is presented as much better than the banal but well credentialed choice they had before. The entire plot of "The Surpremes" is based on the idea that smart people arguing ideas is better than simple appointing a compromise justice. When Stackhouse is running in the primary against Barlett they show that his run from the left causes Barlett to take the politically risking stances on needle exchange. He is presented as smart and reasonable even though the cast in angry at him for making the election harder. I think Bernie people might actually enjoy the episodes during this part.
People often try this strange double move against the West Wing where is both a fantasy and also the administration was "actually" not effective but the text of the show is that the people in politics, particularly liberal politics, are smart and passionate but also personally flawed and that despite their virtues it is hard to make progress. Their victories are often compromises, they suffer defeats and they end up thinking about who can continue the fight after their time is up.
I think you and Matt are both correct that the complaints of being a "liberal fantasy" don't really gel with the actual content of the show. I just wanted to add that I feel the same way about some of the complaints about Sorkin's dialog.
You often hear "Real people don't speak in super-polished soliloquies and biting witticisms!" but if you actually watch The West Wing and much of Sorkin's other work, the fun in his writing comes from how frequently language breaks down and characters fumble over their words or let their mind wander. It's about really smart people reaching their intellectual limits and then saying something really dumb because they are actually human beings and NOT superheroes.
(Note: in WW, all characters exclaim the name of the person they’re talking to on a regular basis)
If you’re a has-watched-the-whole-series-6-or-7-times person like me, let me endorse the show (don’t worry - Mandy doesn’t last beyond season 1...you can fight through it) - the future star/cameo watching alone is worth it. I’d also recommend the West Wing Weekly companion podcast. Cohosted by Josh Malina.
My complaints about WW are many but I’ll name these:
1) Bartlett was too often like K9 on Doctor Who (Tom Baker years). In Doctor Who they’d create some totally inescapable trap for the characters...then at the last moment K9 would show up and use a previously un-discussed weapon (a laser cutter or smoke bomb or stun ray) and save the day. On WW they’d create some political Gordian Knot and in the last sequence POTUS would have some all-knowing/all-seeing karate move that he never talked about before...or he’d simply change his mind and decide the knot didn’t need to be untied. What? You weren’t ever going to sell the Aegis cruisers to the Taiwanese?? Wow! Good idea!! That would have been a great thing to tell your *#%ing staff about, Jed! Problem solved!
2) John Goodman’s horrendous Southern accent. It was only 3-4 episodes but it was bad enough to stun a team of oxen in their tracks.
3) John Spencer’s acting - may he rest in peace. Sorry, but search your feelings - you know it’s true. It sounds like he was a great guy...but the Leo role always felt totally miscast to me. Spencer was just never convincing as the ‘ultimate Washington power broker’
PS - I am typing this while simultaneously briskly walking down a crowded hallway, typing comments on 3 other Substack articles.
I don;t know who K9 is. I never noticed Goodman's bad accent. I thought Spencer was excellent. IIRC they incorporated his death into the story line, no?
I've loved WW myself, binge-watched the crap out of it a couple years after its run ended. But I've yet to re-watch it. What West Wing is for you (in terms of multiple re-watches), Mad Men is for me.
When you’re from the south, bad southern accents make you crazy...especially trying to squeeze a southern accent onto an actor with such a thick midwestern twang. Kills me.
I know it’s heresy to criticize Spencer - and don’t get me wrong - he’s lovable and has some fantastic moments. I just never understood why he is so revered as a dramatic actor.
I’ve binged Mad Men multiple times too! It’s fantastic - a little depressing - but the material is so rich. (PS - January Jones is the John Spencer of Mad Men)
I'm from Boston. I feel your pain. And unlike with Boston accents (although I'm not sure you'd agree) at least there are a few actors who occasionally get southern accents right. Pretty much 99% of the Boston accents gifted to us by Hollywood are cringe. Super cringe. (I respected the fuck out of Scorsese-Nicholson for not even bothering to attempt one in "The Departed"). Though Christian Bale (incredible actor IMHO) did a pretty convincing one in "The Fighter."
I'm not too familiar with Spencer. I (vaguely, tbh) remember his performance fondly in WW, but it's not the hill I'd want to die on.
January Jones is actually the Anna Gunn of Mad Men: a somewhat unlikable character who generated excessive antipathy for the actor playing her. It's not easy to play "irritating, immature, nagging Wasp ice queen sure to alienate fans of the show" but Jones pulled it off with considerable aplomb.
PS—depressing? Mad Men mostly ended on a note of optimism for all the principal characters (if anything it was arguably a crass, overly glib "Hollywood happy ending.").
Leo was not originally the ultimate Washington power broker - he was Bartlett’s right hand from being governor of New Hampshire. He seemed believable in that role to me.
Power broker is the wrong phrase. He’s more like the ‘consummate Washington insider....’
We know he had a cabinet post under the previous (D) administration (Commerce?) and we know they’ve been friends for a long time, but I don’t remember anything about him being a right hand man in New Hampshire. In fact that would be a stretch - in ‘Bartlet for America’ Leo visits Jed as Governor, and the mood is that they haven’t seen anything in a long time.
I don't really like The West Wing but this is a good article and, in combination with many of the comments here, hits the nail on most of the head. The one little piece I think it's missing is that some portion of the anti-WW sentiment from the left isn't about realism but because they *agree* with Matt on what the point of the show is (taking the emblems of the American state and associating them with liberal ideas) but a central part of their aesthetic is having distaste for the emblems of the American state.
"Most fictional depictions of D.C. life show it as a super cynical place full of power-hungry schemers who don’t care about anything. This is a convenient device for a certain kind of thriller, but it’s extremely fake."
I want to see a high quality dramatization of the Iran-Contra affair. That was a very interesting time, with the CIA waging brutal covert wars in Central America, and the US President getting away with stuff that merited his removal from office. And the people who plotted and planned Iran-Contra were not power mad cynics but people who were willing to do terrible things for what they saw as the good of the US.
What’s always struck me as bizarre about Iran-Contra, beyond the fact that it’s basically a form of true conspiracy theory, is how absurdly contrived the whole thing sounds. Like, if it were a movie or thriller plot I would have sent it back for editing.
“Really, you’re telling me that the generally unaccountable and secretive CIA, typically funded by the enormous resources of the *Federal Government Fisc,* had to hold the equivalent of a bake sale to *Iran* of all places in order to fund a rightist insurgency in a banana republic? Why couldn’t they just cut them a check?”
A big irony is that Israel was a major player between the US and Iran in that deal.
I seem to recall Chomsky arguing that the CIA saw cozying up to Iran's armed forces as a good in itself, because the armed forces are what do the coups, and the CIA wanted a coup. I can't vouch for that analysis, though.
Unpopular opinion, George H.W. Bush pardoning his literal co-conspirators in the Iran Contra affair is more corrupt than anything Trump ever did in office. It's one of those, I can't believe this happened in a developed country things. Bush 1 was an actual, indictable member of a criminal conspiracy, won the presidency, and then pardoned other conspiracy members from Reagan's cabinet at the time. Totally wild
Personally, I think this is where the kernel of truth about cynical politics has always been.
It’s just very true that the GOP is dominated by actual cynical schemers. They believe earnestly in the goals of those schemes and they’re not merely for self-enrichment. Bush no doubt believed passionately in an America ruled by the noblesse oblige of society pages types!
But beyond him, there is a whole class of political operatives for whom politics is just a game where the only thing that matters is winning. I think that worked when institutions still had a lot of strength, but you can see how much it’s unraveled in how ineffectual the GOP has actually been since Bush.
One of the problems of the imperial presidency is that I don't think there was a president from FDR onward who didn't try and do some really shady stuff. The two exceptions maybe Eisenhower and Carter, but candidly I would be more shocked if there wasn't than if there was and I just didn't know about it.
Heads up - Trump also pardoned his co-conspirators, Manafort, Bannon and Stone. Its just they’ve similarly gotten away with it. Manafort is guilty as sin having passed confidential campaign info to a Russian spy he’d worked with the previous decade in Ukraine also boosting Putin’s preferred candidate.
But I don’t disagree that’s a really f’ed up episode that doesn’t get enough attention , one that Bill Barr was very much wrapped up in personally. Neither does the similarly f’ed up episode regarding the Valerie Plame affair, retribution for pushing back against cooked intelligence to justify the Iraq war,
ended with a similar set of pardons. You could also mention the episode regarding the 2000 elections and Roger Stone’s Brooks Brothers Riot, as one of the more under appreciated f’ed up moments in US national politics, that greased the skids for Trump’s arrival and all this elite criminal impunity we see today.
Obviously it’s not a “realistic” show but The Americans is kind of good on this sort of thing from the other side.
I know someone who had a career at the CIA; he recommended “The Americans.”
If you were to ask Oliver North today about his motivations regarding his role in all this, I'm pretty confident that he would say he was a Patriot doing what he needed to do to protect America and defeat evil Communists intent on destroying America. It's one of the reasons he became something of a celebrity after the Iran-Contra hearings. He almost sincerely believed in what he was saying*.
Which in a lot of ways proves Matt's point. What Oliver North did (and more importantly his superiors) was insanely corrupt and quite worthy of prison time**. Even on realpolitik policy merits, you're telling me that the Contras (and Nicaragua more generally) were some immediate threat to America and warranted such extraordinary attention? And yet, I'm pretty sure North today would tell you he was proud of what he did and did what he did out of love for America and I'm pretty sure he believes it.
*Give a listen to the Slate podcast about this whole fiasco. It's wild. Including the detail that a major figure in this whole enterprise was a repairman in Suffolk County Long Island. The podcast highlighted the hoopla and celebrity around North. But also pointed out that if you listen carefully to his responses, his answers are pretty evasive and mostly amount to "you have to ask my superiors".
**It's a comment below, but wholeheartedly agree that GHWB pardoning all the senior people is not highlighted enough as an extremely corrupt act; especially considering Bush's personal relationship to both the CIA and the people involved. Something the podcast points out that I think is instructive (and something Matt has pointed out) is that in a lot of ways the late 80s and early 90s was an extraordinarily right wing time in America and a high point of Reaganism (although interestingly enough, not Reagan himself). So much of why Iran-Contra did not lead to more consequences is that many ways, the partisan lean of the country was so decidedly in the GOP favor at that time.
If anything, the earnest types can be worse than the opportunists, because if you really believe in the ends, it's easier to justify the means. A careerist may be more likely to play the odds rather than taking ideological risks. Of course, a true desire to make things better is ultimately important, but sometimes it feels like we're screwed either way.
You bring up an excellent point: there is a huge quantity of riveting fodder for drama in the annals of US political history, and Hollywood has barely scratched the surface. Obviously the rise and fall of Trump will one day be one of those stories. I hope they do it justice: truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes.
Snowall does this a litte. It's about the crack epidemic in LA but (spoiler) the supplier of cocaine into the US is the CIA, which is doing it to raise funds for a war in Central America, and the CIA agents discuss their motivations a fair bit.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6439752/
Seconded, the American Crime Story format seems perfect for this but I found the Lewinsky/Clinton series a bit anticlimactic in the end.
It’s probably not going to be told all that often, so I think it’s important not to give the Iran-Contra story to Ryan Murphy.
Haven't seen that one yet (thanks for the reminder) but I thought the first two seasons were really fantastic.
> it rapidly became an article of faith in the Berniesphere that Sanders himself was wrong about this and the West Wing fandom in fact represented everything that was corrupt and bad about the Democratic Party
I think this faith results from the enticing simplicity of the corruption theory as well as its congruence with our intuition about human affairs. Our brains evolved in an environment consisting of small tribes where a few people could have a significant impact. We therefore naturally want to identify the key actors and their motives that conflict with our goals when society doesn’t function as we desire.
Hence these conspiracy theories have an intrinsic advantage in the “marketplace of ideas.” In contrast, the failings of well-intentioned bureaucrats requires understanding the management structure and incentives of complex, non-intuitive institutions.
Similarly, we struggle to comprehend the diverse interests and sincere beliefs of our country’s legislative representatives and their ever-shifting alliances. It’s hard enough for us to understand how individual people can have radically different models of reality than ourselves, yet alone project that onto large groups of people.
So we fall back on simple narratives centered on a few corrupt villains.
Basically *all* of our intuitions about the way the world works are rendered obsolete by industrial civilization, nationalism/imagined community, or a combination thereof.
Whenever my parents cite “gut,” “common sense,” or “intuition,” my reply is “Your ‘gut’ evolved 200,000 years ago under starvation conditions in a tribe of 50 people. Please explain why it still matters?”
When I was a teen and my dad would cite this kind of stuff, I would (jokingly, of course, with a smirk) tell him that instinct told me that I should crush his head with a rock while he slept and take my place at the head of the tribe.
Stealing this.
In defense of the gut - I think you should check out “thinking fast and slow.” Often times intuition is pattern matching based on years of experience. A structural engineer can have a gut feeling on whether a bridge will collapse, and that has nothing to do with evolution. That intuition can often be more reliable than triple-checking your calculations. So the follow-up question to “I have a gut feeling” is what relevant experience do you have from the past to draw on? If someone has no experience in an area and is still trusting their gut, then you have a problem.
If you're going to check out "Thinking Fast and Slow", you need to be aware that it's pretty much at the center of the replication crisis in psych research. Some very, very large grains of salt to take with most of the experiments cited, which casts a lot of doubt on a book based on interpreting the results of those experiments.
The problem I have with "gut feelings" is that it's the same thing that makes old ladies clutch their purses a little tighter or drivers avoid stopping their taxis when they see certain people, just trussed up in prettier language.
You could take any decision making process and judge it by it's worst possible outcomes.
Is your intuition about strangers always wrong and useless? You've never seen a guy on the street and thought "better avoid him"? Or thought, "this restaurant doesn't look good"?
It's interesting that you bring up the Taxi driver example. I have a friend from Morocco who works in North America. He was telling me that last time he was back, in a taxi, the driver was blowing by "black" immigrants from south of the Sahara, and he called him out on it. The driver said something to the effect of "the reason I'm not stopping is b/c they stiff me on payment all the time. I'd like to pick them up and make more money, but through experience I've learned the odds are not good"
I have no idea, from 3,000 miles away if that's accurate or not. But the friend's takeaway was that maybe it's a tougher problem to solve than he thought and he should be less judgmental of a guy who drives a barely AC'd cab 16 hours a day near the Sahara for poverty wages. I'd like if that Cab driver was less racist, too, but I don't have to feed my family driving a North African taxi all day.
Do they like that?
Meh, my dad in particular is used to me being a smartass.
Got it from him after all, lol.
And yet if many/most people are led by their 'gut instincts', it can become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"I think most people are drawn towards various forms of tribalism, and if they all accrue the advantages of a tribe, I had better do the same or I will lose out."
Also, in terms of narrative (both IRL and TV) 'villains' are easier to defeat than 'complicated situations'.
There's a reason no one wins office by sending out a bunch of mailers saying that "I'm gonna do my best but these are complicated problems that I will only have a marginal impact on! Vote for me!"
I object to the “evolutionary” hypothesis it’s sort of irrefutable and more importantly unhelpful. The best data we have is of the past century, and we can really see that people’s perception of government and trust in institutions shifts radically across time and place. Thus there may be some universal (“evolutionary”) baseline tendency or cognitive biases to be aware of but they are clearly less significant than historical (cultural, social, economic, political) factors. It is moreover those historical factors that we can hope to change. So what’s the use to keep theorizing about the “natural state” (albeit dressed up in more modern terminology)?
I’ll admit that evolutionary theory is likely insufficient to fully explain our draw to the simple explanations of villains.
I also agree that historical factors matter. That includes leaders being rewarded or penalized for their delivery of tangible results or failure to do so, respectively. Or at least the appearance of doing so from the perspective of voters. E.g., I partially explain Reagan's blowout victory in the 1984 election due to the end of inflation and the improving economy, even if he might not deserve much credit.
I mainly find such evolutionary psychology hypotheses useful in helping us to accept our frequent encounter with other people who are captivated by simple, conspiratorial explanations. I myself find it quite frustrating to frequently encounter these false narratives online (occasionally even in SB comments). I find that I can better manage my irritation and resist the urge to respond with a correction when I accept the enticement of such simple stories of villains.
The theory is also useful in getting me to challenge my own simple explanations based around a few bad actors.
I think modern studies of cognitive biases have their uses. I don’t know that we need the framing story about the pre historical basis for said biases- except if we take it kind of metaphorically. It’s important to understand that as actual explanation it’s rather flimsy.
P.S.
Let me explain what I mean. Ideas about cognitive biases etc. are actually based on studies of *modern* people (the sample moreover disproportionately the very culturally-specific subset of American college students). Out of these studies pyschologists and other presume to make claism about "human nature". The problem is then compounded when others try to use the highly tentative and rather schematic models we have about what prehistoric human socieiteis may have been like, to find in those reconstructed proto-socieites an *explanation* for these moden finds, thus compounding possibilities for errors. Things get worse when often people go further with the fantasy to find in the imagined "hunter gatherer societies" justifications not even for highly specific cognitive biases but simply for basic popular stereotypes (men want sex women want protection etc.). Similar offenders are those who use cherry picked misinformed and outdated studies of animal behavior for similar purposes (most infamous is the debunked "alpha male" wolf model).
My point is that all these extra layers seem heuristically counterproductive. It's sufficient that behavioral psychologists seem to identify cognitive biases affecting *us* here and now. No need to go further.
>>Thus there may be some universal (“evolutionary”) baseline tendency or cognitive biases to be aware of but they are clearly less significant than historical...<<
I believe your "clearly" is doing massive heavy lifting. On one side of the scale we have ten thousands years of post-hunter gatherer society. On the other side of the scale is perhaps six million years since we started walking upright. My money's on the latter.
Eh. I think the story of human progress is one of developing institutions and norms that counteract our "natural" instincts, for the most part, and I would argue that's for the better.
One thing that drives me nuts about the Rogan/Peterson crowd is there's always this appeal to some sort of state of nature which they act as advocates for (or at least peddle the idea of), when in reality they both would've been eaten by bears. Rogan was a dorky kid who got bullied and Peterson is a dorky adult. Lunchmeat, both of them.
My problem is that "the state of nature" tends to reflect contemporary ideas more htan any thing else. It could be a *foil* to contemporary norms, but it still is *based* on them, even if by negation. I am very skeptical that we actually can know much about "human nature" per se. Or rather - that it is a useful way to go about things. The worst offender is of course discussions of gender and assumptions about what men and women (or males and females) are "really" like.
You saw this when Matt was on there promoting his book, and Rogan was like, "Oh well, when they put mice together in studies" or whatever, and as Matt pushed back, rightly, human beings aren't mice. We aren't wholely driven by instinct alone, and we can, and should, go up, around, under, and through those instincts in the drive for a more sane and equitable future.
Certainly. But moreover I have grave doubts that we know much about "instincts" if by instincts you don't mean literal instincts (adrenaline rush in certain stiuation etc.) but in fact are making assumptions about supposed primordial social structures .
We see that trust in government isnsttuions can be as high as 90% or as low as 10% depending on the situation. If the historical factofrs have such huge influence, what's the use to hypothesize about some "state of nature" (assuming such state ever existed!) ?
P.S. your 6 million should be amended to 300 thousand (per wikipedia) unless you think earlier literal species teach us more about human behavior (or indeed human nature) than actual human history.
I do suspect this is the case. Which is why I wrote that comment.
How can you justify that? You think the meager evidence we have about a literally different animal says more about people than the study of actual people, especially people about whom we know many orders of magnitude more and who are in settings far more similar to our own?
A great essay about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/?comments=false
Yup, not to make everything about housing but you can see the search for a villain on display when people claim BlackRock is the cause of the high housing costs in major cities. It is a lot easier to blame nefarious financiers than a broad coalition of groups that oppose housing for fairly banal reasons:
1. Living near construction is annoying;
2. Parking;
3. Home Values;
4. Traffic;
5. ETC.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/942103050/yard-sign-bold-in-this-house-we-believe
You either bend the knee to the algorithm and die on a hill for slogans or escape the matrix by being a normie. The choice is yours, neo.
Lol
Another example: “…the causes of making abortion illegal and taking health insurance away from poor people.”
Broadly, interpret the Constitution as written and establish principled limits to the welfare state.
😂
If someone thinks Obamacare never should have become law in the first place, then taking a chance that “repeal and replace” would instead become “repeal” is a good gamble.
Americans, of course, want the federal government to do more than what the Constitution says. But they do not agree on what those things are. It may be impossible to square a particular circle. (As Kevin D. Williamson says about the Bill of Rights, it was the Founders saying, “This is the shit you guys don’t get to vote on.”)
Oof. Thanks, that's a really good articulation of how I've been feeling in a number of conversations lately.
I think “The West Wing” is for a certain generation of political types like what “Law & Order” was for lawyers of my generation.
Although its depiction of the practice of law was completely unrealistic, it was the first law show I can think of where the lawyers actually *practiced law.* Perry Mason and Matlock and so on were basically just detectives in the Holmes/Poirot model, with the trial simply a forum for the detective-novel denouement, and shows like LA Law were basically just soap operas. The “lawyer” portion of L&O at least resembled what lawyers understand themselves as doing—there was real focus on the individual elements of the crimes (issues like intent and causation, analyzed totally separately from “who fired the gun”), on how the evidence satisfies each of those elements, and on procedural stuff like motions practice, or the fact that so many of the cases end in pleas. Was it realistic? Of course not—but it was still light years from what was previously depicted. And whenever I talk to fellow lawyers, they’ll acknowledge that yeah, the vibes are nothing like L&O…but they all watched the show when they were young.
I suspect there’s something similar in “The West Wing” for politics. Prior depictions of the practice of politics, esp. on TV and movies, are basically “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” type stuff, or inevitably they introduce some CIA black ops BS or it all boils down to some torrid love affair. TWW actually went into some of the nuts and bolts of how policymaking—both substantive stuff like real policies that were being considered at the time and procedural stuff like the role of people like WH Chief of Staff or congressional leadership. So forget about whether it was a “good show about American politics”—it was recognizably “about American politics”, period, in a way that only a few shows before or since have been. So of course political people loved it.
(But I will say, I always found it cringe.)
I loved the West Wing and was the right age for it to have a deep impact on what I thought an American President should sound like. One of my favorite things about the show was that the speeches made me proud to be an American, an idea that parts of the Democratic Party has since firmly disavowed.
The Obama years felt like I was finally living the West Wing. Every major speech that Obama gave was something I’d either watch live or tape to watch with friends/family later. His ability to inspire is profoundly missing from politics today. Obama felt like the last Democrat patriot. He, like Bartlett, espoused the idea that Americans had a troubled past and fraught present, but that we were uniquely aspiring for something better and that our practical ethos would allow us to continually move toward a better union.
The early season Sam Seaborn character was also unbelievably inspiring to me. Rob Lowe at his absolute best playing the type of character that I’ve always hoped filled out the offices of every able politician.
"Obama felt like the last Democrat patriot. He, like Bartlett, espoused the idea that Americans had a troubled past and fraught present, but that we were uniquely aspiring for something better and that our practical ethos would allow us to continually move toward a better union. "
Ehhh, I mean, neither Clinton or Biden had Obama's (or Martin Sheen's?) rhetorical skills but that seems to be like almost every Biden's speech. Remember the 2020 DNC? There might be a part of the Democratic Party that doesn't want you to be proud to be an American, but I'm pretty sure its contained to like, Cori Bush's office.
FWIW I thought Bill Clinton was naturally a very effective public speaker. It was his speech writers who often came up short (long, rambling, etc).
Biden said we are living through Jim Crow 2.0. Does that sound like he wants you to be proud about the US?
Here's the first result of Joe Biden's remarks that mention Jim Crow 2.0 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/01/11/remarks-by-president-biden-on-protecting-the-right-to-vote/
I am sure a person of your reading comprehension can see that this isn't a sociology professor proclaiming that AmeriKKKa is an evil empire. He praises previous Republican presidents.
"And if you do that, you will not be alone. That’s because the struggle to protect voting rights has never been borne by one group alone.
We saw Freedom Riders of every race. Leaders of every faith marching arm in arm. And, yes, Democrats and Republicans in Congress of the United States and in the presidency."
Yes, it does. The fight against Jim Crow is one of the parts of American history many people are proudest of.
The message is that we're no better today than during Jim Crow. What good purpose is served by that slander?
I don’t believe that is the message I’ve heard from people. I’ve heard the message that Jim Crow isn’t completely gone, but not that there has been zero progress.
Jim Crow 2.0 implies progress in the wrong direction. Why did Biden craft that obvious lie?
That particular piece of rhetoric is obviously meant to be critical, or to warn, or to galvanize. But nice job impugning Joe's patriotism!
Like pretty much every thing about him, Biden’s patriotism is entirely situational and transactional.
Strange thing to say about a man where one of his scandals is having emails leak where he's too loving to his son going to rehab.
I don’t recall that being a scandal.
As a long time New Orleans Saints fan, I can tell you it’s entirely possible to be very proud of something (braggadocios even!) and also be very critical.
I think the contemporary Democratic Party scores pretty high in terms of present- and (especially) future-oriented patriotism. Happiness and pride about what the country is and where it's going.
I also think there's a plausible conception of patriotism that's mostly about the past. How you relate to the institutions you've inherited as a result of a history you share with other citizens operating and being affected by those institutions.
What Democrats lack, IMO, is a clear answer to what they love and wouldn't willingly let die about American politics, culture, arts, religion, etc., as of 1795 or 1815 or 1835.
Hear, hear! I came to the The West Wing a few seasons late, having been one of those lefties who would not listen to ANYTHING that threatened my belief in the Progressive Rapture, which I was sure going to happen as soon as enough “Neocons” had been berated out of their moderation. I imagine that what the Rapture Left hates most about TWW was the show’s effectiveness in forcing comrades like me to confront how little they actually knew about the country they were born in.
How could a hot-blooded Brooklyn progressive not love this show?
Half the show is scenes of conservatives getting berated into submission with snide one-liners
Yes! Exactly. I was about to write the same comment, having gone from growing up on the West Wing with the final season being my senior year of high school, to entering college and all of a sudden Obama is on the scene. Those early Obama years really made me think we could have a Bartlett presidency, and I dashed off to intern at a Congressional office with that mental model. We were going to create a real social safety net! And stop global warming! Reality really slapped me in the face lol, though I'm one of those who thinks Obama did the best he could do given the circumstances.
Now I work at a state govt affiliated private entity, and we're all sincere normie cringe libs, but we actually get to make progress because most people don't know we exist. Sometimes the speeches, no matter how good, make progress less likely.
Obama was the only President ever who made me feel like State of the Union addresses were a worthwhile usage of my time. I didn't always agree with him, or the things he believed in, but asserting that it's okay to believe-in-believing-things is pretty powerful. Hope itself has become rather uncool since then, which is quite depressing. This is a big part of why I don't begrudge Trump as much as many others; people in chronic desperate withdrawal from hopium addiction need a fix, sooner or later. If the establishment won't provide it anymore, they'll look elsewhere.
I also remember McCain's concession speech being quite moving. Strange to think of a time when a politician told an audience heckler to shut up and show some damn respect for a worthy opponent. I know he had to run far to the right to secure the nomination (as Matt has written about a few times), but, boy, there were elements of that former GOP I surely miss today. Rhetoric really does have an outsize effect on the national "vibes", policy notwithstanding.
I'm surprised that Matt didn't mention what I've seen as the overwhelming criticism of the show on-line for the past 15 years or so -- it fails to show Republicans stomping puppies to death while simultaneously cudgeling doe-eyed orphans in each and every episode.
This comment is good enough standing alone, but it really does get at a deep resentment that I've sensed from left wingers with regard to entertainment: the lacking of (and strong desire to see) a high profile and successful movie or TV show that is unapologetic in demonstrating just how bad and evil Republicans and right wingers are--maybe especially due to entertainers typically leaning left as a whole.
Isn't that what the Daily Show, Last Week Tonight etc are? Of course they aren't "TV shows" in the sense you mean here, but it seems like Comedy News should be enough to placate them
Yeah, that slice is thoroughly saturated, but I'm thinking fictional works here.
It would be tough to pull off commercially, I suspect. Even for HBO.
Right, and that kind of furthers my point, they'd really like to see a major mainstream movie or TV show both be highly lucrative and unambiguously anti-GOP/right wing, and are frustrated that it isn't happening.
"Don't Look Up" is basically this.
Yeah and it's a reason why it's pretty flawed. David Sirota was determined to "draw and quarter" every aspect of the political system he didn't like to the determinant of narrative coherence.
It's a shame because there are parts of the movie that worked well (thought the Ariana Grande cameo was especially inspiring), but just became a vehicle for all of Sirota's grievances instead.
Agree. It had its moments, but holy hell are the politics predictable and hamfisted.
I got blocked by Sirota.
I think it could perhaps be done in a very limited run. But it must cost a lot of cake to produce a full length 10ish episode streaming-worthy series with high production values and at least one or two lead loss famous actors. And that's gotta be hard to pull off, financially (or is in general risky) when you're pissing off 48% of the country.
I guess I think the existence of Last Week Tonight on the same network shows that Left-idealogical bias shouldn't be a big blocker.
What does that show cost to produce? THAT was my point. The discussion was (initially, at least) about WW-style shows. Leftist content certainly makes the small screen, but I believe the economics of this are harder to pull off in the context of a prestige television, scripted show of the variety HBO, Amazon, Apple etc are known to produce (a few high profile actors, glossy production values, etc). Not saying it couldn't happen, but an unrelentingly "left is good right is horrible" vibe, I think, is hard to pull off in an expensive genre...
This makes me think of the US House of Cards show, where the main character was a South Carolina Democrat whose main legislative push was a federal jobs program paid for by gutting every single entitlement program.
They could have just written him to be a Republican, but then that would make Republicans look like corrupt, murderous villains, and then Republicans wouldn't watch the show and would whine about it.
I watched the first few seasons, and thought it was reasonably entertaining. But it was apparent after about 15 minutes into the first episode that the show bore virtually no resemblance at all to DC. Similar to "Vice" (the Dick Cheney biopic). You come for the performances. Not for a realistic depiction of how things work.
The US House of Cards just wasn't a very good show, though the first couple of seasons were entertaining enough.
Also, Matt's point about TWW's White House being too small really really applied to House of Cards: the Underwood administration seemed to have, like, two people. It was ridiculous.
It really lost the plot after season 2. The plot threads were all there in season 2 for season 3 to be Frank's downfall, but instead they had Not!Putin and AmericaWorks and whatever else happened I couldn't begin to care about. I'd bet Netflix saw the success of those first two seasons and told them to keep making more instead of wrapping it up, forcing major rewrites that made the show just... incomprehensible. Then they dragged it out for too long and Spacey's past became a liability.
If they kept it to three seasons, I'd bet the show would be remembered as a great political drama, if a bit tainted by association with Spacey.
Alpha House kind of does this. It's about some Republican senators and is a comedy. So the characters are different caricatures of various Republicans in the Obama years. Theyre not totally evil,, but usually bumbling oafs. John Goodman is in it.
Man I loved Alpha House. My favorite character was always Matt Malloy, the obviously closeted anti-gay Republican. It felt like they really tried to explain a worldview there I had never been able to understand.
The show did a pretty good job of showing Republicans stomping puppies to death.
The very first episode I saw, which hooked me on the show, was the one where Toby and Josh go to Indiana and are shown to be out of touch with "real Americans" etc. At one point Toby mock-quotes the GOP presidential candidate as saying "Don't worry, we'll get some Jews for the money stuff."
Here's Trump from the same era, as quoted by a business associate: "The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
You just can't beat that for art imitating life imitating art!
Trump has a unique kind of benevolent racism where he believes all racial stereotypes are true but also that they're good.
One of the top 5 strangest things about him, the first being he's a 70 year old theater kid.
I saw that comment, but I still thought it was worth remarking on Matt's lack of discussion of the point that the show is heavily criticized these days for being insufficiently cartoonish. I mean, I guess "too earnest" covers that position, but I'm completely serious when I say that I see the, "It failed to portray Republicans as unambiguously evil villains at every possible occasion," critique at least an order of magnitude more frequently than any other critique of the show and have for many years. (Heck, since 2018 or so I think I've seen the, "Aaron Sorkin is a misogynist and/or racist so therefore anything he's ever been associated with is bad" critique for the show much more frequently than "too earnest.")
I remember when the West Wing's main critique was that conservatives were too evil! Times sure have changed.
"It’s typical for a television show to focus heavily on a small cast of characters. The very best television shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” tend to break free of this constraint and use the long runtime of television to tell sprawling narratives that wouldn’t fit in a movie."
I think that no TV show did better and was more revolutionary in having a large cast of characters than The Simpsons. The ability of animation to spit out tons of characters that were nonetheless high quality paved the way for South Park and others to do the same.
Also props to the voice actors. They voiced dozens of instantly recognizable characters with like 5 people.
Gotta plug Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 as being genuinely ensemble-led (great) shows as well.
“It’s a somewhat unappreciated quirk of American history that all three of these presidential deaths shifted public policy in a pro-slavery direction. There is more contingency at work on this issue than most people realize.”
It’s a massively under-appreciated quirk of American history that much, possible most, political change comes from ad hoc reactions to crises. Slavery is the best example of this. It was not abolished through the slow and steady boring of hard boards by abolitionists. Lincoln was not an abolitionist when he took office. In his first inaugural, he offered to amend the constitution to protect slavery in the states where it existed. Slavery was abolished because planters lost their shit over the election of a President who opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories and the transportation of slaves like Dred Scott into free states. The masters refused to compromise, overplayed their hand and lost their human property and, in some cases, their lives.
Northern opinion was radicalized by the war, there weren’t even a significant number of abolitionists in Congress in 1861.
Maybe this is a quirk of American history. But it's worth pointing out that Slavery was abolished in nearly every other country in the world by something closer to "the slow boring of hard boards" than to civil war. Maybe our political system is the only one which required a crisis to get rid of it, but I tend to suspect that it would have died one way or another by the end of the century even if the planters hadn't lost their shit.
slavery was abolished in haiti because of the french revolution. it was abolished in brazil after abolition in the US. the slow boring of hard boards may explain abolition in the british empire, though i think backlash against rebellious slave owners is a better explanation. Never forget that 10% of New Yorkers were slaves in the early 19th century, and the proportion was higher in New Jersey.
"slavery was abolished in haiti because of the french revolution" - indirectly. Directly, it was abolished by the Haitian Revolution. They are actually the 1 example I had in mind when I wrote "nearly every other country".
"Never forget that 10% of New Yorkers were slaves in the early 19th century, and the proportion was higher in New Jersey." Isn't that evidence for "slow boring" given it was abolished in the North w/o civil war?
In re your second paragraph, this is definitely one of the, "have your cake and eat it too" aspects of the 1619 Project and many similar "revisionist" takes on the history of American slavery: if slavery was widespread, common, and genuinely of major economic importance to a bunch of states that unambiguously abolished slavery through ordinary political processes, then why, supposedly, could slavery only ever be abolished in the southern states through cleansing fire?
And then in 1802 slavery was reestablished in Guadelupe. So you can understand why Haitians realized they'd need to fight against the French for real independence from 1802-1804. It wasn't until 1848! (well after the Haitian revolution) that France finally ended slavery for good.
>>Maybe our political system is the only one which required a crisis to get rid of it,
Madisonianism at its dysfunctional best.
Our country was the only one where the slavers had enough political power - sure, there were powerful slavers in the UK, etc. but none of them controlled a whole region of the nation. Manchester (to pick a random part of the UK) wasn't going to secede over slavery ending.
Europeans massively participated in the human slavery economy. They just outsourced the externalities to the Western Hemisphere. Nice folks those Euros!
Google tells me there are 195 sovereign nations in the world today. There were probably a similar number of self-ruling political entities in the 1800s. The majority of them had slavery in some form, especially outside of continental Europe and East Asia.
Our country was surely not the only one where slavers had 30-40% of the political power, or more than that in some subregion. Study this list a bit for reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom
The planters lost their shit because they saw the writing on the wall
You might also argue that they massively misperceived the objective correlation of forces
I've also noticed that, while people seem to think you need a communist revolution to get public healthcare, in most countries it seems to have happened because a bureaucrat decided "we have public healthcare now" and there wasn't a revolution in sight.
Yeah but the Southerners were correct strategically. They'd been boxed in and slavery was going to end in the US. They took a process that might've taken several decades and forced a reckoning immediately. This is actually kind of the opposite of Matt's point
Southerners who wanted to own slaves and live off the profits they created could have milked their rents for decades. They chose to go to war with a nation with four times their free population, while subjugating 4 million slaves who had good reasons to support the Union. Did they forget that Lord Cornwallis had emancipated slaves willing to fight for the crown? They were not maximizing the present discounted value of their rents!
Many noble classes have chosen self immolation over compromise, see, eg the German military in world war one, Sparta, and the bolder elements of the French aristocracy. The planters preferred an ancient form of “honor” over concession. The quirk is that this strategy sort of worked during reconstruction, and, other than half a decade during reconstruction, racial conservatives ruled the South until 1964.
Whether or not southerners "maximiz[ed] the PDV of their rents" is besides the point.
Slavery ended not because of a crisis, but because abolitionists were slowly boring their way through the board of American politics. The crisis obviating much of the boring because it snapped the board in half, but the southerners wouldn't have snapped the board at all if rising abolitionist power hadn't pushed them to it.
I do not think this is a very good example of contingency. Yes they could've lasted a few more decades, but by the early 20th century slavery was going to be illegal everywhere and everyone knew it. The story ends the same way
"It’s a massively under-appreciated quirk of American history that much, possible most, political change comes from ad hoc reactions to crises."
I think that's at least somewhat true of history generally. It might be more true of American history. But most of the time, where you see a big change, there's a crisis (real or perceived) behind it somewhere.
Maybe crisis is the only thing strong enough to push past all of our veto points, and parliamentary systems don’t have to be as reactionary. But I don’t know non-US history well enough to say.
> Even a lot of the really bad characters in politics — Paul Ryan, for example — are extremely sincere.
In the case of Paul Ryan, was he actually a sincere guy? I remember Ezra Klein feeling pretty burned that he believed the sincerity of Paul Ryan. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/10/17929460/paul-ryan-speaker-retiring-debt-deficits-trump
"To be clear, I am not particularly concerned about deficits right now, just as I wasn’t in 2010. But I took Ryan seriously when he said he was... But now, as Ryan prepares to leave Congress, it is clear that his critics were correct and a credulous Washington press corps — including me — that took him at his word was wrong. In the trillions of long-term debt he racked up as speaker, in the anti-poverty proposals he promised but never passed, and in the many lies he told to sell unpopular policies, Ryan proved as much a practitioner of post-truth politics as Donald Trump."
He wasn't sincere about the deficit, but he did sincerely want to dismantle the welfare state.
As Ezra points out, this is exactly what critics of Paul Ryan said would happen. Paul Ryan disagreed. But then he became speaker and we saw what he actually did. The critics were right.
To say this means Paul Ryan was selectively "sincere" feels like a weird use of the word "sincere" to me.
Paul Ryan sincerely believes the US would be better off if we dismantled the welfare state and he took actions he thought would advance that goal. I would contrast this with people like Kevin McCarthy or Lindsay Graham, who do not really seem to have sincere ideological beliefs but are merely in it for the power.
1. Paul Ryan talked a good game, but his revealed preferences were exactly what you'd expect if you paid no attention to what he said.
Even worse for the "Paul Ryan was sincere" argument is that if you took what Paul Ryan said at face value, your predictions about what he would actually do would've been worse than just guessing he wanted tax cuts for rich people.
So I'm not really sure what help the word "sincere" is. Or in Matt's case "extremely sincere."
2. Contra Mccarthy or Graham, I personally know people who are genuinely squishy ideologically, but sincere nonetheless. But they're not elected politicians!
To be clear, I think Matt's argument really does hold up for the people who staff congressional offices (they're usually taking pay cuts because they believe in their work!). Just don't think this works with Paul Ryan.
I think you're parsing the definition of sincere correctly, but I still think you're missing a key difference that Matt is pointing out. Perhaps he should've used a different word.
Paul Ryan has actual beliefs about how the government should be run. He thinks there is a purpose to all this. He is willing to lie in order to achieve those ends.
Kevin McCarthy (using as an example, someone might disagree with me about Kevin specifically) has no actual beliefs about how the government should be run. His political incentives lead him to a similar outcome as Paul Ryan, but Kevin McCarthy would be happy to raise taxes on rich people if it would help him in the smallest possible way. He doesn't think running the government is actually a thing that matters one way or the other, it is only a means to personal power for him.
I'm not saying that makes him worse than Paul Ryan, in some ways it makes him better in terms of outcomes. But there is a belief in actual purpose that does make Paul Ryan more "sincere" in some sense
double plus like
He may sincerely want to reduce the deficit, and also sincerely want to dismantle the welfare state.
And then perhaps assess the situation and determine that dismantling the welfare state was more important and would also help achieve the first goal.
This is theoretically possible, but it's not really consistent with Ryan's positions on taxes.
Political necessity, yo.
If your goal was the reduce the deficit and slash the welfare state, which party are you going to join? Republicans.
And will that party generally accept higher taxes? No.
FWIW, I subscribe to the 'almost all politicians are power-hungry monster' school of thought.
So I don't think that Ryan is really very sincere overall.
Just that it is feasible, and that y'all are unwilling to engage in the same level of nuance for his views and actions as you would with democrats or progressives that hold similarly conflicting views. =)
If I wanted to reduce the deficit, I would be a Democrat. If you think Republicans are interested in the deficit, well, it's fine not to pay attention to politics but it's also fine to sit out discussions of topics you're not interested in.
Paul Ryan wasn't just against higher taxes, and he wasn't some back-bencher along for the ride. He was speaker of the House when it passed a $2 trillion tax cut. Then, his work done, he resigned.
So no, it's not feasible that he was a secret deficit hawk. That's the opposite of what actually happened in plain sight.
"If your goal was the reduce the deficit and slash the welfare state, which party are you going to join? Republicans"
"If I wanted to reduce the deficit, I would be a Democrat."
YES! History shows that having a Democrat president and Republican congress is the best way to reduce the deficit. Republicans in congress generally don't increase spending as much, and a Democratic president vetoes their tax cuts.
Did anyone else who did not watch the West Wing but enjoyed this post get really confused when Matt brought up “Santos”? I kept thinking George Santos and didn’t know why Matt was so complementary to this description of an Outsider.
Yo Matt, there’s a new Congress that could barely choose a Speaker of the House and might default on the national debt. More importantly, there are a lot of extremely pedestrian takes on said Congress and I’d like to hear a smart one from you. Off news cycle posts can be fun, but please step up to the plate when when there are big events that beg for smart take slinging.
Congress piece coming tomorrow
And predictions for 2023?
You will hear Matt’s film and tv criticism and like it David! ; )
The Brazil- Jan 6 event and how Twitter radicalization/organization fed it might have been an excellent post this morning.
Not a coincidence that Elon canned the entire Brazil moderation staff and then this insurrection was largely organized on Twitter.
Our host doesn’t write about breaking news, quite intentionally.
I agree hot takes are a problem on todays news cycle and media environment.
I’m just totally confident the thesis I’ve pushed in these forums the past month regarding Elon’s dangerous oversight of Twitter is being borne out here. (And would like to drive that point home in real time)
Lol.
No one should use the phrase “I’m totally confident” in analyzing current events after *two days*, especially when their analysis amounts to “now, more than ever...”
So when this bears out in a few days, you’ll eat your own shit, right David R?
When your unfalsifiable word gobbledygook proves true, then sure, ChatGPTBot, sure.
Stop being a spiritual emperor, in other words?
Yep, your ridiculous insistence on not reading then misrepresenting my positions is hilarious. But please go on.
And when my ideas turn out to be accurate; will you concede I’ve been right or just continue misrepresenting me?
A lovely logical fallacy that because Telegram exists, Twitter (and lack of decent moderation) could not have been a driving force for this insurrection easily avoided.
But please make fun of MY arguments
Brazilians largely use Telegram and Whatsapp, not twitter, so your confidence is misplaced.
I don’t think you understand my arguments then.
It is not “either/or.” Its that Musks irresponsible leadership allowed for this event to be worse (or to perhaps reach the critical mass necessary for it to get off the ground at all.)
According to this survey, Twitter (48%) and Telegram (55%) usage within Brazil is pretty similar.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1307747/social-networks-penetration-brazil/
According to early reports, experts are including Twitter as one of the main social media engines most responsible for allowing for the organization of this mess.
You might brush that off. I won’t. Those who have benefited so much from our free society should be interested in protecting that freedom, not unravelling it. And Musk’s actions, purposefully or not, are pushing chaos, radicalization and terrorist violence. This is the first clear evidence of this but will not be the last
> According to early reports, experts are including Twitter as one of the main social media engines most responsible for allowing for the organization of this mess.
Who? How could they possibly know, less than 24 hours after this even happened?
Your survey doesn't establish usership; it's a list a of the proportion of people that "access" a service. Technically I "accessed" twitter just now, even though I don't have an account. Also you clearly just googled this and didn't have any info at hand before making your claims.
I'm going by the WaPo reporting on this, which says, clearly, that the events were planned on Telegram. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/08/brazil-bolsanaro-twitter-facebook/
> Organizers on Telegram posted dates, times and routes for “Liberty Caravans” that would pick people up in at least six Brazilian states and ferry them to the party, according to posts viewed by The Washington Post. One post said: “Attention Patriots! We are organizing for a thousand buses. We need 2 million people in Brasília.”
We can't possibly know yet the extent of this, but that's actually evidence, rather than unnamed "experts" you claim to have read.
And now Bolsonaro is becoming a Florida Man.
Can’t make this shit up.
The connection is that if congress had gone for speaker Tucker than he would have been third in line for the presidency. (I think?)
I think the biggest liberal critique of The West Wing is that it has no space for McConnellism (the GOP strategy for accruing power by obstructing Dems at every turn, saying no to any deal, and simply trying to run out the clock). By 2010-11 it was pretty obvious that this is how Republicans would behave towards Obama, yet he still kept trying to make deals with them. Hell, some D members of Congress still haven't gotten this message, hence we're heading for another debt ceiling showdown!
Watching the show now makes it seem hopelessly naive.
I wonder if there just isn't a great way to make this compelling television. Usually the protagonists are presented with an obstacle and the tension comes from trying to overcome it, but with something like McConnellism, it'd just be characters talking about there being nothing they can do, at least in any realistic portrayal. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Probably true! As entertainment, The West Wing has some strong moments and nobody really likes watching McConnellism in real life anyway, so why would they want to watch a fictionalized version?
I suppose the critiques usually center around the aides who came of age during the West Wing Era and went to work for Obama (or other Congressional Dems) and became disillusioned to learn that Washington wasn't really like that. Maybe that narrative is a little too pat, but the punditocracy used to act this way during the Obama Era ("if only he invited Orrin Hatch over for dinner, they'd be able to make deals like LBJ did in the 60s!").
The left certainly has a weird tendency to see 1933-34 and 1964-65, four years out of 400, as the "norm" of our politics and the other 396 years as deviations from the norm. However I recommend Gabler's biography of Ted Kennedy. He DID invite Orrin Hatch over for dinner, and the DID make deals.
To be fair, Joe Biden kinda said a version of this in 2020 and then he...proceeded to pass a bunch of legislation, with nontrivial bipartisan support.
I'm sure it's way more complex than just inviting Senators over for dinner or whatever (and it's worth noting that Dems had narrow majorities, of course). But I'd score Biden's first two years as a modest win for the "relationships and dealmaking matter" theory of politics.
Obviously the GOP has gotten very obstructionist, especially in certain key areas like judicial nominations and executive staff. But the Biden admin has proved that it really is possible for bipartisan dealmaking to work in the current environment, so I think the idea that attempting cooperation is prima facie unwise is sort of overstated.
I think a yet underappreciated fact is how the early Biden years are really challening the Obama-era narrative of "GOP obstuctionism". His *repeated* bi-partisan successes, with McConnell still leading the Senate GOP, strongly suggest that Obama shares the blame for the congressional dysfunction under his administration. OF course, this persepctive might shift agian in the coming years, but should Biden *continue* to succeed to handle the GOP relatively well in the next couple of years (and hopefully also the next term after that!) it would really be a serious additional factor that would make the Obama legacy age poorly in retrospect.
But again, Biden has been operating with Democratic majorities, albeit incredibly slim ones. Obama had 60 D Senators and a large House majority to start his presidency, then faced an R House for the remaining 6 years (and an R Senate for the last two). Biden's achievements have absolutely been impressive, but we're entering a new era. Let's see how things change.
I partially agree. But considering the filibuster is intact, Biden *still* needed GOP votes for a bunch of stuff, and hit *got them*. Obama on the other hand failed with bi-partisanshipboth when he had far better and worse numbers in congress than Biden. However I agree that the latter half of Biden's term might shift our perspective once more.
I didn't say it was unwise, just that it was not reality. We'll see what happens now that the Republicans have control of the House. Based on the Speakership fight, I'm not optimistic.
To be clear, I am very worried too. I think the Dems were fools not to elminate, or at least raise, the debt ceiling when they could. This game of betting the very life of the country for short-term political gain may have worked in the midterms but at some point we will pay very very dearly for this Russian roulette.
While default is possible, I think the chances are miniscule. The nuclear option is that the Biden administration just blows right through the ceiling, and then we wonder why we all believed it was a real thing in the first place.
I've commented before that I don't understand why the Obama administration didn't take the position that spending authorizations work an implied repeal of the debt ceiling to the extent Congress fails to make any other arrangement to pay for the increased spending. It's very defensible from a legal standpoint (arguably more so than the platinum coin option Matt favors).
Congress has the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and, separately, the power “To borrow Money on the credit of the United States.”
The president cannot do either of those things. The president can only spend the money on hand to do the things Congress has told him he may or must do.
That's super interesting! Maybe they think it's safe to leave the Damocles sword hanging to make the GOP see reason? That trying to take it off the table any other way would at best give the GOP some rhetorical points and at worst will create additional headaches (e.g. lengthy litigation, even if Biden wins it in the end)?
I hope you're right. I am super worried however. I'd also add the worry that should the deadline pass without congress approving the ceiling rise that can trigger panic that may lead to great economic harm on its own, no? i.e. if the markets *believe* the US is going to default, isn't that already more than half the damage?
In other words, if you're correct, can't that be too late? Unless Biden provides sufficient assurances *before* the deadline, which would disincentivize the gop to compromise to he presumably won't?
At the end of the day it's up to the sanity and/or competence of congresspeople and their leadership. Thus I am very concerned.
What does a market freakout look like? I guess it would matter most at the next auction of US treasuries, by which point it will be resolved one way or another.
To some extent the show just failed to anticipate how bad things would get, which isn’t that great a failing--as late as 2009 liberal commentators were still saying that yes, Bayh and Nelson might vote against parts of the ACA but of course they’d vote for cloture. And TWW didn’t totally whiff on obstructionism and hardball; in one scene Leo tells Toby some old anecdote from the House that ends “the Republicans aren’t the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate’s the enemy,” but then concludes, “it’s not like that anymore.” Characters like Ainsley Hayes were not typical.
Chuck Grassley spent months talking healthcare with Max Baucus and other Dems!
It's truly disheartening remembering how long Democrats were strung along trying to pass anything when they had 60 Senators (and then 59) in the 2009-2010 Congress.
A critique that boils down to ... the show didn't predict the future ... is a pretty weak critique, no?
It was fairly obvious from the Gingrich Era that the GOP was trending in that direction. Even Bob Dole dismissed Clinton's election as being illegitimate since it came with less than 50% of the vote.
I guess I should clarify that I personally really enjoy the best moments of the show, and that it's fine to enjoy a fictionalized version of reality for entertainment (also for the reasons MY highlights in his comment). It's more that there really were people in positions of power and/or influence who should've known better who thought the show was more reality than fantasy.
This was my gut reaction to Matt’s piece, as well. Certainly by the time of Bernie’s 2016 remarks it was clear to even the most casual of observers that cynicism and nihilism really *were* the ascendant order of the day in Washington? (See also: title of prominent McConnell biography.)
(Matthew S.’s point that it’s hard to make good TV out of that is well-taken. )
“…obstructing Dems at every turn…”
Such as…?
My sense is failure to get a debt ceiling increase was mostly a matter of political self-interest on the part of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. I doubt many Democrats on the Hill have any illusions at this point about their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I don't know if my take is widely shared or not. Maybe there's a better explanation.
What self-interest to Manchin and Sinema have in blocking a debt ceiling increase?
They both face tough reelection bids (assuming they both run in 2024), and both of those Senators have tried to cultivate a centrist, non-partisan brand. Voting with 48 of your Democratic colleagues and zero of your Republican colleagues to turn us into Zimbabwe (/s) is something you might be reluctant to do.
“…a matter of political self-interest…”
Obstructionism is another word for democracy.
Contention: Arnie Vinick was the fever dream of establishment centrism and The West Wing’s most utterly ridiculous creation.
It was less unreasonable then as "really old guy in the Senate from a now-blue state who has always been a moderate and holds on by the power of incumbency".
Not a million miles from, say, Olympia Snowe (from that time), or a mirror-image version of Manchin now. Heck, if Arnie had run for the Senate when he left the Governor's mansion, he'd have had a chance.
The Presidential nomination, though? Completely outside the possible world.
Yeah. I don’t doubt there are real-life Republicans who inspired the Vinick character. But they had been declining in influence for decades even then.
While it’s entirely plausible that such a Republican would have been highly competitive in a national election, the idea that they a) would have won the primary, and b) through their example reoriented the party, strained dramatic credibility even then and looks even more laughable now.
Sorkin likened Vinick to McCain.
Like a lot of people, he fell for the image McCain liked to portray, rather than the voting record. But, tbf, McCain got elected for the image.
Sorkin didn't write Vinick. I guess he might've said that somewhere but I doubt it because he didn't comment on the later part of the show much
True, but it was always clear to me that Vinick was "McCain, but actually a moderate."
Hm, the quote was from during the '08 election, and was something to the effect of TWW predicting the entire election (Obama as Santos and McCain as Vinick). It might've been someone other than Sorkin.
Wasn't Sorkin off the show by the time Vinick showed up?
I've written about the West Wing in these comments before, not sure how it came up, but I'll once again say that nearly everyone over 30 I spoke with while working in politics/politics adjacent fields as cited the West Wing as inspiration or a favorite show.
In terms of their radicalness, Barlett at one point made some large changes to foreign policy, in a more interventionalist direction, and Santo's education plan was not particular incrementalistic.
That Millhiser piece seems a bit misguided. The Barlett administration having few accomplishments is just the text of the show. He asks: "Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college?" That was the point of their refundability plan, to help reduce the cost of college, and they do so by removing a tax loophole on CEO compensation. He also says Barlett is inattentive to economic justice but Josh's intro to his campaign is him telling his constituent that he voted against a Dairy Compact because of child poverty.
I agreed that "The Surpremes" is very overrated, I think people just want to like a late season episode, but thats mostly because the writing of the conservative justice, Justice Christopher Mulready, was kind of silly. They want him to seems super objectionable at first and then just kind of hand wave that to get at the idea of a smart liberal and smart conservative arguing about ideas being cool. The point was that Glenn Close's character was that she was the "Liberal Lion" that they could replace the chief justice with rather than just get some middle of the road liberal. The abortion thing was a liability not the point of the nomination. Fun performances but doesn't hold up on later watches.
"A conventional knock on the show is that it makes it seem as if substantive political battles can be won with nice speeches. I think Aaron Sorkin’s movie “The American President” really does that. But “The West Wing” doesn’t — Bartlet simply does not achieve many big changes to American public policy because giving nice speeches doesn’t win substantive political battles"
I think this is correct (and similar to the take I had previously posted here). The speeches people remember are mostly embarrassing conservatives or reacting to great tragedies like the car crash or the bombing. Santos gives the most impactful, plot-wise, speech of the show at the convention.
It should also be mentioned that the West Wing often comes out in support of passionate people on the fringes. Justice Mendoza is presented as much better than the banal but well credentialed choice they had before. The entire plot of "The Surpremes" is based on the idea that smart people arguing ideas is better than simple appointing a compromise justice. When Stackhouse is running in the primary against Barlett they show that his run from the left causes Barlett to take the politically risking stances on needle exchange. He is presented as smart and reasonable even though the cast in angry at him for making the election harder. I think Bernie people might actually enjoy the episodes during this part.
People often try this strange double move against the West Wing where is both a fantasy and also the administration was "actually" not effective but the text of the show is that the people in politics, particularly liberal politics, are smart and passionate but also personally flawed and that despite their virtues it is hard to make progress. Their victories are often compromises, they suffer defeats and they end up thinking about who can continue the fight after their time is up.
I think you and Matt are both correct that the complaints of being a "liberal fantasy" don't really gel with the actual content of the show. I just wanted to add that I feel the same way about some of the complaints about Sorkin's dialog.
You often hear "Real people don't speak in super-polished soliloquies and biting witticisms!" but if you actually watch The West Wing and much of Sorkin's other work, the fun in his writing comes from how frequently language breaks down and characters fumble over their words or let their mind wander. It's about really smart people reaching their intellectual limits and then saying something really dumb because they are actually human beings and NOT superheroes.
Matt!
I agree! What you write is extremely true.
(Note: in WW, all characters exclaim the name of the person they’re talking to on a regular basis)
If you’re a has-watched-the-whole-series-6-or-7-times person like me, let me endorse the show (don’t worry - Mandy doesn’t last beyond season 1...you can fight through it) - the future star/cameo watching alone is worth it. I’d also recommend the West Wing Weekly companion podcast. Cohosted by Josh Malina.
My complaints about WW are many but I’ll name these:
1) Bartlett was too often like K9 on Doctor Who (Tom Baker years). In Doctor Who they’d create some totally inescapable trap for the characters...then at the last moment K9 would show up and use a previously un-discussed weapon (a laser cutter or smoke bomb or stun ray) and save the day. On WW they’d create some political Gordian Knot and in the last sequence POTUS would have some all-knowing/all-seeing karate move that he never talked about before...or he’d simply change his mind and decide the knot didn’t need to be untied. What? You weren’t ever going to sell the Aegis cruisers to the Taiwanese?? Wow! Good idea!! That would have been a great thing to tell your *#%ing staff about, Jed! Problem solved!
2) John Goodman’s horrendous Southern accent. It was only 3-4 episodes but it was bad enough to stun a team of oxen in their tracks.
3) John Spencer’s acting - may he rest in peace. Sorry, but search your feelings - you know it’s true. It sounds like he was a great guy...but the Leo role always felt totally miscast to me. Spencer was just never convincing as the ‘ultimate Washington power broker’
PS - I am typing this while simultaneously briskly walking down a crowded hallway, typing comments on 3 other Substack articles.
I don;t know who K9 is. I never noticed Goodman's bad accent. I thought Spencer was excellent. IIRC they incorporated his death into the story line, no?
I've loved WW myself, binge-watched the crap out of it a couple years after its run ended. But I've yet to re-watch it. What West Wing is for you (in terms of multiple re-watches), Mad Men is for me.
When you’re from the south, bad southern accents make you crazy...especially trying to squeeze a southern accent onto an actor with such a thick midwestern twang. Kills me.
I know it’s heresy to criticize Spencer - and don’t get me wrong - he’s lovable and has some fantastic moments. I just never understood why he is so revered as a dramatic actor.
I’ve binged Mad Men multiple times too! It’s fantastic - a little depressing - but the material is so rich. (PS - January Jones is the John Spencer of Mad Men)
I'm from Boston. I feel your pain. And unlike with Boston accents (although I'm not sure you'd agree) at least there are a few actors who occasionally get southern accents right. Pretty much 99% of the Boston accents gifted to us by Hollywood are cringe. Super cringe. (I respected the fuck out of Scorsese-Nicholson for not even bothering to attempt one in "The Departed"). Though Christian Bale (incredible actor IMHO) did a pretty convincing one in "The Fighter."
I'm not too familiar with Spencer. I (vaguely, tbh) remember his performance fondly in WW, but it's not the hill I'd want to die on.
January Jones is actually the Anna Gunn of Mad Men: a somewhat unlikable character who generated excessive antipathy for the actor playing her. It's not easy to play "irritating, immature, nagging Wasp ice queen sure to alienate fans of the show" but Jones pulled it off with considerable aplomb.
PS—depressing? Mad Men mostly ended on a note of optimism for all the principal characters (if anything it was arguably a crass, overly glib "Hollywood happy ending.").
Leo was not originally the ultimate Washington power broker - he was Bartlett’s right hand from being governor of New Hampshire. He seemed believable in that role to me.
Power broker is the wrong phrase. He’s more like the ‘consummate Washington insider....’
We know he had a cabinet post under the previous (D) administration (Commerce?) and we know they’ve been friends for a long time, but I don’t remember anything about him being a right hand man in New Hampshire. In fact that would be a stretch - in ‘Bartlet for America’ Leo visits Jed as Governor, and the mood is that they haven’t seen anything in a long time.
I liked this comment just for that last sentence.
Am I the only one who thinks of Howard Dean whenever the West Wing gets mentioned?
I think 2004 fit the “outsiders not radicals” model really well.
I don't really like The West Wing but this is a good article and, in combination with many of the comments here, hits the nail on most of the head. The one little piece I think it's missing is that some portion of the anti-WW sentiment from the left isn't about realism but because they *agree* with Matt on what the point of the show is (taking the emblems of the American state and associating them with liberal ideas) but a central part of their aesthetic is having distaste for the emblems of the American state.