Okaytopia: American Ideation, the 21st Century, and The West Wing as Science Fiction (Patreon)

Here we are, my dears, a few scant weeks after the election, and y’all wanna hear what I think about The West Wing, i.e Lord of the Rings for suburban liberals which I guess makes some kind of sense.

BY THE WAY, for the purposes of this review, when I say the word “liberal” I am not using it as an insult. I KNOW. WHAT? THAT’S FUCKING CRAZY IT’S THE WORST WORD IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE ON THIS THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT FINALLY AGREE. No, I just mean basic-ass Democrats who believe in civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, universal health care, public education, social security, diversity, possibly not all the guns all the time, environmentalism, unions, government-funded programs of many kinds, sensible regulation of basically all the industries, and I don’t know maybe not having so many wars but also if there is a genocide happening probably we should do something though maybe.

That’s what “liberal” meant in the 90s and early 00s. Not as far along on some of those topics as we are now (although…occasionally further along, we have regressed delightfully as a nation, it’s been super fun) but basically on board those boats even if some folks were still all scared, wearing about a hundred life preservers, dragging one toe flirtatiously on the birdshit-encrusted dock while asking stupid questions about what would happen if the boat wanted to get married to another boat or if it didn’t want to get beaten all the way to death by the boat police. Mostly because for twelve years this whip-it brained country had elected people whose official policy was more or less “fuck boats we’re all walking okay we’re driving but you’re definitely walking use them bootstraps idk” and everyone left of Satan was so freaked out about maybe getting locked out of politics forever by the anti-boat assholes that Bill Clinton was actually a generational sea change that felt like a new world and also a big fat lurch to the left and Hillary was treated as so staunch a socialist feminist ball-buster that she was basically torched on live TV every day for not baking cookies and not *checks notes* neoliberal fascist shills who accomplished nothing.

Back then, liberal was simply the word for not being a right-wing dick canister. “Progressive” still referred to a pretty obscure (to most people whose mothers were not political science professors at major universities) isolationist movement in the early 20th century, “leftist” wasn’t even really in Rush’s garbage-mouth vocabulary and in a mainstream cultural sense meant the four people in the Che Guevara fan club on your local university campus maybe because it was about five seconds after the fall of the Soviet Union and even students were pretty flinchy about words like that, and all those things I said up there were THE unbelievably controversial issues that right wing radio and television hated so fucking much they convinced like five generations at once, in both parties plus the Greens and Libertarians, that “liberal” was a dirty yucky no-good curse word no one should ever admit to being. Lol those assholes wanting everyone to have things.

Hey remember “latte-drinking liberal”? Ha ha coffee is good but if you put milk you already heated up in it then it’s basically communism I love the 90s.

So that’s what liberal meant then, and by then I mean when I was 20-27 years of age, a navy wife, marching in anti-war protests, insisting that YES I am a liberal AND a feminist and those are perfectly good words to say out loud and not whisper, and absolutely refusing to watch the goddamned West Wing fuck you very much.

Those were the Bush years. You know, back when The West Wing was the most popular alt-universe science fiction show on television.

And I hated that motherfucker. Still do. I spent much of that time watching the news for word of dead officers who might be my husband. Watching the media warp every thousands-strong protest I attended until it looked like “both sides” had equal support but also jk no one came it was a bust everyone loves war. The idea of watching a different administration, one not filled with clowns and devils and the Ghost of Christmas Future as VP, play out on television made me physically nauseous. It was not a game of make-believe that I wanted to play after the 2000 election got stoled the fuck up and the entirety of the authoritarian rogues’ gallery from the 70s and 80s rolled right back into power and put their nasty feet up on the table we were all supposed to share.

And I liked Aaron Sorkin back then! I loved Sports Night despite its mostly horrific view of women and dating. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t watch a lavishly-shot, beautifully-cast production of the better timeline every week at 8pm/7 central. It would be like having a glory hole in your living room through which you could see 2016-2020 play out with Hillary in charge and less than a hundred people dying of COVID and oh look there’s a cute How Huma Abedin Got Her Groove Back subplot where she dumps her dirtbag husband on a street corner and he slinks off to Mandyville never to be heard from again.

I wouldn’t watch that shit either. It’s just…salt in the wound to me. Not entertainment.

SO IF YOU HAVE SO MANY GRANDE-SIZE FEELINGS AND IT’S CLEAR YOU DO, CAT, SINCE WE’RE 800 WORDS DEEP AND YOU HAVEN’T EVEN SAID THE WORDS “JED BARLET,” WHY THE EFF DID YOU WATCH SEVEN SEASONS OF THE WEST WING PLUS THE SPECIAL PLUS THAT WEIRD EPISODE WITH ALL THE POLITICAL PEOPLE BEING INTERVIEWED BECAUSE TV WAS LIKE JUST SHOOT WHATEVER IT’S NOT LIKE PEOPLE HAVE ANYTHING ELSE TO DO WHILE THEY WAIT FOR INSTAGRAM TO BE INVENTED?

Well, I made a deal with my brother, see.

My brother is basically Ainsley Hayes. He’s a good and moral dude, but he votes Republican because guns, I don’t want to get into it with y’all, it is what it is. But he’s also a huge fan of The West Wing and I don’t really get that but it ALSO is what it is. And two-ish years ago, he really wanted me to watch it after he enjoyed Parks and Recreation so much on my recommendation. I said: I will not watch it, Bro I Am. I will not watch it on a train. I will not watch it on a plane. It will hurt me more than it ever would have in its prime to watch a show about good people trying to make good government considering who we know is sitting in those chairs right now. Er. I do not like it, Bro I Am.

But see, media is very important to my family and I knew that and I saw an opening. I can play a politician when I need to. I counter-offered. I said: I will watch every stupid minute of this stupid show if you will vote Democrat in 2020 LIKE YOU KNOW JED BARTLET WOULD WANT YOU TO DO.

I got a long silence. I said: I will accept third party.

And the deal was struck. (And kept to by both of us, just to cut any tension that might have set up.)

So off and on over the last couple of years, I have watched this show. And I wanted to hate it, because it hurt me. It hurt me to watch good people trying to solve real problems goodly when I knew the people in all those roles now were, in fact, various orcs and mindflayers who didn’t care at all about doing anything, let alone goodly. It hurt me to watch Republicans portrayed as basically moral people who played fair and could be trusted to take over the Presidency from a Democrat for like five minutes because reasons and generally pretended not to be fascists in light-coverage makeup. It hurt me to watch a version of the 2000s play out in which the government was run by someone other than the Reagan/Nixon Seditious Snake Squad just plowing us face-first into war and financial destruction at all times.

But I didn’t hate it.

Oh, I hate parts of it. But as a whole, I did not and do not hate this show about how much you can trust the government.

It is 100% easier for me emotionally to take in Veep or Vice or House of Cards where everyone is weird, incompetent, selfish, or actually evil most of the time. Cynicism can be a comfort, and Aaron Sorkin, as cool as he would like us all to think he is, is foundationally against cynicism. All his shows on both a macro (series) and micro (episode) bend toward a sincerity and build to a sort of spiritual crescendo of whatever topic they revolve around (sports, comedy, politics, newscasting, etc). We make fun of his trademark monologues but each and every one is essentially a new draft of a constant, consistent plea not to become cynical, to see the importance of these units of culture, to do our best by them, to participate and believe, to allow ourselves to find elevation in them. It is not a revolutionary plea, and is in some ways an inherently conservative one—Sorkin finds elevation within the system, always, not by tearing it down or indeed even largely interrogating it. But it is rather a cozy one.

And it is a plea that is particularly difficult to pull off when applied to a show about government, a topic on which most of us are foundationally cynical. It’s one thing to devote a bunch of time on Sports Night to monologues about how sports can be more serious and enlightening than most people give them credit for. Oh, I never thought of it that way is forever an excellent and sought-after audience response. But we all know government is important. And when given an uplifting monologue about said importance, it’s very hard not to return a less desirable audience response: yeah, but we all know it doesn’t really work like that.

In fact, I’d like to suggest that the only reason The West Wing works and feels like anything other than a worshipful paean to the status quo (though boy does it walk that line sometimes), is because of the context in which it aired. That it was explicitly an alternate universe, a fantasy of good government aired during and an explicit response to a regime flirting with if not out and out embracing authoritarianism. It portrayed a system and a status quo that did not exist, and as such was a small act of allegory and resistance. This is a show that cannot be understood as though it was meant to be watched during the Obama or Clinton administration. It is a product of the Bush era and a hard pill to swallow during Trump’s.

The hurt I feel watching WW is a central part of the concept, a cognitive dissonance between what I know to be and what is imagined that I am meant to take away and into the world.

In short: The West Wing is science fiction.

It’s just the opposite of dystopia. Not utopia, exactly, but okaytopia. What if everything were just…okay. Not perfect, not evil, just basically trying to do all right at this whole existence thing. That’s the core of the show. And though it’s been dismissed as porn for liberals, I don’t really think it ever was. You don’t feel satisfied watching it when the actual administration is a Republican nightmare orgy of cruelty, you feel angry.

It’s basically all summed up by the theme song. Every episode starts with lovely sweeping music and rattling American Revolution drums and its all very stirring. And then ends with fucking Happy Christmas Hallmark music that gives you semantic whiplash and a slap on the ass with a sprig of mistletoe. It brings you in with a promise of solemn consideration and drama and tradition, but sends you out with a light jingle and a corporate giggle no matter how serious the episode is, as though it’s a 70s sitcom where everything was resolved in half an hour so let’s all celebrate in the freeze frame.

Dissonance. Everything’s not okay. It never is. But the background music/mainstream culture says it must be.

Dissonance.

Did Sorkin intend that? I’m not sure. Maybe. Doesn’t really matter. That dissonance is an unavoidable aspect of watching the show now, in a world where we have been taught in lessons of fire what each and every ones of these jobs in the White House is by total monsters doing them extremely loudly and badly. You know how people used to explain various posts? “It’s what Toby/Josh/Leo/CJ does in The West Wing.”

Now, does all that mean it’s some towering work of resistance art? Not even close. It has serious flaws throughout that are continually saved by great acting and Sorkin’s ear for dialogue. Some of it gets very, very hard to watch now. Sometimes because Sorkin kind of sort of completely hates women, so CJ, who I will argue to the death is the actual protagonist of this show, can’t be introduced like all the men are, in the midst of a power play of some kind, but by falling on a treadmill like some kind of weird rom com heroine who can only be relatable if she has a flaw, but not like a real flaw because then she might be a human being like the menz so LOL WOMEN BE CLUMSY AM I RIGHT. So Mandy is vanished off the face of the planet without explanation, Donna’s whole relationship with Josh is a whole soggy mess of borderline inappropriate power dynamics, Amy as the token “official feminist” is obviously too ambitious, too pushy, too annoying and only gets screentime when she needs to be the love interest of the guy who is going to end up with his subordinate, we never really deal with what anyone would make of Dr. Bartlet when Hillary was so savaged for not being a housewife and Michelle after her for existing as a Black woman in a Black Democrat’s White House, numerous female characters, most notably Ainsley Hayes and Zoe Bartlet, are brought up and treated/shot/written as though they will have important stories and effects on the narrative and then slowly forgotten about without resolution, and despite several sex scandals over the course of seven seasons, rarely if ever so much as meeting the women those naughty men slept with. And of course, while CJ’s arc is central to the final seasons, her ultimate conflict is between work and personal life, which no men seem to have any angst over at all, and it resolves with a dude teaching her the right way to balance those pesky things. Yay! Feminism is complete! Sexism over!

One does not simply watch an Aaron Sorkin show expecting not to get real mad about the women in it.

And, you know, also the men. Bartlet is this Ultimate Democratic Final Form Dream Journal Daddy in the shape of a human male, less a character than literally just the most electable possible Democrat as created in a lab, FDR meets Clinton meets the actual Founding Fathers, but also so endearing and down home small town America but also speaks Latin but also calls the Butterball Turkey Hotline. And Charlie is the ideal Boyfriend Material good guy. Leo is pretty okay.

Everyone else is just kind of a dick. Yes, even Toby, who manages by the end to be not great at anything he does barring copyediting. And I will go to the grave saying Josh sucks and the only reason even I feel warmly toward him is that Bradley Whitford is just that good. Josh is a goddamned mess of a man, he cannot handle any woman not bowing to his superior intellect, he’s rude and shitty to everyone, he does not listen, he is a bad boss and a bad friend. But Bradley Whitford could make a list of different types of cheese sound as compelling as Hamlet so Josh comes off looking pretty good in the end BUT HE IS NOT GOOD HE IS A BUTT.

Which doesn’t even get into Sam Seaborn, who was clearly meant to be the protagonist (PS this is why you have to understand the context of WW, because even casting Rob Lowe made everyone all uncomfy back then on account of how Mr Rob Lowe had a threeway with a 16 year old during the Democratic Convention and filmed it and nobody had hired him for a bit because of it) but leaves after season four never to be mentioned again because oh well just go pull another handsome man with brown hair and a clenched jaw out of the Hero Barrel, there’s plenty to choose from.

Generally speaking, The West Wing’s biggest flaw may well be that it can’t decide on a protagonist. It’s not an ensemble show really, it just can’t settle down. At first it really looks like this whole shindig is going to be about Charlie and Sam, but holy shit, by the end you barely remember those two characters and are genuinely kind of surprised Charlie still works there because they haven’t bothered to write anything for him for YEARS. Which is NOT A GREAT LOOK for the only Black main cast member. Then for awhile it looks like it’s mostly Bartlet’s story, but once the whole drama with the 25th Amendment happens, he fades more and more into the background until he’s barely in the last season as we focus on the Presidential campaign to replace him. It sort of seems like Josh gets to wear the Main Character hat, but ultimately, his actions don’t often affect the plot at large, just his own circle of influence and/or dumb life of being a dumb butt waiting for #MeToo to start, and he never grows or learns anything of note. His last “lesson” is to…take a vacation with your long-suffering subordinate who is now your girlfriend because that will fix all your bad boss behaviors. And while I said before that I do think CJ is the ultimate winner of this Protatonist Showdown, the show doesn’t know what to do with her on a REGULAR BASIS, and it’s only after Sorkin leaves that she comes to be central to most of the plots and is allowed to progress in her job and evolve.

So you end up with a situation where the different eras of the show genuinely feel like different shows because so many people are just forgotten about, sidelined, erased, brought forward, dumped, and then mentioned briefly in the finale. But it never feels like a true ensemble either, because someone is always being treated as the protagonist, it just never sticks. It’s hard to overstate how weird it is that Charlie continues to work at the White House until the very end but just gets no material at all past a certain point. For no stated reason. It looks from the outside like the writers just forgot he was even there.

But there’s that cracking dialogue, and the walking and the talking, and we all do love Jed Bartlet so much and Stockard Channing is so great (even if she rarely gets anything to work with) and it does all make Congressional budgets interesting and it’s pretty compulsively watchable even when it makes no sense at all (I’m sorry I still can’t get over handing the Presidency to the Republican Speaker of the House because it’s too intense to be involved in your daughter’s rescue and then America is apparently okay with that and he gets re-elected since in Fantasyland I guess it isn’t the weakest move imaginable that those very Republicans would quite rightly capitalize on as the Dem couldn’t do the job and had to get a GOP temp in there ugh it’s just bizarre and so much worse optics than hiding a medical condition which we all know no one cares about since forging your own doctor’s note is an acceptable substitute for a release of medical records. Bartlet should have thought of that!) and there’s such a lovely revolving cast of legends and up and comers and it does make you feel things about America and shit and there’s a whole bit in Latin and you come to love all these people, even Josh the Butt, and you almost, almost don’t notice that they really don’t get any substantive change through in the whole administration. Whoops!

And a great deal of this affection comes from wishing these people, or at least these kinds of people, were in charge and making decisions, instead of the rogues’ gallery we have to see every day. From the acting and writing and camerawork, yes. But also from the wishful ideation they inspire deep down where you don’t want to be inspired by anything anymore.

My biggest complaints about the show honestly all come in the last season, which revolves around Matt “Totally Not Obama” Santos’ campaign. Before that, it’s mainly a standard Sorkin Soup of greatness and misogyny but also greatness, douchebags being rewarded for bagging douche, people talking so much the visuals are perhaps not as compelling as they might be until you realize it’s just an office drama in a REAL nice office, and frustration at the sheer number of dropped plots and characters.

But then we hit season seven and Arnold Vinick and I start to get upset.

Because there has never been a Republican like him in the modern party and there never will be. But America is obsessed with the idea of the Good Republican, or at least the Cool Republican, and this myth that there’s GOP loyalists out there with liberal social stances and sensible economic policies who isn’t afraid to stand up to his party and that that guy would unify the nation.

Essentially, putting a bunch of centrist Democrat ideas in a Republican’s mouth.

But that guy? Never gets past a primary. A pro-choice Republican? There aren’t any. And I say that to you as someone who’s Senator is Susan Collins, who was supposed to be that guy, and happily rubber stamped the court that is going to rip up Roe. Vinick is obviously supposed to be McCain BUT OH MY GOD AMERICA MCCAIN WASN’T THAT GUY EITHER. He was a Party man through and through who somehow convinced Democrats he was on our side with a couple of votes in decades in office FML there are no Republican mavericks they all fall in line.

Vinick pisses me off whenever he’s onscreen because I can handle a fantasy of how mainstream Democrats work, but not this bath-salts-fueled hallucination of what Republicans are after the last four years. NO! DO NOT HIRE HIM AS SECRETARY OF STATE HE’S GONNA HOTBOX NATO OR SOMETHING. And much like “copaganda,” I think this obsession in media with creating good, moral, reasonable, honorable conservative characters (that sound exactly like Democrats but are from Texas or some crap) in order to seem unbiased fuels real people’s conviction that Republicans are the party of morality and Democrats are all corrupt slutty assholes. Conservative media does not great strong, lovable, reasonable liberal characters when they want a foil. But liberal writers keep telling America that the Good Republican of their dreams is out there if we just clap our hands hard enough.

It’s pretty notable that the Good Liberals in The West Wing never seriously have to contend with right wing media dominance and propaganda outside of a Very Special Episode. Maybe that’s the true fantasy.

And yes. It was impossible to imagine Trump then, they get that pass. But they could definitely imagine Bush, and Karl Rove, and the “Permanent Majority” nonsense, and I can’t stand watching a liberal fever dream of what we want Republicans to be, knowing what’s happened now that they’ve had four years of an excuse to be what they want to be. Even in the fantasy, the liberal President doesn’t get that much done and it’s that popular and doesn’t always rise to the occasion. But the awesome maverick Republican who can win California still gets front and center. And the original plan was for him to win the election. You know, the one that in reality went to Obama.

This show, accused by all of being liberal porn, originally had a money shot consisting of McCain winning in 2008.

Not that liberal. Not that porny.

Throughout the last season, the “big ideas” and out of the box thinking that Santos and Vinick are supposed to represent are often remarkable for feeling like rather small potatoes given how 2016 changed the landscape. The crazy pie-in-the-sky health care plan is Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It, almost word for word. Racism and police brutality are barely mentioned because Vinick is such a good guy he shouldn’t have to answer for his party’s white supremacy I guess. Santos’ whole “radical” educational plan boils down to some fairly conservative points—removing tenure from teachers, punishing them for poorly performing students, increasing the school year. He doesn’t bring up teacher pay or school shootings or the failure of No Child Left Behind or the college cost crisis or free universal pre-K or anything we would put front and center in an educational debate now. Nothing shows how much mainstream Democrats have moved left since 2008 like watching this show, which is supposed to be the idealized Democratic world, hold up some pretty lukewarm stuff as a world-changing straight-talk leftist sundae with sprinkles on top. Nor do I believe for a second that Leo, a Chief of Staff who brings no constituency or state, who recently had a major cardiac event, would ever be chosen as VP. BUT WHATEVER I ALSO SAID IT WOULDN’T COME DOWN TO NEVADA LIKE S7 SAID AND LO AND BEHOLD.

Also we have seen what a debate without rules or moderation and a “different” outsider Republican is like and it’s definitely not Authenticitypalooza 07. It’s a mess. Yeah, it would be nice if our electoral choices were between two good, honest people with somewhat (but not severe) different ideas about governance but that hasn’t been the American election since Eisenhower.

The only over-idealized unrealistic over the top liberal porn thing on The West Wing is its portrayal of Republicans. Don’t @ me.

In the end, The West Wing comes down to how it makes you feel. A million characters come and go. Plotlines appear and disappear. But you feel a lot for these characters, and therefore for the jobs and roles they represent. And maybe if we hadn’t seen those roles get absolutely dumped on for four years, I would have more concern about that affection being manipulated to create faith in the system where we can afford none, but…those four years did happen. My brain has to fucking deal with the role of CJ Cregg being currently played by Kayleigh McEnany like a Nazi Chatty Cathy doll and Josh Lyman’s suit being filled out by Actual Nosferatu Stephen Miller and no idealism with regards to the press or the White House is gonna survive that.

So it’s about how it makes you feel. And I think these days it makes you feel angry. Angry that it isn’t like that when it could be. Angry that even in the fantasy no one is really changing all that much. Angry that things which end politicians’ careers onscreen—and deservedly, plausibly so—would never matter now. Angry that the show and government is so white and male and chauvinistic and it’s not gotten that much better. Angry that the ideals given voice here turned out not to matter at all to most people, and we all have to live with that.

But I think that anger is good. It is a righteous and correct anger. It is an anger that looks like hope, from a certain angle. It is a useful, productive anger. The kind of anger good science fiction can inspire in us—an anger that wants to re-shape the world to satisfy its longing to be at least better if not best.

Its longing for Okaytopia.