Was "The West Wing" Good Drama?

No. It Was Great Comedy

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I.

Over at

Slow Boring

,

Matthew Yglesias

penned a post a few months ago defending The West Wing as a good drama about politics. This was a response to leftist complaints over the fact that some of its cast members supported Hillary Clinton and not Bernie Sanders in 2016. Despite the fact that Sanders himself is a fan of Aaron Sorkin’s NBC hit, a few supporters decided to dump on the show for peddling the kind of plutocratic politics that Sanders has made war on. Yglesias lines up the show’s top three virtues as follows:

1. The characters are earnest do-gooders and so are real people in government.

   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. The smart and accurate thing to say is that real-world politics is more Veep than House of Cards, which is extremely true. But Veep is satire, exaggerating for effect and fundamentally also overstating the level of cynicism in Washington.

2. Americans like outsiders, not radicals.

   The West Wing correctly illustrates that traditionally, the voters have appreciated outsiders in presidential politics but not radicals. If you look at Bartlet and Matt Santos, they don’t have much in common biographically. But they are both alternatives to the establishment insiders (Hoynes and Russell) and both inspired idealistic people on their staff and in the electorate. They are fresh, interesting characters who promise a break from the grubbiness and opportunism that people see as endemic to the political system. But in terms of public policy, neither of them is anything particularly special.

3. Presidents dominate vibes, Congress dominates policy.

   Bartlet simply does not achieve many big changes to American public policy because giving nice speeches doesn’t win substantive political battles. To enact ambitious legislation you need congressional majorities—ideally large congressional majorities—and Bartlet doesn’t have them. What he can do is give a lot of good speeches.

How to Watch Movies

I was a young Republican in high school, coming from a family of moderate conservatives. Yet we flocked to the TV set every week to catch The West Wing, a viewing ritual that was followed by the latest episode of Law and Order. At school, I’d recreate the show’s dynamics with my Democrat friends; we’d revel in imitating the quick wit and cheeky debate tactics of its characters, whose squabbles—like ours—contained more than a hint of romantic charge. And that’s the thing about Sorkin’s serial: it’s not a drama at all—it’s a high comedy wrapped inside a drama.

This becomes all the more recognizable twenty years after its run. C.J. (Allison Janney), Toby (Richard Schiff), Sam (Rob Lowe), Josh (Bradley Whitford)—and of course President and Mrs. Bartlet (Martin Sheen and Stockard Channing)—form an exclusive club of high society types. In this elevated world, serious matters are often treated with ironic humor, and trivial things with faux seriousness. The women of the cast were especially brilliant at this style, with Janney and Channing sweeping through in fine evening wear and elevated tones borrowed from the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard.

Their witty repartee and smug—yet dashing—privilege are conventions right out of comedy of manners, from Baroque plays to movies like The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Dinner at Eight (1933). High comedy is all about style, class, and delicate wordplay, which the cast of The West Wing had down pat. Sorkin throws in many screwball comic elements, as well, which calls to mind pictures like It Happened One Night (1934). Think of the banter between Josh and Donna (Janel Moloney); Sam and Ainsley (Emily Hayes); C.J. and reporter Danny Concannon (Timothy Busfield)—even Leo and his secretary, Margaret (NiCole Robinson). In other places, he brings a touch of hard-boiled comedy to the proceedings through cynical characters like Toby and, later, Bruno (Ron Silver). The office settings—the show’s famous walk-and-talk scenes—hearken back to newspaper pictures like His Girl Friday (1940), and other classic films whose heroes are crack pros who brook no bullshit. What sticks in your mind—and still entertains you when you rewatch—is all this comic content.

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II.

When it comes to actual politics, however, The West Wing’s record hasn’t aged well. I agree with Ian Millhiser’s analysis from ten years ago that, taken as whole, the priorities of Bartlet’s administration amount to little more than milquetoast liberalism. Compared to the problems we’re facing now—many of which were incipient back then—the dramatic stakes are low. And those issues that do make the agenda are way overblown. Sam, for example, has a whole episode where he rails about how pennies should be withdrawn from circulation. Toby’s inspired to join Bartlet’s campaign because of—wait for it—his answer to a question about milk subsidies. Later, when Sam tires of small-bore politics and decides to swing for the fences, his big idea is that the administration should declare war on…cancer.

It’s not that curing cancer’s small potatoes. But the thing is, it’s not a political position. Who could be against such a proposal? Imagine if, instead, Sam wrote a speech in which Bartlet came out in favor of Medicare for All to make sure that these amazing new cancer treatments would be free at the point of service. Or announced a plan to decarbonize the energy sector by scaling up the country’s public power utility. Or introduced a universal family welfare benefit. (All real policies courtesy of

People's Policy Project

.) Now that kind of speech would truly turn heads, because those kinds of initiatives—the kind that LBJ pushed in the Great Society—are both visionary and political. Millhiser puts it well:

Besides trashing Social Security, the Bartlet Administration had few bold ideas. What was the Bartlet plan to ensure universal access to health care? Or the Bartlet plan to combat global warming? What did President Bartlet do to close the education gap between poor and rich children? Or to ensure that every child who does succeed in high school will be able to pay for college? If anything, his education policy was as much a betrayal as his Social Security debacle. Although the first term Bartlet White House had ambitious plans for education reform, the second term Bartlet wound up supporting school vouchers.

That’s the issue with Sorkin’s politics on the whole: they amount to elitist technocracy. The conceit of The West Wing is that if only a bunch of Ivy League Whiz Kids who talk a mile a minute ran the government, things would be so much more cool and hip and efficient. It’s not that neoliberal capitalism is intrinsically bad and should be tamed through another New Deal, Sanders-style. It’s that the American empire’s being poorly managed by troglodytes in the GOP. Bartlet’s enemies in the show are always stupid or moralistic or religious nuts, whereas he—a Nobel Laureate in Economics—is the paragon of enlightenment. Around these retrograde dolts, the President dances rhetorical circles that sound great but amount to nothing but symbolic shaming.

In fact, it’s often worse than that. Sorkin’s a great writer, but the Achilles’ heel in almost all his work is his penchant for editorializing and belief that he’s the smartest guy in the room—which is how Bartlet and his team often come off. Indeed, they pass on few chances to punch left and parrot conservative talking points. Listen to Sam bloviate as he condescendingly defends America’s low tax rate on the rich—which, despite his claims to the contrary, they still think’s too high and do everything in their power to evade.

It gets even more disturbing. In Episode 6 of the third season, for example, Leo receives a visit from Gen. Alan Adalme (Gerald McRaney), an old Air Force pal who served with him in Vietnam. The Administration’s considering having the U.S. join the rest of the civilized world and become party to the International Criminal Court, which would subject America’s military to possible prosecution for war crimes. McRaney warns him against the move, and when Leo asks why, he’s informed that a bombing mission he flew over Hanoi decades ago—unbeknownst to him—killed civilians. The truth horrifies him, even more so when McRaney tells him that under the new treaty, he could’ve been jailed for the act. The moral of the story, according to the general? “All war’s a crime.”

This is the kind of “gotcha” move that makes for Sorkin’s weakness. Because war is murder, the thinking goes, the truly just thing would be to ban it entirely. Since that would be pie-in-the-sky—and good men like Leo might go to jail—the U.S. should get a pass on such treaties. But this argument falls apart upon the briefest reflection. Yes, war is murder, no matter who gets killed or how. That’s all the more reason, though, to curb its worst aspects and try to prevent it from spinning out of control. Most nations with a conscience have decided to distinguish between legitimate acts of combat (such as Ukraine’s current self-defense) and massacres of poor peasants, like the ones Russia’s committing. As for Leo, the point of such treaties is to hold to account the commanders who order such crimes, not the combatants who don’t know what they’re doing.

It’s such slippery arguments in the show that carry water for the right and grate on your ears today, especially in light of Iraq and Afghanistan. And here I’d push back on Yglesias. It’s not just that Bartlet doesn’t have the congressional majorities to pass an FDR kind of agenda. It’s that he and his staffers don’t believe in such programs. They never argue in favor of them, even in private. They’re non-ideological, and that reflects their creator. In response to the rise of Millennial social democrats, Sorkin took it upon himself to go on TV and wag his finger at Rep. Alexandria O’Casio-Cortez, telling her and like-minded comrades to grow up and act like adults. This tone-deaf moment exposed him as an elder both out of touch and forgetful: does he not recall the impish, slightly chauvinistic humor that pervades The West Wing?

Sorkin is, in the end, an establishment Democrat—long on identity politics, short on systemic change, and high on his own sense of self. In Josiah Bartlet, he created his alter ego, and the result is a big brained centrist squish. Bartlet’s presidency, as Millhiser says, “advances a very small kind of liberalism that appeals mostly to people who’ve never worried if they could pay their medical bills or if their children can afford college.” The paternalist noblesse oblige quality to the President and his staff—of a piece with their high comic style—covers over the fact that their policies are pretty standard Third Way. In this, Bartlet both channeled the better parts of Bill Clinton and primed the audience for Barack Obama. Millhiser sums up the fictional president’s narrow vision:

Ultimately, the Bartlet Administration was a failed opportunity because President Bartlet never once sought out these kinds of battles. Protecting choice or welcoming gays into the military (something the Bartlet Administration supported but never accomplished) are important prongs of the progressive agenda. But a liberalism that’s uninterested in income inequality or ensuring that no American ever dies because they cannot afford to treat a curable disease is both a recipe for electoral defeat and a tragedy of moral neglect.

It wouldn’t be until a film like The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) that Sorkin would put his gifts—both for comedy and drama—at the service of a more radical politics. The West Wing was and is a great comedy. Yet looking at it now from this side of the Great Recession, Forever Wars, and the collapse of democracy, its politics are puny. Yglesias may protest that the blandness is the point, because that’s how things “really work” inside the Beltway. But that’s not always been the case in American history, as he well knows. Quite the contrary: we’ve gone through multiple periods of big, bold social progress in the past, led by dynamic personalities. It’s the lack of such movements and dreamers in the 1990s that was the aberration, not their return. As a reflection, then, of the mood of the country on the eve of the millennium, The West Wing was accurate. But it’s that very lack of vision—both in the show and in reality—that was the problem.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m still a fan. At its best, the show offered revelations of its characters’ interior lives that had a moving dramatic effect, especially for network TV. Years later, I think of Leo’s confession of going on a bender when Bartlet suffered an MS attack, John Spencer drawing on his own struggles with alcohol abuse. I think of Toby burying a homeless vet in Arlington as a boys’ choir sings Christmas hymns. I think of Allison Janney’s reaction when C.J. learns that her Secret Service crush (Mark Harmon) has been gunned down after trying to stop a robbery. And I think of Josh’s traumatic flashback to Bartlet’s assassination attempt, bullets flying as Yo Yo Ma bows a Bach cello suite. The show could never reach the depths and complexities of The Sopranos, its contemporary over on HBO. But in moments like these, with a winning ensemble, it touched a welcome note of grace. As an expression of America’s yearning for a more noble self-image, in contrast to our long national nightmare, The West Wing wasn’t a comedy or a drama, in the end, but an elegy.

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