Current Events > 'The West Wing' shows everything that's wrong with the Democratic Party

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https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/how-liberals-fell-in-love-with-the-west-wing

The West Wing aspires to more than simply visual verisimilitude. Breaking with the cynicism or amoralism characteristic of many dramas about politics, it offers a vision of political institutions which is ultimately affirmative and approving. What we see throughout its seven seasons are Democrats governing as Democrats imagine they govern, with the Bartlet Administration standing in for liberalism as liberalism understands itself.

More than simply a fictional account of an idealized liberal presidency, then, The West Wing is an elaborate fantasia founded upon the shibboleths that sustain Beltway liberalism and the milieu that produced them.
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But promoting or endorsing any specific policy orientation is not the show’s true raison d’être. At the conclusion of its seven seasons it remains unclear if the Bartlet administration has succeeded at all in fundamentally altering the contours of American life. In fact, after two terms in the White House, Bartlet’s gang of hyper-educated, hyper-competent politicos do not seem to have any transformational policy achievements whatsoever. Even in their most unconstrained and idealized political fantasies, liberals manage to accomplish nothing.
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Despite its relatively thin ideological commitments, there is a general tenor to the West Wing universe that cannot be called anything other than smug.

It’s a smugness born of the view that politics is less a terrain of clashing values and interests than a perpetual pitting of the clever against the ignorant and obtuse. The clever wield facts and reason, while the foolish cling to effortlessly-exposed fictions and the braying prejudices of provincial rubes. In emphasizing intelligence over ideology, what follows is a fetishization of “elevated discourse” regardless of its actual outcomes or conclusions. The greatest political victories involve semantically dismantling an opponent’s argument or exposing its hypocrisy, usually by way of some grand rhetorical gesture.
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Thus Bartlet Democrats do not see Republicans as the “enemy,” except to the extent that they are rude or insufficiently respectful of the rules of political decorum. In one Season 5 plot, the administration opts to install a Ruth Bader Ginsburg clone (Glenn Close) as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The price it pays—willingly, as it turns out—is giving the other vacancy to an ultra-conservative justice, for the sole reason that Bartlet’s staff find their amiable squabbling stimulating.
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But if anything gives that worldview pause, it should be the events of the past eight years. Liberals got a real life Josiah Bartlet in the figure of Barack Obama, a charismatic and stylish politician elected on a populist wave. But Obama’s soaring speeches, quintessentially presidential affect, and deference to procedure did little to fundamentally improve the country or prevent his Republican rivals from storming the Congressional barricades at their first opportunity. Confronted by a mercurial TV personality bent on transgressing every norm and truism of Beltway thinking, Democrats responded by exhaustively informing voters of his indecency and hypocrisy, attempting to destroy him countless times with his own logic, but ultimately leaving him completely intact. They smugly taxonomized as “smart” and “dumb” the very electorate they needed to win over, and retreated into an ideological fever dream in which political success doesn’t come from organizing and building power, but from having the most polished arguments and the most detailed policy statements. If you can just crush Trump in the debates, as Bartlet did to Richie, then you’ve won.

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Tag (I'll regret this later, I'm sure)
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The whole article is long, I only pasted what I could fit and what I thought was most illustrative of the point
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Why do I keep hearing about The West Wing all of a sudden
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"Liberals are smug and accomplish nothing, just like Obama."~Article about West Wing
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what is it about
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Microwaved_Eggs posted...

what is it about

Guess.
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Microwaved_Eggs posted...

what is it about

Birds or airplanes or something, obviously.
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Antifar posted...

Microwaved_Eggs posted...

what is it about

Guess.

liherals
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i could never stand the show. only made it to season 3

Antifar posted...

more than simply visual verisimilitude.
Breaking with the cynicism or amoralism characteristic of many dramas
ultimately affirmative and approving.

The West Wing is an elaborate fantasia founded upon the shibboleths that sustain Beltway liberalism and the milieu that produced them.

the show’s true raison d’être

Someone got a thesaurus for their birthday.
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