Democrats need to wake up from their ‘West Wing’ fantasy

By Elizabeth Spiers

NEW YORK: Ever since President Biden’s debate performance sucked Democratic leaders and political operatives into a looping vortex of panic, people have been debating how we got here and who is responsible. The president himself? His handlers? The media? All of the above, but I’d like to focus on a different factor: Aaron Sorkin.

A whole generation of political professionals are so enamored of “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s show about the travails of White House occupants, that they now suffer from what I think of as Terminal West Wing Brain.

The show, which ran from 1999 to 2006, portrays politics and policy not as ruthless power mongering pursued by nihilists (that’s “House of Cards”) but as a higher calling that flawed but idealistic people engage in from a place of civic pride. It depicts America as a place that is divided but that yearns for consensus, for the good of the country. Jed Bartlet, the fictional Democratic president, is often reaching across the aisle to a wrongheaded but often well-meaning Republican. It’s an attractive fantasy that bears little relation to the world we live in, where partisan animosity is about more than policy disagreements and is rarely resolved via civil debate.

Most voters will go to the polls in November not to vote for their guy but to vote against the other guy, a phenomenon known as negative partisanship. Voters say they want Americans to be unified, but Republicans mean they want everyone to be a Republican, and Democrats want everyone to be a Democrat. And partisan obstructionism in Congress has deadlocked policymaking in ways that appear to be getting worse. Working across the aisle isn’t easy when your colleagues are telling their constituents that you’re demonic, and pushing conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking in pizza parlors.

Bipartisan cooperation requires a shared idea of reality that exists in “The West Wing” but not in the real world. Adherence to this fantasy is preventing the Democrats from functioning effectively in the current political climate. In response to Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s road map for a second Trump presidency, which includes agenda items so extreme they would be sent back to the writers’ room in Sorkin-land — Biden offers mostly dry policyspeak. On reproductive rights, the president defaults to talk of rights and reason, while Donald Trump makes utterly false but compellingly graphic statements like,

“They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.” The Democrats talk about facts and analyses. The Republicans talk about a holy war in which civilization hangs in the balance.

In the “West Wing” paradigm, problems can be workshopped and strategized, sometimes into platitudes that neither offend nor inspire. In President Bartlet’s White House, the very busy characters dispatch tasks with ruthless efficiency. They’re smart, the issues they work on are important and everyone means well. But Democrats are not going to be able to diligently and efficiently workshop their way out of the current dilemma or test all of the potential scenarios. There is no way to meaningfully poll alternatives to

Biden and clinically weigh costs and benefits. There’s no precedent for this crisis, we don’t know what the contextual environment will look like in November, and if the leaking is any indication, not everybody means well. “The West Wing” is built on a belief that America is an inherently noble force for good as opposed to a nation that, like every other, seeks to amass and preserve power. This is also an organizing principle in the way many real Democrats talk about foreign policy, and it doesn’t hold up in a 24/7 media environment where the consequences of our actions are broadcast for the world to see. For many, it’s hard to reconcile the idea of an intrinsically good America with, for example, civilian deaths in Gaza enabled by American money and American bombs. Voters are grown-ups. They want to view their country positively, but they also want some recognition of what they can see with their own eyes, and they want leaders who are responsive.

Today’s Democrats have been caught off guard by Trump’s willingness to overturn democracy for personal gain, the corrosion of ethical norms and the tectonic decisions that have come out of the Supreme Court in the last few weeks. And they were caught off guard by a debate so disastrous that it sent leaders into a tailspin.

Instead of watching “The West Wing,” Democrats should have been taking to heart the lessons of “Veep,” Armando Iannucci’s very different White House series in which everything dumb and disastrous that can happen does happen. A dark and devastating comedy, it depicts Washington as staffed by petty, venal people who are too busy tripping over themselves to successfully advance their own interests.

A college mentor of mine who was a Republican member of the National Security Council liked to say that somewhere in a dusty box in a closet in the Pentagon, there’s a plan for what the United States will do if we’re invaded by Canada. This plan exists not because we think such a thing will really happen, but because we have intelligence professionals who are paid and trained to think about how every possible thing could go wrong. As it would on “Veep.”

It’s not clear to me that Democrats have enough invasion-of-Canada plans for all of the dumb and disastrous things that could await, even now, when you can say “former reality star turned president Donald Trump suggested that America buy Greenland” and not be wrong. It does seem that there was no plan for what would happen if Biden bombed at the debate, but it doesn’t matter now. Democrats need to stop overthinking it and now need to ruthlessly commit to a plan. Which option they pursue — Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris or someone else — matters less than that they do it. This is not an election with a wrongheaded but well-meaning Republican. It’s an all-out war with an illiberal megalomaniac who will happily destroy American democracy if it buys him one more ounce of power and keeps him out of prison.

In “The West Wing,” Jed Bartlet is censured for not disclosing a medical condition. He slips in the polls. But he wins re-election by a landslide anyway because voters vote with their better selves — and his fictional opponent accepts the results. It’s a pretty fantasy, but here in real life, people often vote out of fear and anger and align with a party as much as a specific candidate. Whether Biden stays or goes, this is an opportunity to articulate to voters that Democrats understand that the world we all live in is less “West Wing” than “Veep” — and to demonstrate that they’re capable of adapting to it.