We have one person to blame for the Democratic Party right now

And I have a historical beef.

I’m at the point with the news where I just laugh at headlines because they’re so bleak. The Supreme Court has abandoned all pretense of respectability and is just openly setting the stage for a dictatorship, while also overturning any laws that they simply do not like. Donald Trump sounds more deranged every day, both in terms of coherence (none) and in his plans for his dictatorship (plentiful, awful). The House of Representatives voted to stop citing the Palestinian death toll, rather than stop funding the unapologetic genocide responsible for said death toll. And through it all—indeed, for the past three presidential elections—the Democratic Party has done little but scream “VOTE” at leftists and then blame us for their failures. As though telling us “democracy is on the ballot” every four years, and then doing nothing to advance or even protect democracy in between, won’t have a numbing effect. As if the very act of trying to hold our elected officials accountable to any values beyond “be in office” is a threat to democracy, rather than democracy itself.

Right now, the left is looking for someone to blame. Liberals are blaming Bernie bros, leftist protestors, and young people. Leftists are blaming Joe Biden, the electoral college, and gerrymandering. Ralph Nader is blaming Hillary Clinton, and James Carville is blaming everyone who isn’t Bill Clinton. As for me and my household, we are blaming Aaron Sorkin.

Cards on the table: I have hated Aaron Sorkin since I have known of Aaron Sorkin. I find it hideous that he wrote one fucking excellent movie, though I comfort myself with the knowledge that David Fincher had his foot on Sorkin’s throat the entire time. I hate his faux humility. I hate his toxic beta misogyny. I hate the way he shamelessly recycles his own material.

This is the kind of contempt that can only come from intimacy, and I regretfully admit that I have consumed a LOT of Sorkin’s work. Besides The Social Network, I’ve seen A Few Good Men (not a very good movie!). I’ve seen The American President (a perfectly fine movie!). I’ve even seen a whole episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip—though, as a lifelong member of Team 30 Rock, that was mostly to gloat. And, of course, I’ve watched and re-watched at least 3.5 seasons of The West Wing.

Like everything else in his oeuvre, The West Wing is created entirely in Sorkin’s image. And his image here is very fucking smug. Your mileage may vary somewhat, depending on the actor—I love a smug Allison Janney, because she deserves; I want to give smug Rob Lowe a swirlie, because he does not. But regardless of the mileage, smug is the overwhelming vibe. These people believe themselves to be the smartest, most righteous, and most charming humans to walk-and-talk their way through the White House. And at least two generations of liberals watched this show and came to Washington with visions of Sam Seaborn dancing in their heads. They thought that politics was The West Wing, when on a good day, it’s Veep.

One of the most Iconic West Wing scenes comes early in season 2, in the episode “The Midterms.” Tensions in the Bartlet White House are running high, after a shocking assassination attempt and in anticipation of the upcoming midterm elections. President Bartlet is generally and understandably fussed about everything, and finally finds an outlet at a White House talk radio host event (lol). He launches into his charming prepared remarks, but can’t help but notice one Dr. Jenna Jacobs sitting in the room, and that’s when the sparks begin to fly.

Bartlet first clowns Dr. Jenna Jacobs for leaning on the “Dr” to project subject matter expertise on her religious advice radio show (she is not a psychologist, theologist, or social worker). He then sarcastically appreciates her for saying that homosexuality is an abomination, and she corrects him from her seat that it’s the Bible that says so, not her. This is where he unleashes Sorkinian hell, displaying his memorization of (presumably) every chapter and verse of the Bible while highlighting the hypocrisy in cherry-picking which Biblical sins to take seriously. And then he closes in for the kill:

One last thing: While you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the Ignorant Tight-Ass Club—in this building, when the President stands, nobody sits.

And everyone watches as Dr. Jenna Jacobs awkwardly rises from her seat under Bartlet’s steely gaze. God bless America.

This shit is gross for several reasons, but I’ll just focus on one: What bothers President Bartlet most isn’t who Dr. Jenna Jacobs is or what she stands for, though he does use those as the on-ramp to his tight five about Biblical interpretations. He would have been fine with giving his prepared speech with this bigot in the room, as long as she had stood like everybody else when he entered that room.

Bartlet For America.

Sorkin has an intense reverence for institutions, matters of decorum, and arcane procedure. He seems to find the way things are done beautiful just because they’ve always been done that way. And that insistence on decorum and procedure is a big part of how institutions protect themselves from any meaningful change. Like how, despite everything this Supreme Court majority has done to shred our faith in its legitimacy, most Democratic leadership refuses to even consider expanding the Court to include more justices. Their reasoning tends to boil down to “that’s not how it’s done.”

It’s funny—there’s also a SCOTUS nomination episode that perfectly captures the folly of Sorkinian politics. Now, Sorkin isn’t directly responsible for this episode, since he had left the show at the end of the previous season under a white powdery cloud of suspicion. But his ink-stained fingerprints are all over it.

In season 5’s “The Supremes,” a Supreme Court Justice has died, so the Bartlet Administration has a seat to fill. While everyone’s first political instinct is to push a moderate candidate forward, our heroes find themselves won over by the unimpeachable brilliance and liberal positions of Judge Evelyn Lang. (She’s played by the unimpeachably brilliant Glenn Close, which never hurts.) Eventually, office brainiac Josh Lyman comes up with a typically twisty solution—make the Chief Justice retire, nominate Evelyn Lang to be the first female Chief Justice, and nominate a conservative for the other open seat. They settle on the arch-conservative Judge Christopher Mulready, who gets a meet-cute with Judge Lang as they debate gun-free school zones (aww!). They meet so cute, in fact, that Mulready advocates for Lang to be on the Supreme court over anyone else, including him.

RIP Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. You would have loved the collapse of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.

(Side note: This is the sort of liberal fantasy that also cropped up on The Good Wife, one of my favourite shows, more than once: the good faith conservative who works with liberals because he likes “smart people who disagree with him.” [When the conservative is doing the hiring, it is always ‘he.’ The lone conservative woman, meanwhile, gets hired by liberals. Curious.] So they’re smart enough to gain proximity to power, but even in this fantasy, they don’t get actual power. Just the validation of winning a conservative’s grudging but good-natured approval with intelligence and verve.)

Josh is thrilled at the prospect of having “two voices articulating the debate at either end of the spectrum,” while office Eeyore Toby Ziegler advocates for moderates in the hopes of avoiding Republicans choosing “a young, spry, conservative ideologue who’s going to camp out in that seat for 45 years.” Since this show is a liberal fantasy, you can guess where this all goes.

Toby is making the legitimate argument here. Politics is about building power, not about casting your dream version of Inherit the Wind. But according to the logic of this show, thinking about the legacy of political power you could build is for uninspired pedants. Thinking about the dynamic nature of lively debate (“the sound of intelligence,” as Sorkin has referred to it) between two ideologues, not to mention the chance at some “representation matters” legitimacy—now that is for the truly inspired patriots in the room. Who could care about actual rights when sparkling banter is at stake? (Besides the people behind the zinger “you have the morals of an alley cat,” of course.)

The thing is, we had a Supreme Court Justice—who partially inspired the Judge Evelyn Baker Lang character—whose representational bonafides made her absolutely totemic to liberals. And amidst all of that “Notorious RBG” energy, that Justice prioritized her individual power and legacy over the very real judicial legacy that needed protection. So now, both her legacy and our rights are in tatters, because she wouldn’t retire when it would have actually helped a progressive agenda.

But at least we got memes?

The Sorkinian way of thinking has manifested a Democratic Party that is woefully inadequate for the moment. The NY Post is calling Kamala Harris “the first DEI President,” and y’all are still expecting institutions to protect us. We already had a whole Trump presidency. So many people who should be alive are dead because Trump was president. Trump’s followers attempted a whole violent coup with murderous intent on his behalf, and the Republican Party refused to investigate or even denounce it. Mitch McConnell glitched on camera twice and has visibly taxidermied possums for hands, and the Republican Party didn’t allow anyone to suggest that he stop Weekend at Bernie-ing until he was ready to. There’s no lively debate to be had with these people. There’s no good faith compromise to be found. I know their political systems are different than ours, but Mexico, France, and the U.K. are pushing back against their right-wing horrors by moving further left, not further to the center which is actually the right. The way out of democracy being on the ballot every four years isn’t through scolding appeals to decorum, or through naive attempts at moderation between democracy and fascism. It’s through taking this ugly shit seriously.