he Sorkin Mindset
Liberals, having sold out decades ago and laid the welcome mat for a new era of right-wing domination, have long retreated into realms of fantasy. In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, they’ve disappeared into cultural cosplay more than ever before—and no one has done more to sculpt their virtual reality than the master of the monologue, the king of quips, the ayatollah of argument: Aaron Sorkin.
Everything shitty about libs, from their smugness to their worship of decorum to their embarrassing rhetoric of “resistance,” is arguably Sorkin’s fault. From humble beginnings as a cheesy but not terrible playwright, Sorkin has come to dominate the popular imagination, and has done more to poison American political culture than anyone since D. W. Griffith. Sorkin’s preeminence in the world of political drama testifies to the destitution of American culture. Let’s survey the damage.
To Sorkheads, of course, his dialogue is electric, his characters are memorable, and his narrative voice is bold and unmistakable. Another Hollywood weirdo with far more talent, Quentin Tarantino, once gave this stunning quote to New York magazine:
Now, the HBO show I loved was Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. That was the only show that I literally watched three times. I would watch it at seven o’clock on Sunday, when the new one would come on. Then, after it was over, I’d watch it all over again. Then I would usually end up watching it once during the week, just so I could listen to the dialogue one more time.
The fact that Tarantino—a man heralded, rightly or wrongly, for his command of snappy banter—felt comfortable praising Sorkin’s dog-shit show for the same strengths shows how far America has strayed from the light. Through some alien brain virus, people have learned to regard Sorkin’s Adderall-fueled schlock as the gold standard.
In fact, The West Wing is the Rosetta Stone of every stupid thing that contemporary liberals have come to believe. Many of us in Chapo were impressionable kids when West Wing first came on, and as we grew older and slightly less stupid we went through the natural progression of disgust with this show: first, we realized that the way things worked on The West Wing wasn’t the way they worked in the real world; then we realized things had never worked that way; then finally we realized things should not work that way. That would be horrible. It would be a gaudy, unending pageant, full of self-obsessed blowhards saving the day not through radical change or real moral courage but with shitty zingers and face-to-face bloviation.
The show was, however, an instant hit among those enjoying the twilight of the Clinton years, when it first lit up the screens of content, sated middle-class families who felt that basically all the problems had been solved. Once George W. Bush slithered into office in 2000, the show took on a new purpose as a liberal fantasia, presenting an alternate universe where everything was fine and the Yosemite Sam Republicans were put in their place with catty banter and speechifying. But then, after eight years of evil with the Bush administration, the Sorkinites got their wish with Obama, a real-life Jed Bartlet: a Nobel Prize–winning commander in chief who was eloquent, academic, and presidential, and who ate dog.
And sure enough, the show telegraphed every single failure, error, and misapplication of power in the Obama years. Why? Because the people in charge finally got their chance to play out their fantasies of being characters on The West Wing! In so doing, they ran straight into the maw of real politics, power, and ideology. Anyone who may once have believed in the Sorkinverse discovered, if they were paying attention, that the person who had the most data at their fingertips and owned the other person in the debate did not automatically win.
To give an example of the show’s diseased politics: In season five, episode twelve, Toby Ziegler voices the dreamy prose of Sorkin’s pen to make a bold, brave, and moral case to cut Social Security. The whole episode chronicles his effort to form a commission that will reduce benefits and save the program from an (invented) financial doomsday. And were it not for the CHUDs of the Freedom Caucus who spoiled it for John Boehner in 2011, President Jed Obama would’ve gotten his Grand Bargain, which had been designed to obliterate the American welfare state to appease the honorable Republicans on the other side of the aisle.
And that, in closing, is the scariest thing. This shit went from pages on a cokehead’s laptop to a network TV show straight to the Obama administration: Obungler came onto the scene in 2004 with his Sorkinesque DNC speech about how there’s no “red or blue America,” then campaigned on “bipartisan,” nonideological solutions to the unambiguously partisan and ideological onslaught of right-wing America. And we don’t even need to go into all the ways the administration pursued the stupid neoliberal fantasia that West Wing characters such as Toby preached, like getting everyone from both sides into the same room to hash out the most reasonable solution to a divisive problem. Hell, there’s even an episode in which Josh Lyman has a beer summit, à la Henry Louis Gates Jr., at the White House with a Republican with whom he trades facts and bromides about gay marriage.
This reality-bending curse latched on to Obama’s would-be successor in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s rolling calamity of a campaign took every page from the Bartlet manifesto. Take note: In season three, episode fourteen, as Bartlet runs for reelection, Toby Ziegler counsels the president before a crucial televised debate: “Make this election about smart and not; make it about engaged and not; qualified and not. Make it about a heavyweight—you’re a heavyweight, and you’ve been holding me up for too many rounds.” Bartlet goes on to own the shit out of the folksy, dumbass, Jeb Bush–style yokel, and the president is reelected in a landslide. Why? Because he was smarter than the other guy in the debate.
You could see how ill-equipped to operate in the real world this liberal adulation of the office of the president was once the long reign of Democrats in the twentieth century came to an end. As soon as they slipped out of power, their ideology—their mythology, really—left nothing in the toolbox that would get them back in. They were equipped only to keep inheriting power; as soon as they lost it, they had no tools or vision for getting it back. Watching The West Wing twenty years on, you realize that as the Democrats lost each and every municipal, state, and now national office, their self-perception as heroic Jed Bartlets and C. J. Creggs and Josh Lymans only grew deeper and more convinced. The further liberals got from power, the further they delved into fantasy and the more they appropriated Sorkin’s pithy banter, letting events pass by, letting history shove their heads down the toilet for a swirly scored by the tinkling notes of Thomas Newman.
Liberals, having sold out decades ago and laid the welcome mat for a new era of right-wing domination, have long retreated into realms of fantasy. In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, they’ve disappeared into cultural cosplay more than ever before—and no one has done more to sculpt their virtual reality than the master of the monologue, the king of quips, the ayatollah of argument: Aaron Sorkin.
Everything shitty about libs, from their smugness to their worship of decorum to their embarrassing rhetoric of “resistance,” is arguably Sorkin’s fault. From humble beginnings as a cheesy but not terrible playwright, Sorkin has come to dominate the popular imagination, and has done more to poison American political culture than anyone since D. W. Griffith. Sorkin’s preeminence in the world of political drama testifies to the destitution of American culture. Let’s survey the damage.
To Sorkheads, of course, his dialogue is electric, his characters are memorable, and his narrative voice is bold and unmistakable. Another Hollywood weirdo with far more talent, Quentin Tarantino, once gave this stunning quote to New York magazine:
Now, the HBO show I loved was Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. That was the only show that I literally watched three times. I would watch it at seven o’clock on Sunday, when the new one would come on. Then, after it was over, I’d watch it all over again. Then I would usually end up watching it once during the week, just so I could listen to the dialogue one more time.
The fact that Tarantino—a man heralded, rightly or wrongly, for his command of snappy banter—felt comfortable praising Sorkin’s dog-shit show for the same strengths shows how far America has strayed from the light. Through some alien brain virus, people have learned to regard Sorkin’s Adderall-fueled schlock as the gold standard.
In fact, The West Wing is the Rosetta Stone of every stupid thing that contemporary liberals have come to believe. Many of us in Chapo were impressionable kids when West Wing first came on, and as we grew older and slightly less stupid we went through the natural progression of disgust with this show: first, we realized that the way things worked on The West Wing wasn’t the way they worked in the real world; then we realized things had never worked that way; then finally we realized things should not work that way. That would be horrible. It would be a gaudy, unending pageant, full of self-obsessed blowhards saving the day not through radical change or real moral courage but with shitty zingers and face-to-face bloviation.
The show was, however, an instant hit among those enjoying the twilight of the Clinton years, when it first lit up the screens of content, sated middle-class families who felt that basically all the problems had been solved. Once George W. Bush slithered into office in 2000, the show took on a new purpose as a liberal fantasia, presenting an alternate universe where everything was fine and the Yosemite Sam Republicans were put in their place with catty banter and speechifying. But then, after eight years of evil with the Bush administration, the Sorkinites got their wish with Obama, a real-life Jed Bartlet: a Nobel Prize–winning commander in chief who was eloquent, academic, and presidential, and who ate dog.
And sure enough, the show telegraphed every single failure, error, and misapplication of power in the Obama years. Why? Because the people in charge finally got their chance to play out their fantasies of being characters on The West Wing! In so doing, they ran straight into the maw of real politics, power, and ideology. Anyone who may once have believed in the Sorkinverse discovered, if they were paying attention, that the person who had the most data at their fingertips and owned the other person in the debate did not automatically win.
To give an example of the show’s diseased politics: In season five, episode twelve, Toby Ziegler voices the dreamy prose of Sorkin’s pen to make a bold, brave, and moral case to cut Social Security. The whole episode chronicles his effort to form a commission that will reduce benefits and save the program from an (invented) financial doomsday. And were it not for the CHUDs of the Freedom Caucus who spoiled it for John Boehner in 2011, President Jed Obama would’ve gotten his Grand Bargain, which had been designed to obliterate the American welfare state to appease the honorable Republicans on the other side of the aisle.
And that, in closing, is the scariest thing. This shit went from pages on a cokehead’s laptop to a network TV show straight to the Obama administration: Obungler came onto the scene in 2004 with his Sorkinesque DNC speech about how there’s no “red or blue America,” then campaigned on “bipartisan,” nonideological solutions to the unambiguously partisan and ideological onslaught of right-wing America. And we don’t even need to go into all the ways the administration pursued the stupid neoliberal fantasia that West Wing characters such as Toby preached, like getting everyone from both sides into the same room to hash out the most reasonable solution to a divisive problem. Hell, there’s even an episode in which Josh Lyman has a beer summit, à la Henry Louis Gates Jr., at the White House with a Republican with whom he trades facts and bromides about gay marriage.
This reality-bending curse latched on to Obama’s would-be successor in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s rolling calamity of a campaign took every page from the Bartlet manifesto. Take note: In season three, episode fourteen, as Bartlet runs for reelection, Toby Ziegler counsels the president before a crucial televised debate: “Make this election about smart and not; make it about engaged and not; qualified and not. Make it about a heavyweight—you’re a heavyweight, and you’ve been holding me up for too many rounds.” Bartlet goes on to own the shit out of the folksy, dumbass, Jeb Bush–style yokel, and the president is reelected in a landslide. Why? Because he was smarter than the other guy in the debate.
You could see how ill-equipped to operate in the real world this liberal adulation of the office of the president was once the long reign of Democrats in the twentieth century came to an end. As soon as they slipped out of power, their ideology—their mythology, really—left nothing in the toolbox that would get them back in. They were equipped only to keep inheriting power; as soon as they lost it, they had no tools or vision for getting it back. Watching The West Wing twenty years on, you realize that as the Democrats lost each and every municipal, state, and now national office, their self-perception as heroic Jed Bartlets and C. J. Creggs and Josh Lymans only grew deeper and more convinced. The further liberals got from power, the further they delved into fantasy and the more they appropriated Sorkin’s pithy banter, letting events pass by, letting history shove their heads down the toilet for a swirly scored by the tinkling notes of Thomas Newman.
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