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Guest Essay
By Elizabeth Spiers
Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.
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,” Mr. 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 powermongering 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........