For years now, I’ve been talking about what I call the “West Wing Problem,” a phenomenon in which media liberals declare that it is offensive for people on the left to be straightforwardly proud of their own values.
I was never really a fan of The West Wing, but I also never had the same problem I heard again and again (and again) from other liberals: “it’s like a liberal fantasy!” Then, as now, this attitude baffled me. Why would liberals have a problem with a show that straightforwardly believed in the moral value of contemporary American liberalism? Certainly, there’s no equivalent dynamic on the right. The idea of conservatives saying that a show or movie is objectionable because “it’s like a conservative fantasy” is absurd on its face. I would argue that this is the basic reality of American politics: conservative intellectuals treat conservatism as something to be proud of; liberal intellectuals treat liberalism as something to be ashamed of. Is it any wonder who has the rhetorical advantage? Whenever people question why so many voters evince liberal policy positions but vote Republican, I immediately think of this problem. People don’t want to vote for a party that is ashamed of itself.
You can add a corollary to the West Wing Problem, which is the Aaron Sorkin problem: the liberal conviction that the biggest political problem is other liberals. Alex Pareene offered a scathing attack on Sorkin, which begins “Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals.” In the piece (which seems to acknowledge the West Wing problem), Pareene asserts the same old nostrum that people hate liberals because liberals have the temerity to unapologetically believe in stuff. I don’t particularly see much difference between Aaron Sorkin and Bill O’Reilly’s flavors of certitude. Smug? Condescending? Self-righteous? Check, check, check. It’s just that liberals spend all their time calling Sorkin an asshole and conservatives would never do so to O’Reilly. It takes Pareene until the 16th paragraph to share that he “certainly agrees with [Sorkin] on many particulars.” If conservatives know one thing, it’s that you never bury that particular lede.
One of the most popular and consistent pieces of liberal conventional wisdom is that Americans hate self-righteousness and sanctimony. The proper political response, in this reading, is to stop acting like we know what’s right. But where does this conviction come from? After all, the more successful political ideology engages in almost nothing but sanctimony. I assure you: Sean Hannity does not lie awake at night, concerned that he’s become too self-righteous. And the rest of movement conservatism certainly doesn’t criticize him as such. Sure, people say they don’t like self-righteousness, but they follow and vote for people who are purely self-righteous. Maybe we should start paying attention to what people do instead of what they say.
I think the truth is that a lot of liberals just want to complain about what they think is annoying, so they turn it around and claim that the American people think it’s annoying. That this materially hurts their cause goes unconsidered.
As someone on the loony fringe, I am used to the notion that I am the problem, and that if only Jon Chait was allowed to carry out the cull he so clearly yearns for, moderate Democrats would rule the country and bring on a new age of only-slightly-less rapacious capitalism and oligarchy. I think, in fact, that the complete opposite is the case. I think the problem is exactly the Jon Chaits, who constantly chase the center while conservatives, cackling gleefully, drag it to the right. Even if you win an election, you end up giving them all the ground. We’ve been doing it and doing it and doing it and it is not working. If centrism and captulation and triangulation actually worked, we wouldn’t have lost so many of the rhetorical battles, and we wouldn’t have newscasters claiming without consequence that this is a center-right country.
If you’ve keep losing, you’ve got to go after your most basic assumptions about what it takes to win. Particularly the assumptions that justify self-injury.
the <i>West Wing</i> Problem and the Sorkin ProblemPost + Comments (89)