Luke Savage doesn’t much like the West Wing (TWW). Or so I gather from his article in Current Affairs. I’m fine with that.
But to criticize a body of work, particularly a very complex work that stretches out over seven years, a critic really needs to find a place to stand. Savage doesn’t do that in this piece, but since he needs it so urgently, I think I can help him there.
Once we find a place for him to stand, we will be able to understand his criticism
more more clearly and to evaluate it more thoughtfully. In a way, I am not the ideal person to do this. I am, I need to say, a fan of TWW—the kind of person who was referred to in the chatrooms as a “wing nut.” I participated in the chatrooms. I taught a university course about the West Wing. I own the DVDs of all seven seasons and I do, in fact, refer back to the issues that are raised more urgently and ominously in the Trump administration. [1]
On the other hand, I am a good choice for this task in other ways. I do understand the relationship between a critic’s home ground and the plausibility of the criticisms. Whenever you say that something should have been done, for example, you are implying that it could have been done. Whenever you say that one thing was a bad thing to do, you are suggesting that something else would have been better. Critics like Savage don’t ordinarily take the time to justify the tacitly proposed course of action. Just condemning the action taken is usually enough and that is what we find in this piece.
So…who is Luke Savage and what is he using as a baseline in his evaluation of TWW? Savage writes for a new magazine called Jacobin. Here is what they say about themselves on their website.
Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.
Here is what Chris Hayes, the MSNBC political host says about the publication.
I really like Jacobin — it’s very explicitly on the radical left, and sort of hostile to liberal accommodationism. [2] There’s a lot in there that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it’s bracingly rigorous and polemical in a really thought-provoking way. It’s a really well-done publication, almost preternaturally good.
— Chris Hayes, host of All In w/ Chris Hayes
From Hayes’s brief comment, I found a few clues that were helpful. Specifically, I found “rigorous and polemical” and “sort of hostile to liberal accommodationism”
Polemical: So I picture Luke Savage and his Jacobin colleagues watching TWW and looking for signs of hope. TWW is also “rigorous and polemical” but the thing about polemics is that if they don’t match your own polemics, they don’t sound reasonable. So that doesn’t necessarily help. In fact, as we will see below, it is the basis for explicit criticism sometimes.
Accommodationism. This is going to be a loser from the very beginning. The Bartlet administration had a government to run, after all, and a Republican Congress to entice into some minimum forms of cooperation. If you don’t like cooperation, changing it to “accommodationism” is an easy step to take.
So let’s take some of Savage’s criticism’s from his Current Affairs article and see whether my placement of him on the ideological and programmatic left helps us make sense of his criticisms.
The West Wing is an elaborate fantasia founded upon the shibboleths that sustain Beltway liberalism and the milieu that produced them.
I’d say there is no blood in that one at all. But it does launch some criticisms. “Fantasia” is not entirely clear, but the relationship with “fantasy” not at all obscured. And the fantasy is founded on “shibboleths” [3]—inside code words that establish membership. These same shibboleths sustain “Beltway liberalism.” By the way, “Beltway” is the adjective of death. Nothing good is modified by the adjective “Beltway.”
So there is a tight grouping of smears here, but no actual charges. Let’s go on.
In fact, after two terms in the White House, Bartlet’s gang of hyper-educated, hyper-competent politicos do not seem to have any transformational policy achievements whatsoever. Even in their most unconstrained and idealized political fantasies, liberals manage to accomplish nothing.
Now this one does have some blood in it. After two terms, Savage says, Bartlet’s gang of politicos does not seem to have any policy achievements at all.” He may be right about that one. During their time in office they passed budgets that protected some programs liberals like to protect. They left behind a Supreme Court with an appetite for constitutional issues. They prevented a lot of bad things from happening. But in the last episode, as the Bartlets are looking over the inauguration site, Abbey Bartlet says to her husband, “You did a lot of good, Jed. A lot of good.” From Savage’s perspective, that’s not much to say.
It’s a smugness born of the view that politics is less a terrain of clashing values and interests than a perpetual pitting of the clever against the ignorant and obtuse. The clever wield facts and reason, while the foolish cling to effortlessly-exposed fictions and the braying prejudices of provincial rubes.
“Smug” is one of the cheapest of slurs. In a whole article of slurs, it is probably the lowest. Note that the alternative presented is “clashing values and interests.” Savage has collected a great many of the opponents of the Bartlet administration into a category defined by ignorance and prejudice, rather than by any political position. This makes them victims of the attitudes of the Bartlets and their minions rather than people who fought for their own principles and lost. Savage can get away with that by oversampling the episodes that dealt with campaigning and paying much less attention to the episodes about governing the country.
Maybe just one more.
But if your values are procedural, based more on the manner in which people conduct themselves rather than the consequences they actually bring about, it’s easy to chuckle along with a hard-right conservative, so long as they are personally charming (Ziegler: “I hate him, but he’s brilliant. And the two of them together are fighting like cats and dogs … but it works.”)
The good position here—Savage’s position—is that political judgments should be based on “the consequences [that politics] actually brings about” rather than being merely procedural. The example he chose comes from “The Supremes,” (Season 5, Episode 17). The tension in that episode was the value of having a Supreme Court made of moderates, who simply kick the juridical can down the road a little, or one made up of constitutional architects who build the structures that lesser and later courts redecorate.
This is an odd choice for Savage. It was the giants of the Court who extended the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to apply to actions taken by state legislatures; prominent jurists who stopped rewarding local police for evidence gathered illegally; daring justices who wrote the epitaph for “separate but equal.” It is decisions like these that the new Bartlet court, with its programmatic conservative anchor and its programmatic liberal anchor, will consider. You’d think even Savage would like that. And to dislike it, he is forced to call Judge Mulready (William Fichtner) “personally charming,” where the writers of the episode go out of their way to make him an irascible nerd. [4]
OK, enough carping. Savage ends his piece with this line:
But, in 2017, [the West Wing] is foremost a series of glittering illusions to be abandoned.
I can see why he feels that way, but I start from a different place, critically, and I think that only by electing White House ensembles like the Bartlet administration and backing them up with Congresses willing to take the hard votes, are we going to get anywhere at all. As I see it, it is Savage’s hankering for a hard programmatic turn to the left that is the illusion.
[1] I also, by way of a chatroom meeting, became a member of the doctoral committee for Melissa Crawley’s dissertation, which was subsequently published as Mr. Sorkin Goes to Washington: Shaping the President on TV’s The West Wing. Dr. Crawley’s degree was authorized by a Department of Communications, but it is the best overall assessment of popular response to “politics as presented by the media” I have ever read.
[2] Accommodationism is not a familiar word in this context. The Wikipedia article, for instance, describes two settings where it has been used in American politics, neither of them anywhere near this usage. Still, it is not hard to see what Hayes means. The parties of the center are always condemned for accommodating themselves to injustice and economic misdeeds. As a rule, that is what you do when you are running a government split between liberal and conservative strongholds.
[3] One of the West Wing episodes was called “Shibboleth. “In it President Bartlet quotes the biblical passage that grounds it historically and declares that the Chinese Christian refugee in his office has just used “the shibboleth.” Season 2, Episode 8.
[4] With the sole exception of his hallway argument with Charlie Young (Dulé Hill) in which he gives Charlie a much better argument in favor of affirmative action than Charlie has ever heard before.
our house, so after every run, I would add that extra half mile. I called them “victory laps” after all the victory laps I had seen superb runners like Steve Prefontaine take at Hayward Field in Eugene. [2] And that’s all there was to it at first.
This is Britain Lake, by the way. The faculty circle loop is just to the right.
and right downstairs by the pool is the hot tub. I do have one new trick about physical relief. My body has felt bad in a lot of different ways over the years and I am familiar with those ways. I am capable, now, of getting up in the morning and actually experience the “not hurting” of a joint or a muscle. That is something I never experienced at all at the time I was running the 1776 project.
And I think I will start with winter. Winter will begin five days after my birthday. That doesn’t seem too long to wait. And my brother John, who has greatly enriched my appreciation of seasons, begins his survey [7] with winter on the grounds that it is the simplest. Productivity has shut down and “life” is resting—unless it is trying to find a way to live through the winter—and the whole cycle is getting ready to begin again.
good at it or who had gotten good at it. But good people or no, the ceremony itself is aimed at making people feel welcome because it is a library. They conveyed the attitude that a library is a special place. That’s where the illusion of the curtsying came from. Welcome to this special place. We do knowledge here. We are so glad you have come to spend some time sharing this pursuit with us.
We’ll look first at the situation as Levitin describes it; then at the alternatives as they seemed to him at first. Then, finally, how he escaped that trap and how those familiar and bad options turned themselves inside out and gave him some new choices.
indicated above, the decision situation derives directly from things you aren’t aware of at the time. “The situation” is concocted of stories you have heard, movies you have seen, arguments you have had, your own attitude toward yourself, your self-confidence or the lack of it. So the set of options—should I shoot or not if it comes down to that—seems very present. It seems clear. And it should seem clear. These are all things you are experiencing.
I like this story because Levitin escaped from the trap that his gun laid for him. Suddenly another question became available to him Am I prepared to kill another human being just to protect all this stuff? Of course not. In that form, he rejected it instantly.
ry to understand why an Easter card has meant so much to me over the years. It first meant something to me because it was sent to me by my niece, Lisa Hess, in the confident expectation that she and I found the same kinds of things to be funny. Boy was she right about that!
. Welcome back.” For me, this is where the funny starts.
artist didn’t have a candidate in mind. For myself, I think maybe “the natural order.” The relationship of God’s followers to the natural order has been contentious to say the least. Those drawing from Genesis get to choose between God’s command that we “dominate” and “subdue” nature or that we “care for it” as a steward cares for his master’s property. Quite a difference.
wrestling with it. I haven’t either. Dad was in a great deal more contact with “resurrection” than any casually orthodox Christian would have been. I think Dad knew the Resurrection about as well as Jacob knew the angel he wrestled with and for most of the same reasons.
have any trouble with that particular clause, but there were clauses that troubled him a good deal and he didn’t say those clauses. The effect was like a radio with a loose connection and some clauses would be easily audible, then some silence, then another audible phrase.
is probably about right—I tried to understand the essential “truths” of the Christian faith in a way that made sense. I was free, as Dad was not, to mess around with the questions and that is how I was able to come up with “answers” that fit the questions better. Like Captain Kirk, subverting the Kobayashi Maru exercise, I have felt free to reprogram the computer and manage not to die.
ear. Of the socks I show you here, one of the tapes is still clear, as Dad had been. And one is blank, the identity has come off, as Dad became. And I think about that when I put on the one sock; then the other.
Let’s get the invidious comparisons out of the way right here at the beginning. McKenna Grace is much cuter than Matt Damon has ever been. OK, having said that, Good Will Hunting is a much richer movie than Gifted. Both explore the dilemma faced by a brilliant kid who wants to life a normal life. Matt Damon plays a punk from South Boston; McKenna Grace plays Mary, a little girl with no social skills whatsoever (no friends either) being raised by her uncle in Florida.
had read the synopsis and seen a preview. But I also knew that sitting there in my chair in the theater, I could see any number of other movies. It occurred to me when we went in that I might be about to see a movie about a “gifted” uncle, who is raising a little mathematically precocious girl in pretty casual circumstances in Florida. I was ready to see that movie and it would have been a really good movie. I might see that movie when I go back to see Gifted again. I could call it The Gifted Uncle.
g. But if the climax of the movie is Frank’s slamming the document down on the desk in front of his unbelieving mother, then his doing nothing about that document all through the movie is enormously meaningful. You just don’t realize it at the time.
I have no way of knowing, of course, what movie you will see when you go to see Gifted. You may want to go back and see Good Will Hunting again. I did. You may attach the principal meaning to the mother and the relationships she has had with her husband, her son (Frank) and her daughter, Mary’s mother. This particular movie is about her relationship with her granddaughter, but Evelyn is a “one interest at at time” sort of person. “Very English,” says her continent son Frank, and there is no reason you can’t just give yourself permission to see the story that stars her and her aspirations, if that is the one you want to see.
It is gone and it is not coming back. Politicians can promise that they will “fight for us,” and as long as we are feeling powerless to control our own economic destiny, that promise will be powerful. They are empty promises. We can no longer control our economic destiny and that is probably a good thing, however uncomfortable it makes us feel.
Consider what China has already done with solar panels. “China is now home,” Bradsher says, “to two thirds of the world’s solar production capacity.” That gets them a place at the table, wouldn’t you think? And, Bradsher continues, “because China also buys half of the world’s new solar panels, it now effectively controls the market.” I would think that would give them most of the other places at the table as well.
voters on the basis of what we will have to do to “govern ourselves once more” or to “take control of our own destiny” or even “to return America to the leadership we once had.” I haven’t even begun to cover the slogans, and in my list, I restricted myself to only positive images. If you include avoiding negative outcomes—like “Better Red than Dead”—you can make a much bigger list.
The nationalists will call the globalists, “defeatist.” The globalists will call the nationalists “delusional.” What I want to know is what the voters will call these two “parties.”
If this is the wave of the future, economically, how can the American voters prepare to vote their own economic self-interest in national elections? How can they learn to respond to the globalist message when there is no hope in it for them and no way back to American global dominance?
one thing evokes which attached it to another. Of course, associations—plausible but mistaken associations—are the root of a great deal of humor. Advertising for mattresses, for instance, is full of references that could be taken to refer to the mattress or to what one might enjoy doing on the mattress. They count on you to associate the one meaning with the other and nearly everyone does.
I have seen that story set in Revolutionary War times and in Civil War times, but either setting presupposes the line of soldiers with muskets or rifles standing in the way of an attacking army and refusing to retreat. “They stood there,” ran one account I saw, “like they had tar on their heels.” The Tar Heels had the courage to “stand their ground,” a term that makes perfect sense on the battlefield. [2]
down the street yesterday when I passed a car with a North Carolina plate. It said, like this one, “First in Flight.” At that point, my mind handed me a meaning of Tar Heel I had never had before. Thank you, mind. It pointed out to me that “Tar Heel” means “Last in Flight.” That’s a very good thing if you are talking about the behavior of soldiers in battle. So I started smiling and have hardly stopped. When I was still chuckling about it this morning, I thought I would share it.
No one questions the speaker’s qualifications to speak on the assigned topic, but he is a member of an organization (the Presbyterian Church of America) which is more conservative than the Presbyterian Church USA, the home denomination of Princeton Seminary and the PCA is a great deal more conservative than the faculty and students at the Seminary itself.
l beyond our initial expectations, many gentiles have responded positively. We could treat their interest as an occasion for “harassing them” [2]. We could see how sincere they are by putting obstacles in their way. We could cast aspersions on some other aspect of their way of life or their associations. But wait, James says, let’s not do that. They are turning to God. Let’s refuse to throw obstacles in their way.
The expression “identity theology” is new to me, but it is an idea I have seen in practice for a long time. Sometimes, when I get sloppy, I see it in my own practice so I am not pointing fingers as a mere spectator might. I ran across this idea first in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the premise of which is that Screwtape, a very senior devil, is giving advice to his pupil, Wormwood, about how to damn human souls. [4] This passage is from Letter 25.
