Like most well-adjusted and popular teenagers, I was a massive fan of The West Wing in high school, to the point where one of my happiest memories of tenth grade is waking up to snow mounting outside my window and realizing that the day’s school cancellation meant I could catch up on Zoey Bartlet’s kidnapping plotline from the show’s fifth season.
More than that, I was one of the many people West Wing-pilled enough to actually pursue a career—or, in my case, an internship—in politics as a direct result of my infatuation with the show. I spent the summer after my freshman year of college in D.C., sharing a dingy Dupont Circle studio apartment with my longtime best friend and reporting for duty at a storied women’s rights organization. Week to week, I was ferried through the Rayburn Building on “lobbying trips” (glorified let’s-bother-congresspeople expeditions) and paid in free office supplies to “woman the phones” by answering hotline calls from desperate women looking for help that we were scarcely qualified to dole out.
If I sound cynical, it’s not because I don’t believe in the life-saving potential of women’s rights organizations, or because I made some kind of edgelord-y pivot rightward after actually seeing how the political sausage gets made; if anything, I’m more progressive as a voter and a citizen now than I was when I was obsessively watching The West Wing in high school and college. It’s more that the concept of revisiting Aaron Sorkin’s turn-of-the-21st-century tribute to American governance in 2025 (The West Wing is now streaming on Netflix for the first time since 2020) seems…very depressing.
Of course, it’s hard for any show to hold up almost 30 years later. But to contemporary eyes and sensibilities—and during this particular presidential administration—there is something especially grating about the optimism shining from the unrealistically attractive face of nearly every member of the fictional Bartlet administration. Even its cranks (hello, Toby Ziegler) were mission-driven and staunchly loyal to a system that, in real life, can be very difficult to believe in.
As I’ve gotten older and put away childish things, I’ve realized that idolizing politicians—or even wisecracking liberal press secretaries in the mold of C.J. Cregg—isn’t necessarily healthy for our democracy, even when they’re figures whose impact I’ve seen firsthand, like New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. (The thing about human beings is: we’re all incredibly fallible, whether we’re voters, journalists, or, ahem, Pennsylvania senators.)
With that said, there are lots of reasons to feel hopeful right now, with organizations like the Women’s Prison Association, Middle East Children’s Alliance, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network providing sorely needed resources and training everyday people to become their own communities’ leaders, both at home and abroad. Maybe the days when we could joyfully lose ourselves in the fictive America of The West Wing are long over, when it comes to building the kind of America we want to actually live in, we really don’t need televised hopecore to inspire us to do it.
