The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

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.