I’ve been rewatching The West Wing lately, and it’s like visiting a museum of extinct emotions. There’s President Bartlet, striding through the corridors of power with his moral compass pointing toward true north, surrounded by staffers who genuinely believe their late-night policy debates might actually improve someone’s life by Thursday. The show aired from 1999 to 2006, and watching it now feels like archaeology - excavating the fossilized remains of a time when folks could imagine their world as fundamentally decent, improvable, and oriented toward justice.
Boston Legal told the same story. Alan Shore and Denny Crane sparred over cases that mattered, in a legal system that, while flawed, still seemed capable of surprise verdicts in favor of the little guy. These shows are cultural artifacts from an era when we collectively believed in what I’ll call the “upward arc” - the assumption that despite setbacks and frustrations, the long trajectory of Western life bent toward something better.
That assumption is dead. I know this sounds melodramatic, but I think we’ve witnessed something unprecedented in our shared culture: the wholesale abandonment of progress as a governing narrative. Where we used to tell ourselves stories about systems that could be reformed, institutions that could be redeemed, and problems that could be solved, we now traffic almost exclusively in a paradigm of decay, capture, and inevitable disappointment.
I get the impression that the US conservatives still believe in reforming everything for what they see as better, but their idea of better appears to focused on better for an in-group (they assume they are in the in-group) rather than all people, with an uncaring or even vengeful attitude to the outcome for others whether those others are foreigners, other Americans, and especially other Americans who also happens to be immigrants.
Where vengeance is the goal they don’t seem to have a clear idea of what the slight they have endured is, just that it occurred and all or part of the out-group must be punished for it.
They seem to have outsourced implementation of their better to people who tell them they will enact the goals with little definition of a plan to enact those goals or oversight of how they achieve it. They people they outsource to typically appear to have little education, or have mediocre performance in the education and are usually easily identifiable as grifters.
Once broadcast tv and radio stopped being the dominant media our society started fracturing.
Loved that show, but I don’t even want to watch it any more because I would just make myself sad.
“We changed timezones?” “It’s a common mistake” “NOT FOR THE US GOVERNMENT!” “What kinda schmuck ass system is this?”
(in the background) “Can we have a civilization?!”
