The Pernicious Appeal of Sorkinism
By: Jack Shepherd
Tags: Politics, Social Media, Television, Culture, Media Criticism

The Pernicious Appeal of Sorkinism

In real life, even when you win, the bad guys never truly get “owned”

Photo: NBC

The enduring appeal of The West Wing, especially as comfort food in a dark time, comes partly from the wish-fulfillment you get watching competence and kindness as operating principles in the White House. But the real secret sauce of Sorkinism comes from a darker place. What actually makes The West Wing tick is the very specific emotional high you get from watching the ritual humiliation of bigots and bullies and other bad actors take place in front of a duly impressed group of onlookers, usually through the righteous dispensation of Truth and Science. There are far too many scenes like this to count throughout the Sorkinverse, but an illustrative example is the time when President Bartlet singles out the religious fundamentalist talk show host Dr. Jenna Jacobs at a White House event. Noticing that she’s failed to stand as he enters the room, he acknowledges her and then lays into the homophobic Bible-thumping she’s renowned for with an erudite reductio ad absurdum from the Old Testament:

“I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7 . . . What would a good price for her be?”

He ends the tirade with a display of Presidential dominance:

“One last thing. While you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the Ignorant Tightass Club, in this building, when the President stands, nobody sits.”

Chastened and humiliated, she stands, as the awed crowd takes in her disgrace. It’s all quite satisfying to watch (if you can look past the troublingly lopsided power dynamics at play), but if the last four years have taught us anything at all, it’s that the feeling it’s designed to give you is one that you will never have in real life.

The Germans probably have a word for this particular emotion, which is a potent combination of schadenfreude, personal vindication in front of an appreciative audience, and the smug joy that comes from watching in realtime as a vanquished enemy slowly begins to see themselves for what they are. But if there isn’t a word for it, there should be, because it’s a high that many have been fruitlessly chasing since at least the Bush years. After The West Wing finished its run, the best peddler of this particular narcotic was Keith Olbermann, who would dutifully furrow his brow at 8 p.m. every weekday and deliver a blistering and eloquent tirade directed at the villains of the day (often the President himself). This finger-wagging “You-sir-ism” was addictive at the time, as it positively invited you to imagine W. himself watching it in the White House—probably while cowering under a desk — chastened and humiliated like Dr. Jenna Jacobs; crushed under the weight of logic and wit and righteousness.

Keith Olbermann, heroically vanquishing some enemy who couldn’t possibly care less. Photo: MSNBC

And in the era of Trump and Twitter, this idea that these remorseless goons are just one good “own” away from slinking back into the fever swamp with their tails between their legs is somehow more prevalent than ever. It’s immensely satisfying to watch (for instance) the craven Trump lawyers pursuing frivolous allegations of election fraud get smacked down by judges, or the QAnon grifters being hilariously debunked as their predictions fall apart in front of them, but it’s also important to realize that they don’t care. They are not (as the dril tweet goes) owned.

And neither, importantly, is Trump. The absolute best that we can hope for is that he will, at some point, go away. But the catharsis—the righting of wrongs and the restoring of balance—that so many of us have been conditioned to hope for exists in the same imaginary world where George Bush apologized for his crimes against humanity and Donald Trump got destroyed by The Lincoln Project and Michael Douglas turned his campaign around by saying to Bob Rumson, “I’m Andrew Shepard, and I am the President.” The appeal, and the danger, of Sorkinism is the idea that the other side can be vanquished if they’re exposed for what they are. But as validating as it can be to watch videos of Trump surrogates getting lit up by righteous cable pundits or quote-tweeted into oblivion on Twitter, that next moment—the one where they grudgingly stand up and acknowledge reality like Dr. Jenna Jacobs—is never going to come.

The fact is that these people can’t be shamed or forced to concede or even compelled to admit that they’re living in their own twisted, nightmare reverse-Sorkinverse where they’re the righteous ones.

They can only be painstakingly beaten back, never defeated or vanquished. They’ll never give anyone that satisfaction.