For the past couple of weeks I’ve been watching obsessively every evening—“binge’-watching” we say nowadays—the old TV series ‘The West Wing.” The phrase is the name for the business side of the White House in Washington. The series, which was a political drama about a fictional center-left Democratic administration, was broadcast for seven seasons from 1999 to 2006, straddling the real center-left Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and the real center-right Republican administration of George W. Bush. It won every award, attracting anywhere from 7 to 20 million viewers—especially, it is said, the elite, like readers of columns in Folha.
Really, now, it’s beautifully done. The acting is excellent, the plots fascinating—if perhaps a little optimistic about integrity in politics. The dialogue is amusingly cynical, filled with sharply observed types of American politicians. If your English is very, very good and if you are very, very familiar with U.S. popular culture, such as sports talk, you’ll love it as I do.
As I said, the show comes from the center-left, with which I often don’t agree. The Democrats in the show are always trying to raise the legal minimum wage, which hurts the very poor, or to subsidize this or that form of energy, which supposes that Washington knows best. The President character is of all things a Nobel-prize winning economist, of a sort with whom I would not agree. In an amusing sub-plot in one episode the President reluctantly hosts the co-winner in his year a “rational expectations” economist of anti-statist convictions, on the lines of Robert Lucas (non-fictional Nobel 1995). I knew Lucas well. I approved of his economics, but not his personality. For the President character of the series, played brilliantly by Martin Sheen, it would be the other way around.
As I listened to the handling of one crisis after another, one political campaign after another, one human mistake at the highest level after another, a conclusion grew on me.
The size and range of the state is crazy.
Think of your family trying to get through the day, or the year. It has a few priorities to balance, a few resources, a few people to be satisfied, or not. It’s pretty clear what the goals are, and to know whether or not you succeeded. Even so, it’s tough to do it right, yes? Or think of your employment: please the boss within the constraint of your energy level and ethical standards. Simple, eh? (If you think so, you’ve never been employed.) Or think of your private business: please your customers, within constraints of effort and character. If that was easy, we’d all be rich.
Now think of the governance of Brazil from Brasilia or from the city hall of São Paulo. The complexity, an engineer would say, is several orders of magnitude greater. There are a hundred times more goals, a million times more people and purposes involved.
Conclusion? Better leave to markets and other voluntary human interactions most of what the state tries to plan, organize, order, shape.
The West Wing is c-r-a-z-y.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
Nobody, regardless of the political stripe that you wear, could argue with Sorkin's ability to write cracking dialogue.
I love the fantasy of the show (Americans electing *an economist*!) and sorkin’s sharp dialogue. But I struggle to return to it since a friend pointed out how often casual misogyny pops up without any comment.