What does a functioning democracy actually look like?
Consider Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, a liberal fantasy about an American president and his staff of mostly white male idealists who always care about doing the right thing and always do their darnedest to make it happen. In the context of #MeToo and Trump, the show is about as believable as a White House fact checker. But woven between the layers of rapid fire dialogue, the too-smart speeches, and the peanut butter thick moralizing, there is the thread of something brilliant and lasting.
One of my favorite recurring motifs takes place at the end of most of the early season episodes. The plot lines wrap into a tidy bow and the staff gathers in the oval office. President Bartlet addresses the room with the urgency of an E.R. doctor treating a ward of gunshot victims: “What’s next?”
Music swells. Roll credits.
To me this is a vastly underrated aspect of The West Wing. Let me unpack.
What’s next is, I say without exaggeration or hyperbole, probably the most important question we can ask ourselves on a daily basis. It prioritizes. It focuses. It allocates attention in a way that allows us to not only survive, but succeed.
Sometimes it’s instinctual, like dodging lions on the plains of African tens of thousands of years ago. It can also be rational, like preparing a Keynote for an ungrateful boss who holds the keys to your financial future. The fact that Jed Bartlet is keen to this question tells me, in no uncertain terms, that he is a man who knows how to get things done.
But what would J.B. do at a time like this?
Contrast Sorkin’s Capraesque vision of government with our current reality and it’s hard not to feel a gurgle of vomit bubble up in your throat. Any system that elevates a Revenge of the Nerds-style bully to the supreme court is, by a definition, a broken one. Any country that builds power and prestige upon a history of misogyny, racism, and economic inequality, is, in the most generous of terms, a complicated one. And yet I will argue that now is not the time to give up on the promise of what America could be.
Sometimes I imagine the future. I’ll sit on a stoop schooling the neighborhood teens about times way back when. I describe a relic called Twitter and how our president used this platform to spread provable lies every goddamn day. I lament when our government allowed money to be free speech, and politicians calculated positions not on the basis of right and wrong, but on the expected vote totals to be gained from ducking left or right. I stammer through an explanation of how women just weren’t believed, how entrenched powers guarded their interests, and how poverty was institutionalized with sickening precision.
Maybe by the time I’m giving this lecture things will have changed. More likely though, the echoes of today’s conflicts will carry through and I’ll make some comment how history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. The kids will smirk, and walk on, unimpressed by my diatribe and unmoved to heed the warnings so many generations have ignored before. Voter turnout for 18-24 year olds in the year 2048 will be an all-time low.
Unless…
America is an obscenely rich and messed up place that sometimes also gets it right. But we’ve only gotten as far as we have because the wealthy white farmers that founded our country made one truly genius move. In their constitution they left us room to operate. To assemble and to vote and to amend. They rightly figured they didn’t know everything, and that future citizens might be able act with greater wisdom and insight, thereby creating a more perfect union over time. The jury is out on the whole ‘more perfect union’ thing. But this prism of uncertainty is something that the present moment demands we consider.
No one knows what tomorrow brings. Maybe an asteroid slams into earth to end us all. Maybe I have a heart attack two seconds after I publish this post. Maybe Trump is impeached, the senate flips, and government actually works for a change.
My point is, the future is untold. America could still evolve into a democratic utopia. It could just as easily be doomed to fascism. The plain fact is we don’t know yet.
Given what’s at stake, the sentimentality of The West Wing hardly seems appropriate, and still it is in that show’s can-do attitude and perpetual optimism that we need to draw our strength. At no time in history have we needed more people to be lifetime practitioners of the democratic process. Citizens who are ready, willing, and able to engage. But why even buy in?
Who wants to participate in a system that tolerates demonstrable moral vacancy. We all feel the gnawing ache of powerlessness against a corrupt government. We all shout at the T.V. when obvious lies go unchecked. It makes you angry. Bitter. Fearful. Disappointed. Resigned. And yet I humbly suggest the path forward is to channel that rage into a series of next actions that will be difference makers over the long run. If you want to save democracy, then now is the time to recommit. It’s ok to feel all the feels, as long as it spurs you to action..
Start with something as simple as reading about a few issues you care about. Write a letter. Call a congressmen. Talk to a friend. Register to vote, and then go to the polls every, single, fucking time, whether it’s a local, state, or national election. Rinse and repeat.
These aren’t Herculean tasks, of course. But they will be move the needle, at least if done consistently enough, by enough people, over a long enough duration. Like the drops of rain that lifted Noah’s Ark, it just takes time. Puddles become pools, and pools grow into oceans that remap the world. The trick is to keep showing up. We don’t need a blue wave, but a rising tide. Participation may not be the silver bullet, but it’s still the best shot we’ve got. The future is just as uncertain now as it was when a group of white guys gathered in a hall to debate independence. The moment is just as urgent.
The difference is this time it needs to be all of us. Women, men, black, white, brown, straight, gay, trans, rich, poor… there’s no single demographic of do-gooders who is going to save democracy. There is no Josh Lyman or Sam Seaborn to sweep in and take up the moral mantle. Nor do we want that.
No, it has to be us. All of us. We are the notes in the symphony of democracy. The drumbeat of change is now. Strike up the fucking band already.
It’s that, or I’ll meet you out in the streets to watch the burning ashes of a country that could have been great, but never quite got there.
Either way, what happens next will be a direct result of how involved (or not) we choose to become in our own story.
I hope I like how this episode ends.
Featured photo by Ted Eytan via flickr cc
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