In times of chaos, we turn to narrative. Throughout the tumult of the George W. Bush years, the preferred palliative for the demoralized left was Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing—a political drama about the lives of White House staffers in the administration of Josiah Bartlet, a fictional Democratic president played by Martin Sheen. The show, which originally aired in the late nineties and early aughts, depicted a world in which government could serve as an engine of good, an instrument of change. Across the series, the staff brokered peace in the Middle East, dreamt up free college education, and unraveled the gordian knot of entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. In the wake of 9/11, as the U.S. was contending with the specter of domestic terror and gearing up for an unpopular war in Iraq, the show’s viewership tilted toward seventeen million.

The storyline I found most compelling as a young, aspiring author was about the presidential speechwriters. Throughout the show, Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) sequestered themselves in the darkened catacombs of the White House, armed with nothing more than legal pads and Bic pens, testing out snatches of oratory on each other as they sought to draft a comprehensive narrative about America. “Tonight, what began in the commons of Concord, Massachusetts,” President Bartlet intones in a campaign speech, “as an alliance of farmers and workers, of cobblers and tinsmiths, of statesmen and students, of mothers and wives, of men and boys, lives two centuries later.” It was this heady idealism—the notion that America itself was merely a story, a fragile narrative continually authored by each administration—that led me to see politics as a noble calling, a redoubtable vocation. The depth of my fandom revealed itself in ways that were oblique but no less shameful. Throughout college, I festooned the walls of my bedroom with the same framed “Don’t Tread on Me” flag that Seaborn keeps in his office and, on weekends, I recreationally performed critical exegeses on the rhetoric of presidential inaugurals. After watching the 2004 Democratic National Convention, during which Barack Obama delivered a speech that had an elegance rivaling anything Aaron Sorkin had written, I wrote an effusive fan letter and shipped it off to his senate office in Chicago. A few weeks later, a staffer called and suggested that I apply for an internship, which led, somehow, to me spending the next several years in Illinois, toiling first in Obama’s senate office and later in the headquarters of his presidential campaign. As an intern in the correspondence department, I was fairly low on the totem pole and had exactly zero sway in shaping the candidate’s agenda. Instead, my job involved wading through thousands of letters from ordinary voters, an epistolary tangle out of which I gleaned a national longing for a different kind of leader, one who could connect the bloody doldrums of the nation’s past to the hopeful arc of its future. After long train rides home to my garden apartment on the north side of Chicago, I binged-watched episodes of The West Wing, often falling asleep to the DVD menu’s soaring orchestral theme.

Now, in 2018, that time of my life seems lacquered with the same gauzy-edged cinematography as Sorkin’s televisual fantasia. Eventually, I abandoned my aspirations to be a presidential speechwriter and enrolled in an M.F.A. program for creative writing. In retrospect, it seems a slender mercy to have escaped the political arena before the presidency devolved into the blustering Twitter volleys of our current mogul-in-chief. But over the past several years, The West Wing has made a swift and surprising comeback. Owing in part to the convenience of Netflix, the show had been enjoying a resurgence among younger viewers, who weren’t yet born when the series first aired. “The West Wing Weekly,” a podcast devoted to rehashing episodes and extolling the virtues of the Bartlet administration, garnered two and a half million downloads by the end of 2016. So seismic was this revival that earlier this year rumors began circulating about NBC possibly rebooting The West Wing, with Aaron Sorkin wrangling his old crew to serve as a foil to the Trump White House.

Last summer, I learned that these new West Wing fans, or self-described “Wingnuts,” along with the original Aaron Sorkin faithfuls, were planning to commemorate the show with its first-ever fan convention in Bethesda, Maryland. There would be panel discussions about public policy, a West Wing Trivial Pursuit night, plus a mock state dinner. When I showed my wife the event’s Kickstarter page, which was soundtracked by the show’s triumphant theme, she said, with no small amount of grief in her voice, “Please tell me you’re not thinking about going.”  Read More