The West Wing, Redux

[kaysixteen]

So I treated myself to binge-watching a great deal (not all) of the eps of the West Wing, shown over the week between Christmas and New Year's, on HLN (the erstwhile 'Headline News Network', which has apparently long abandoned its original m.o.).  I happened to find it when flipping channels.  It is clearly one of the best tv shows ever produced, but I had not seen an ep for maybe a decade, and boy it was revealing.  It is hard to overemphasize just how, ahem, different the political (albeit obviously stylized/ idealized) realities of 1999-2006 seem to us today, even though most of us were adults then and lived through the era personally.  I was wondering if any of you would care to respond to my observations, disabusing me if need be, if I am misrembering historical details, incorrectly interpreting WW portrayals of the situation, or, of course, am in error wrt today's conditions:

1) Compared even to the end of the show, 2006, the Democrats of today are clearly substantially to the left of those of  the WW era, whereas the GOP is even more to the right of the GOP of then.  Indeed, the WW seems to be advocating for a consensus-driven and very centrist approach to politics, and the GOP in the show is largely seen as going for this.   Nothing could appear to be more different from today's realities.

2) Some political issues and cultural references seem just quaint and some concepts dated, but some are decidedly less so.  There is an ep where Josh is given the enormously uneviable task of trying to convince the president of the Communication Workers' union to get on board with a free trade agreement which is going to cost his union a ton of jobs, which is exactly contrary to the very promise Josh and Bartlet had made to the same man 6 years earlier, in order to get his union to endorse Bartlet in the primary campaign, an endorsement which had a snowball effect that won Bartlet the nomination.  This promise was of course not to support such job-exporting free trade policies.  And now Bartlet, rather unapologetically, is reneging, which is more or less killing Josh, who goes along anyhow, and rather unenthusiastically ends up getting the union boss to go for it, apparently by convincing the man that the agreement is going to pass anyhow so he really has no choice, so he might as well play ball and get the best job retraining, etc., concessions possible.   Even though his union remains opposed, and many of its members will suffer enormous financial, and psychic, consequences.  To get Josh to comply, Bartlet had given him a spiel about how great free trade agreements, unfettered free trade policies, etc., were for the overall economy, even though some people would lose out.   A speech which could have easily been made by George W. Bush as well.  But not by Bernie Sanders... or by Donald Trump.  And the fact that most Democrats by the Obama era had largely adopted this same big business-style Bush GOP view, well, that left the door open for the likes of Trump, who snookered the people like those displaced union workers, into believing that he would reverse their fortunes, while, once in office, he did little to do that, even as he did much else which was destructive of their interests.  In effect, the WW was overtly justifying the broken promises made not only by the fictional President Bartlet, but also by many real Democratic politicians, which caused the hollowing out of the economy in large swaths of the country, actions that were enthusiastically shared by GOP politicians of the pre-Trump era, who of course had never made such promises in the first place.   And we are still living with the consequences, today.