Twenty-five years ago, Aaron Sorkin and a cast and writers room of true-believing Clinton-era Democrats set out to create a technocratic fairy tale in which progressive values win the day by sheer virtue of their irresistibility. What happened next is enough to defy belief. Despite themselves, they made a masterpiece. 

Whatever its ratings success, there has been a critical reevaluation of The West Wing of late, especially on the Right. That’s because, for a certain kind of liberal, the Sorkin-created network drama, which premiered on a Wednesday night in September 1999, remains an eternal standard. What it has to teach about politics is truer, to them, than reality itself, which is why, in 2008, incoming Obama staffers could be found following procedures for presidential transitions that did exist in the show but had never existed in history. On the day after last month’s Democratic convention, the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer took up his pen to celebrate his party’s return to “institutionalism” after a flirtation with harsher gods. Titled “It’s Sorkin Again in America,” Foer’s essay explained that Democrats had turned away from “a darker, more Hobbesian view of politics” and were “bath[ing], once more, in the strings of the West Wing theme.” The article was not intended to mark the show’s anniversary. Foer was simply reaching for an allusion that lay close at hand.