A couple of years into Ed Miliband’s leadership, with the party’s polling anaemic and the leader failing to connect with the public, someone around him had an idea. Wasn’t this exactly the sort of situation the Bartlet administration found itself in at the end of season one of a certain presidential drama series? What if the solution was the same? Whether anybody bothered to write it on an A4 notepad, history doesn’t record, but the briefings used the phrase all the same: “Let Ed be Ed!”
Alas Ed Miliband, whatever his undoubted qualities, was not Martin Sheen. His speeches went unaccompanied by “Snuffy” Walden’s soaring incidental music; voters did not follow the script. It would be too much to say The West Wing lost Labour the 2015 election, but it certainly didn’t help.
This is hardly the only way the biggest TV series ever made about American politics has ruined those who work in the British variant. It encouraged a self-serving belief that politics is fundamentally about smart, funny people dedicated to public service (rather than the more British view of the business which is, shall we say, not that). It convinced a generation of SpAds in ill-fitting suits to model themselves on Josh Lyman, a red flag made weirdly aggressive smart alec flesh. And it communicated a misleading impression that the way to win was for the smartest, most decent but most self-satisfied people to just patronise their way to victory. This is not a theory of politics that survived contact with the 2010s.
For a long time there was another way in which I thought The West Wing had ruined us: that it made a very particular kind of Extremely Online Politics Man somehow even worse. People who spent most of their time shitposting about Arsenal or the latest intervention from Nadine Dorries would, as presidential election years approached, develop an extensive and off-putting level of expertise on the intricacies of the Iowa caucus, or the implications of the polls out of the Upper Midwest. This could not, of course, be laid entirely at the feat of one liberal wish fulfilment drama: America existed, whether Aaron Sorkin had televised it or not. But at the very least, The West Wing surely translated all this for an audience of people who had never even set foot in Ohio, and to whom the word “primary” would ideally have referred to colours or schools and absolutely not to politics.
Despite – or possibly because – of the fact I was one of these men, I found all this deeply, horribly embarrassing. Most Americans do not, after all, pore over the results of our elections; even politics nerds in the States are quite capable of missing it when we make one of our rare and seismic changes of government (if that seems unreasonable, consider: do you know which party is in power in Ireland, right now?). More than that, in a British accent, words like “gubernatorial” or phrases like “ways and means” sound as out of place and cloying as Helen Baxendale’s entire stint in Friends.
So a slightly obsessive interest in American politics started to feel like an affectation. It seemed ridiculous that the same people who could have an extensive and detailed discussion of how Gretchen Whitmer’s governorship of Michigan was coming along, couldn’t name the Prime Minister of Australia, or point to North Rhine-Westphalia on a map.
As time has gone on, though – as the Trump decade has turned me from someone who eagerly lapped up crosstabs from swing states, to someone who in an ideal world would never hear a single thing about American presidential politics ever, ever again – it’s gradually dawned on me that this was wrong. It was not an inexplicable affection to be interested in the politics of a country that barely knows we exist. It was a simple reflection of geopolitical realities.
The US after all, remains the largest most powerful country in the world, the keystone of the global economy, the biggest player in NATO by an overwhelming margin and the guarantor of European security. We might wish it were otherwise, but wishing will not make it so. It will thus matter to all of us who wins this November’s presidential election; and obscure bits of polling out of Pennsylvania, or the fact Nebraska does something esoteric when distributing its electoral college votes, could genuinely matter to that result.
Thousands of years ago, the people of Britannia no doubt paid more attention to events in Rome than the Romans did to a province they were barely aware of on an island at the edge of the world. More recently, the people of the British Empire gathered around their radios to hear the results of Labour’s 1945 landslide. That we should pay attention to events in Washington today is a little different. A mouse sharing a room with an elephant has reasons to think about how it’s likely to move, even if the elephant barely knows that it’s there.
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