The great localist blog, Front Porch Republic, just published my essay  on being a recovering West Wing-nut and how the insider mode of politics that the show promoted deeply miseducated our generation about what serious political engagement means:

My own college and post-college experience corroborates Weiner’s observation that The West Wing is to Millennials and Beltway politics what All the President’s Men was to Baby Boomers and journalism: I witnessed friend after friend be baptized into national politics with a binge-watch of the show’s seven seasons; on the night of Obama’s election, I had that exact same conversation that Yglesias had described (“In 2024, that’ll be us on election night,” “You’ll be Josh and I’ll be Toby”); and literally dozens of my friends, myself included, have been caught wistfully saying “If only [The West Wing’s fictional President] Jed Bartlet was President!” Indeed, Washington’s Obama generation might be more aptly named the Bartlet generation.

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When asked why they love The West Wing, most people point to the show’s idealism. But, if my fellow young politicos and I had to be honest with ourselves, I think we would say we mostly loved the show because it displayed characters similar to ourselves winning: winning elections, winning arguments, winning the job hunt, winning duels of wits, and winning debates. Most of we West Wingnuts – myself included – were nerds back in our school days, incapable or uninterested in the type of winning that playing (or even watching) sports brings. The West Wing showed us a game that we could play and win at: I can memorize facts, I can make snarky comments, I can win debates… and all the while I can feel good about myself because I am performing a ‘public service.’ While most of today’s nerd-empowering media wisely challenges us to stop caring about winning in the first place, The West Wing shined a path towards a more enjoyable option: who needs the high road when you have what it takes to be a winner in Washington?

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Viewing hundreds of millions of Americans who are not Washington insiders as useful only for votes and campaign donations is not an idiosyncrasy of Jim Messina and his fictional counterparts on The West Wing— it’s endemic to Beltway politicos. As Theda Skocpol pointed out in her wonderful book Democracy Diminished, we have moved from a “membership democracy” to a “management democracy” in the past century. A once-thriving national network of participatory federated societies – which involved routine local activities in small town chapters which cascaded bottom-up into member-driven state conventions and influential national offices – gave way to a politics where we send our checks in to D.C. managers, who engage in democracy for us. The West Wing will be a perfect historical artifact of this age of political management.

The blog A Patient Cycle posted a response to my West Wing essay, sharing similar experiences at Georgetown:

Like Davis, I still enjoy aspects of The West Wing, and have it to thank for much of my childhood political interest. In a roundabout way, it led me to where I am now. But its political culture is a terrible guide, and leads toward some sort of humility-free, revenge-of-the-nerds world that will never get us anywhere…Washington will never change if we continue to think of it as a battleground, or a prize to be won. That process must start at home, and in practicing a humane politics in the places we live.

Read my full essay — “Beyond Josh Lyman Politics: How the West Wing Miseducated My Political Generation” — here.