The West Wing: Compromise And Political Idealism

Debating Ayn Rand in the West Wing: Compromise and Political Idealism In the acclaimed 2000s TV show “The West Wing,” which fictionalizes the daily battles of American politics, senior staff members in the White House scatter from issue to issue, disaster to victory, and most often, from meeting to meeting, where the staff negotiates and renegotiates their political strategy. Trumpeting idealist and liberal American values, “The West Wing,” written by Aaron Sorkin, also underscored the necessity of compromise, with White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry remarking that “Compromise is statesmanship.” However, it is this trafficking of compromise, and all its murky implications, that is most often criticized in modern American politics. Political
theories such as Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness, form the bedrock of this dissent. Trumpeting the absolute and bashing what she calls ‘ethical subjectivity,’ Ayn Rand asserts that all compromise constitutes a betrayal of one’s integrity; an act of negligence and weakness that empowers wrongdoing. In her mind, the premise of compromise is false- any of what we call compromise is actually an acceptance of defeat. This theory is corroborated by the modern American public. In the NPR article “Why Compromise is a Bad Word in Politics,” host Steve Inskeep states that while many Americans believe hypothetically in bipartisanship, they see compromise from members of their own party as treacherous. Voters, by and large, believe that a principle compromised is a bill diluted. As such, the idealist vision of a White House empowered by meetings and compromise, as painted in “The West Wing,” may remain a fiction.