What I Learned Watching The West Wing

The Portuguese possess one of the world’s best words: saudade.

A restaurant owner explained it to me one night while describing the pain in a fado singer’s voice. There’s no direct English translation, but a decent approximation is something like a mixture of longing, heartache, melancholy, and yearning—but with a kicker: a sense of saudade not only for that which has passed, but for that which might not ever have actually existed.

In short: Imagine your heart desperately and forever missing what never was.

Separately, I just finished watching all seven seasons—154 episodes—of The West Wing, an old TV series about life inside the heart of American politics. It debuted in the fall of 1999, more than a quarter century ago.

I’d never watched it back in the day. After one episode I was immediately hooked. But more germane to today’s dispatch is that, over the entirety of that series, I was racked by a sense of saudade.

I have a vision of America that is framed by and rooted in the 1980s and ’90s, when I was becoming politically aware. Both political parties back then certainly fought and wrangled, and they certainly had competing visions for the America they wanted, but at the end of the day they looked for common ground to move the country—the whole country—forward.

That’s the America that The West Wing portrayed… parties that fought with one another, but which ultimately came together to legislate and rule-make for the betterment of Americans as a unified collective of humans.

And maybe that’s saudade on my part. Maybe I’m longing for something that never really existed outside the lens of a TV series.

Either way, it’s the America I long for. The America I deeply miss.

Because what we have today is an America that I absolutely don’t recognize. Some headlines:

• Trump targets only Democrat-led cities and demands increased ICE raids to deport more migrants – The Independent

• Trump executive order lets VA doctors deny care to Democrats or unmarried veterans – The Mirror US

• US Marines arrive in LA; California governor warns ‘democracy under assault’ – Reuters

• Trump Suggests He May Withhold California Disaster Aid Over His Feud With Newsom – New York Times

None of that is normal.

Aside from anything else, using the power of the presidency to punish political opponents is just so freakin’ childish.

Of course, the far-left pushes its own set of self-defeating problems. Atop the list is aggressively hiding the fact the former President Biden was mentally incapacitated and should never have been in the 2024 race for the White House.

Moreover, the far-left’s “everyone deserves a trophy” approach to society is an affront to those who have busted their butt to scrape by in life, only to see their tax dollars fund what they (often rightfully) see as a frivolous waste or supporting the bad decisions of other people.

And what ever happened to “assimilation?”

Immigrants used to come to America because they wanted to be American, to merge into the culture, proud when their children were fluent in English and living the better life they were chasing for their family when the first alighted on Liberty’s shores.

Today, all I see is the far-left pushing an agenda that sunders society and compartmentalizes people into distinct demographic boxes that take the American out of America. Not hard to see why so many people are so incensed by that.

What’s missing—the saudade I sense—is a died-in-the-wool, middle-of-the-road politician who supports a truly purple agenda that, statistics show, represents the vast majority of America:

• Let people love and marry whoever they want without government intrusion. The “Don’t mess with my life, I won’t mess with yours” approach to society.

• Manage the country’s finances at least as well as a conscientious 4th grader manages a lemonade stand.

• Keep religion—any religion—out of public life.

• Keep far-left social engineering out of public life, too.

• Stop demonizing anyone—on any side of the political spectrum—who doesn’t look like, love like, or worship like you.

In short, I’ll paraphrase Rodney King’s famous line after the LA Riots: Let’s all just get along.

Now, I’m not naive and I’m not aiming to go off on some political diatribe that ends with “Vote El Jefe For Congress!”

Sadly, I don’t think the America I remember is coming back… at least not anytime soon.

We have national and local politicians across the country musing about a national divorce that would split the country along political lines. We have Average Joes and Janes on both the Red and Blue teams calling for the same on social media.

Again, this is not normal.

It was certainly never part of the America I grew up in.

And it’s worsening.

The national temperature is rising…

I want to be clear that all of this bothers me.

That writing about this annoys me in ways I can’t fully explain.

My wife and I regularly contemplate moving to the US for family reasons. I’d like to be much closer to my kids, and my wife would like her son to be closer to his dad, who moved to the East Coast from Europe a decade ago.

But neither of us wants to be caught up in the America that’s emerging…

Instead, all I can do is prepare financially for what’s to come, which is honestly frustrating because it doesn’t really do anything to restore what I most want: My America—an America where I would again want to live my life.

At this point, all I can offer you is the same advice I tell myself: Prepare for what’s to come… the end of America as we know it.

She’ll still exist in some fashion, for sure. But, likely, that fashion won’t be 50 unified states, and it won’t be with the US dollar as the world’s primary currency.

And both of those outcomes are going to have debilitating and devastating impacts on American families.