Could you explain what is a “Sorkinite”? Are they like the Bernie Bros?
Sorkinites are the people that follow the romantic vision of Washington political policy as put forward by director-writer-producer Aaron Sorkin, the man behind such TV series as The West Wing or the Newsroom. Generally speaking, Sorkinite political philosophy is consistently marked lacking substance and is made up with my style. What substance it does have is purely managerial, but doesn’t hold to itself anything other than the current state of nature being the best of all possible options. It’s a very conservative brand of democratic liberalism at the “End of Histoy” in the Francis Fukuyama sense; that being with the collapse of the Soviet Union liberal capitalism won the battle of history and all that was left was an eternity of simply managing the world, there was no longer a grand battle. However Fukuyama has been proven a hundred times wrong and has been forced to revise his thesis as many times before surrendering and becoming a Dengist, but that’s unrelated.
Generally speaking, Aaron Sorkin doesn’t like to acknowledge there are any serious issues in the world that can’t be solved with striking a good deal and sweeping rhetoric. Evidence from his filmography that can be best used to illustrate it this is the opening scene of Newsroom where “Jeff Newsroom” goes on a rant that America isn’t great because of
raw statistics proving him objectively correct and are supposedly apolitical.
Aaron Sorkin in his writer’s rooms lessons or whatever has said also that he doesn’t write characters, but problems which are solved by people with the perfect skill set and abilities to solve them. So you have a class of middle class or upper middle class Washington greenhorns who believe that they are those people with the perfect skill sets because they went to all the big colleges and took all the right classes and grew up in the right socio-economic class that gives them the perfect placement and power to ride into DC like any one of Aaron Sorkin’s copy-pasted characters and can policy into existence a better America. What you get is a more cloistered class of monkish beaurecrats who work more like Chinese eunuchs than the heroes they believe they are.
Berniebros on the other hand are a generally on the social-democratic side of things and believe that America is fundamentally broken and can be fixed by structural shifts. They’re made up more by working class families or college-educated professionals who didn’t go into a civil-service profession but all the same came out of college with the sociological and historical mindset one picks up there to vaguely understand that something went wrong in the late 70’s and the 80’s when the New Deal Coalition of the 30’s and 40’s finally died and they want that era back. But they are also a movement without a backing, unlike the Sorkinite Liberals who operate in the normal fabric of assumed politics of America. Though I’d also accuse the Berniebros as sort of operating on the same framework as the Sorkinites but more alert and aware of the fundamental failures of the America state when it comes to their class, since they’ve long lived outside of the endowed class of Americans; they’re still a group who think their perfect candidate can sweep in from the sides and take center stage because their policies are the right policies, and more rightly so than Biden or Hillary in a more purely rationally centered bourgeoise manner