I’m a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin, and of his 1995 film The American President in particular. The Sorkin-penned, Rob Reiner-directed romantic comedy was a throwback to the charming films of Hollywood’s golden age, yet as timely and smart as anything we’ve seen in the past generation.
The timeliness was largely to do with its take on US politics, which had in the Nineties grown more partisan and adversar ial than it had been in a generation but was still a far cry from the horror we are living through today. The issues that served to frame the debates – gun control and climate change – were downright prescient: they were on the radar at that time, but neither had escalated to nearly the tsumanis they have since become.
But even those markers aren’t the truly prescient call-outs of Sorkin’s endearing, poignant fable. He called out, a decade before the fact, the rise of Authoritarianism in the US, and succinctly summarized its moving parts.
Michael Douglas’s President Andrew Shepherd is an incredibly popular Democratic president approaching re-election. He is a widower, and has begun dating a liberal lobbyist (Annette Bening), which is blood in the water to the Republicans anxious to replace him with Senator Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss). There’s a showdown over two important bills – a gun control bill sponsored by the White House, and a climate control bill supported by an organization Bening works for.
Rumson openly attacks the president’s character, smearing Bening’s character in the media, and when she and the president find themselves at odds over the bills, Shepherd has a come-to-Jesus moment that leads him into the White House press room, where he gives the following live speech:
“We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it! He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”
Making you afraid of it... and telling you who’s to blame for it.
That’s the core of the Authoritarian playbook. Make people afraid, and their cognitive processes shift; emotion overwhelms reason; and the resulting dream causes them to turn to whoever parades as their defender.
This certainly wasn’t any revelation unique to Sorkin’s movie; and it certainly wasn’t something new in US politics. In fact, we can find this manipulative technique in the rhetoric of leaders of all kinds – political, military, religious - as far back as our oldest history books go.
But it jumps off the screen, that 1995 bit of commentary, in the hindsight we suffer in 2022. Douglas made his speech just after Newt Gingrich had paraded his Contract with America, setting in motion the winner-take-all, kill-or-be-killed era of politics that has tainted the past two and a half decades of American life. The perfect timing radiates a prescience of what was immediately to come; be afraid... and they’re to blame! has been more than just the undercurrent it’s always been, these past 25 years – it's been an overt storm, refusing to subside.
Aaron Sorkin, if you’d care to put any more hopeful words in Michael Douglas’s mouth, words that can foreshadow something better up ahead – now's the time.
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