A Tranquil Mirage: Aaron Sorkin's America

Throughout his long career, Aaron Sorkin has kept the flame burning for a certain American idea. His stories cover every center of power—politics, entertainment, media, tech—and take place in an America flourishing thanks to a fair, smart, sometimes smug, but ultimately heroic centrist establishment. From The West Wing to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, from The American President and A Few Good Men to Mr. Wilson’s War and The Newsroom, almost every protagonist in a Sorkin drama represents this unifying ideal. His vision is capacious. Sorkin nods to the conservative skeptic, winks at the leftist radical, owns up to every historical grievance—and then plows on, his cast of quick-witted characters relentlessly pursuing social progress while enjoying extraordinary personal success.

Last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 could be seen as the high-water mark of Sorkin’s project: it somehow manages to integrate the subversive vision of those famous utopian revolutionaries into the Sorkin worldview. This vision is closer to the civic-mindedness of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) than to any radicalism, but it is also wise to the moral and political lessons of the fifties and sixties. When I watched The Trial of the Chicago 7 during the gloomy winter of 2020, I was struck by how comforting its image of America was.

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