This post will be similar in theme to one I wrote about books and bookshelves some four years ago. The short of the last one is that many people in elite positions like to project themselves as well-read though they aren’t at all. This became particularly necessary during the nonsense that began in 2020 where many switched to online video calls at home and desired to demonstrate faux-sophistication by placing a carefully curated bookshelf in the room where they held meetings.
This post is not about this but it is something related and as with the fake bookshelves, it is an example of how leftist-types want to see themselves. Below is a video clip from a television show called The Newsroom starring Jeff Daniels (who I almost confused with Daniel Stern), which ran from 2012 to 2014. I did watch this clip once years ago but could only skim through it again because I can’t stand hearing smug leftists performing rehearsed speeches as if they’re off the cuff.
I was totally unsurprised to learn that the man behind this speech was the Jewish screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin is perhaps most well-known for The West Wing, a left-wing political fantasy drama that began in the last years of the Clinton presidency. I did get through one season of this and it was full of just this sort of writing. The main characters were mostly White House staffers for a Democrat Party president and always had a slick response to the strawmen put in the mouths of their political antagonists. At least judging by the first season, the scandals and dramas that came up were always innocent mistakes and never corrupt or malevolent as things certainly were during the Clinton Administration. The most absurd I can recall was when the character played by Rob Lowe was caught in public with an escort by the media even though they were totally just friends. Truly the stuff of fantasy.
Now to the clip above which centres around Jeff Daniels’ character angrily responding to the claim that America is not the greatest country in the world. Already this is set-up in a rather silly way as Americans are as free to believe this as Bolivians and Yemenis are about their own countries. The difference is that there is actual weight to the American claim given they’ve been the most powerful nation on earth for the better part of the last century. This is a result of a variety of factors related to military power, industrial capacity as well as their economic dominance. Although the American Empire has declined significantly over the last fifty years, it is still one of the most powerful and influential countries on earth. Power and influence alone are enough to show why it is not unreasonable for people to believe it is the greatest country in the world — even to this day.
Jeff Daniels’ character dramatically claims there is “no evidence” for this by listing a number of rankings such as in “literacy” and “life-expectancy” where America is not number one. He would have had to have memorised all of these pieces of trivia and yet it is presented with a rhetorical flourish as if all this information came naturally during his indignant rant to a young female college student. I groaned the first time I was shown this but the audience is supposed to applaud him for his knowledge and elocution. If you look at the YouTube comments, you’ll see that a lot of people still think it’s great today and there’s even at least one idiot on Twitter pretending to be the character.
The reality is everything he mentioned might be of value to some bureaucrat in the relevant government department but this sort of thing would only come up on quiz nights most of the time; if at all. His rhetoric unravels further when one looks into where many of these rankings come from and the methodology employed. One that I laugh at is how high the city of Melbourne, Australia ranks on the “liveability” index each year. It was ranked fourth in 2024 and yet many people are moving away for a number of reasons including the expense of living there. If it was objectively that liveable then people wouldn’t be moving to cities ranked much lower within the same nation. And yet they are.
If you stop and listen to what is actually being said, you will note that he just makes a series of assertions with no context. That the United States, with a multi-racial population well in excess of 300 million people, doesn’t have as high a literacy rate as the much smaller and more homogenous Norway is hardly a surprise. Ditto for most of the other things he mentions which amusingly enough are a direct result of the immigration policies encouraged by people who think this character is very clever. It would be interesting to see where the United States ranked in most of these scales prior to 1965 or if they simply controlled for those who actually are American.
I’ve already mentioned that this is all scripted and then performed by an actor for entertainment but this is nonetheless lost on people. Jeff Daniels even performed a modified version of this rant attacking Trump some years later which was also presented as if it just came to his mind and wasn’t a highly scripted performance. It is worth reminding people who enjoy this sort of thing that Jeff Daniels is really best known for his role as Harry in the film Dumb and Dumber where he portrayed the dumber one.
This sort of thing is like a “literally me” for leftists and it is common especially with celebrities who seem to think that pretending to be smart people on a television show or in a movie means they are smart too. It is also unfortunately the way much opinion media operates with rehearsed responses ready to be used as soundbites. Think of people like George Clooney, Robert Redford, Alec Baldwin among others who love putting themselves in roles where they play a really smart guy. This extends to the people who soak up this sort of nonsense as they see these fictional characters as a reflection of them and their beliefs. Armed with this fantasy, they can smugly dismiss anything they like with a rhetorical flourish they copied from a television show or film. It doesn’t require any thought whatsoever.
I really don’t like it.