I've been rewatching The West Wing lately, and it's like visiting a museum of extinct emotions. There's President Bartlet, striding through the corridors of power with his moral compass pointing toward true north, surrounded by staffers who genuinely believe their late-night policy debates might actually improve someone's life by Thursday. The show aired from 1999 to 2006, and watching it now feels like archaeology - excavating the fossilized remains of a time when folks could imagine their world as fundamentally decent, improvable, and oriented toward justice.

Boston Legal told the same story. Alan Shore and Denny Crane sparred over cases that mattered, in a legal system that, while flawed, still seemed capable of surprise verdicts in favor of the little guy. These shows are cultural artifacts from an era when we collectively believed in what I'll call the "upward arc" - the assumption that despite setbacks and frustrations, the long trajectory of Western life bent toward something better.

That assumption is dead. I know this sounds melodramatic, but I think we've witnessed something unprecedented in our shared culture: the wholesale abandonment of progress as a governing narrative. Where we used to tell ourselves stories about systems that could be reformed, institutions that could be redeemed, and problems that could be solved, we now traffic almost exclusively in a paradigm of decay, capture, and inevitable disappointment.

In 2003, a reasonable person could watch The West Wing and think, "Yes, this is aspirational, but it's not fantasy." The show depicted a political system populated by flawed but fundamentally serious people trying to govern a complex democracy. The characters made mistakes, faced setbacks, and sometimes lost important battles, but the underlying machinery of government functioned according to recognizable principles.

Today, that same reasonable person would watch those episodes and think, "How charmingly naive." We've learned too much about how the sausage actually gets made. We know about the revolving door between government and lobbying, the way campaign finance warps policy priorities, the extent to which regulatory agencies are captured by the industries they're supposed to oversee. We've seen how easily democratic norms are discarded // trashed when they become inconvenient, how quickly institutions will be brutalized and weaponized for partisan advantage.

After decades of gridlock, cronyism, and public failures, who can keep a straight face while saying the system works?

But what troubles me most: I think we've overcorrected. In our rush to shed our naive optimism, we've embraced a toxic hyper-realism that borders on nihilism. We've become so sophisticated about institutional failure that we've lost the capacity to imagine institutional success. Our default assumption is that any system, given enough time, will be corrupted by the worst people within it.

I worry we’ve crossed into a cultural mood that revels in disillusionment for its own sake. That shrugs when institutions fail, that mocks anyone who still speaks about ideals without irony. It’s become fashionable to believe in nothing other than decline. If you talk about the possibility of progress, you sound childish. If you express faith in institutions, you sound complicit. If you dare to hope, you’re dismissed as unserious.

This cynicism has become our new religion. Every policy proposal is met with knowing nods about how it will be undermined by special interests. Every reform movement is dismissed as performative theater designed to distract from deeper problems. Every leader who expresses genuine idealism is suspected of either stupidity or bad faith.

Our prestige television shows - from House of Cards to Succession to The Boys - are elaborate meditations on power's corrupting influence. Our political commentary assumes that everyone is operating from purely selfish motives. Our social media discourse treats good faith as idiocy.

The result is paralysis. We've become so good at diagnosing problems that we've forgotten how to imagine solutions. We can eloquently describe everything that's wrong with Western democracy, but we've lost the vocabulary for talking about how to make it better. When someone does propose a path forward, our first instinct is to explain why it won't work rather than to ask how it might.

When you believe systems can improve, you're motivated to engage with them, to push for reforms, to hold leaders accountable. When you believe systems are irredeemably corrupt, your rational response is withdrawal, cynicism, or destructive rage.

What would it mean to come of age believing every system is a scam, every leader a fraud, every institution a corpse propped up for ceremony? What kind of citizen does that worldview produce? Maybe it produces savvy skeptics who can’t be fooled. Or (more likely) it produces disengaged cynics who don’t bother to participate at all. If politics is nothing but a stage for corruption, then voting becomes a hollow ritual. If corporations are nothing but engines of exploitation, then consumption becomes a grim necessity. If nothing can bend toward better, then hope becomes embarrassing.

What if the truth lies somewhere between naive optimism and sophisticated despair? What if institutions are simultaneously more fragile and more resilient than we imagine? What if democratic systems are neither the noble experiment of their founding myths, or the elaborate con game of our contemporary cynicism - but something messier and more contingent; a collection of human arrangements that reflect the values and priorities of the people who inhabit them?

Instead of choosing between blind faith in progress and equally blind faith in decline, we might cultivate what I'll call "critical hope" - the radical idea that we can acknowledge institutional failures while maintaining the capacity to imagine institutional improvements.

The characters in The West Wing and Boston Legal weren't naive because they believed in progress; they were naive because they thought progress was inevitable. The wisdom we need now is different: the shared knowledge that progress is possible, but only if we're willing to fight for it.

Can we do that? Can we recover some faith in the upward arc without losing our hard-won understanding of how power actually works?

I think we have to try, if only because the alternative - permanent cynicism - offers no path forward at all.

I miss the optimism, even the naïve kind. I miss the belief that better was possible. I don’t think we need a hollow Hulu reboot of Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue or David E. Kelley’s courtroom soliloquies, but we desperately need a cultural narrative that allows for progress again. The pendulum has swung too far toward nihilism, and while that nihilism flatters our intelligence, it starves our spirit. We cannot survive if our stories only prepare us to expect worse. We need stories that push us to demand better.

I refuse to believe that collapse is the only trajectory left. If we abandon the narrative of progress entirely, we guarantee its impossibility. Cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The early 2000s weren’t golden years. The optimism was flawed, sometimes delusional. But even flawed optimism is generative. It fuels engagement (and not the social media kind), it drives reform, it insists that change is worth pursuing. Right now, we are starved for that generative impulse. We have overdosed on disillusionment. And if you doubt that, try rewatching those old dramas. Watch the way the characters argue about justice as if it mattered. Watch how they lose with dignity and believe they’ll win next time. Tell me you don’t feel a pang of longing. Then ask yourself the question I can’t shake: when did we decide that longing was foolish?