***This is written under the assumption you have either seen The American President or don’t mind spoilers. If neither of these descriptions fit you, it may be best to move along.***

As part of my class, Politics & Film, we recently watched and discussed The American President, the 1995 hit helmed by Rob Reiner and written by Aaron Sorkin. Michael Douglas plays Andrew Shepherd, the widowed office-holder about to run for re-election. Annette Bening portrays Sydney Ellen Wade, a lobbyist the president begins to date.

Most of the film takes place within the White House itself, with President Shepherd in nearly constant contact with his staff or his daughter. The drama surrounds the White House’s legislative agenda. To get bipartisan re-election support, the president is pushing a crime bill, while an environmental interest group, with Ms. Wade as their chief lobbyist, pushes a bill that radically reduces fossil fuel emissions. The two bills come into conflict as the president publicly supports the crime bill, while his support for the environmental legislation is passive and indirect.

The antagonist is supplied externally through Sen. Rumson, played by Richard Dreyfuss. Rumson, a Republican, is running to unseat Shepherd and he builds his campaign around family values, using his platform to attack the president and his new romantic interest. Rumson uncovers evidence of Wade’s participation in an anti-war protest where a U.S. flag was burned. Shepherd insists, to all around him, the White House has no official position on the president’s relationship or Ms. Wade. Shepherd argues, consistently, for the right of the president to conduct his personal life as he sees fit.

The film is spectacular by almost any measure. The dialogue is sharp, and the direction is superb. The acting is compelling and mostly believable. The romance is the most effective element, from the “meet cute” to the hard conversations that come later. The film culminates in a famous speech by Shepherd, in defense of himself, his girlfriend, and his political ideals.

The speech manages to be both iconic and idiotic. The language has Sorkin’s typical rhythm and it is alluring as a piece of theater. But as a matter of political thought, it is uncommonly silly. The speech is built on the assumption that Shepherd’s beliefs are passionate and trimmed, only recently, by political practicality. Politics gets in the way of good policy. For Rumson, though, and the film bears this out elsewhere, his motivations are cynical, destructive, and manipulative. He seeks power, while Shepherd seeks the good.

This is classic Sorkin. Progressives, like Shepherd, are noble, while conservatives (though Rumson is not really all that conservative, just mostly oily) are voraciously evil. For most political films made in Hollywood, this is the inevitable outcome. They rarely portray what can actually be true in political reality–opponents compete from the best of motivations. They simply disagree and work against one another. Instead, writers and directors take the cartoony route, where antagonists are not enough, but mustache-twirling villains, two-dimensional cut outs that bear no resemblance, even artistically, to the real thing, are both standard and stupid.

The most astounding part of the clip, at least when viewed from the era of Trump, is how our politics have changed since 1995. These changes may not be permanent, or they may be more rhetorical than structural, but they are evident nonetheless. Shepherd marks his territory around civil liberties, not only his attachment to the ACLU, but to the difficulty of free speech, even speech we hate, in a free society. Progressive shock troops no longer hold to such niceties. Political correctness, taken to its campus extremes, seems all too willing to shut down speech that is objectionable because it has defined it as hateful, and since “hateful” speech hurts, or “delegitimizes,” it should be squelched.*

Shepherd’s progressivism extends also to his willingness to divorce the private and the public to a degree. The public is right to be concerned about policy, but too hungry to depose leaders for their private flaws. The president’s bedroom should be beyond the public’s reach. In contrast, Rumson rails against Shepherd’s improprieties. He trumpets “family values” and the goodness of moral virtue. Rumson, the scold, sneers at the sight even of the president dancing at a state dinner.

The American President was, obviously, Reiner’s apologia for Bill Clinton and the 1992 campaign. Clinton’s affairs were known and adjudicated on the trail. Republicans believed Clinton was a product of the sexual revolution. Clinton’s infidelities were not, alone, the issue at hand. Instead, the culture’s shifting attitudes toward sexual morality was being manifested in abortion, the increasing acceptance of homosexuality, the prevalence of divorce, and out-of-wedlock births. The phrase “family values” was a shorthand for opposition to a changing world. Sorkin never gave Rumson the opportunity to speak in paragraphs, unlike Shepherd. Instead he was a caricature of the Christian Right. This film was pre-Lewinsky, which brought the argument to something of a head, during Clinton’s second term. Conservatives lost that public battle.

Today, it seems they have surrendered their cultural arms. Donald Trump’s past appears to be at least as sordid as Bill Clinton’s. The party rallied around Trump and against Hillary Clinton. Talk of family values, marital fidelity, and moral virtue has largely faded from our lips. Not only does Trump speak with a different tongue, but the movement’s representatives have mostly engaged in elaborate “whataboutism,” answering any concerns about Trump, his mistresses, or his language, with cries of, “but Bill Clinton” or “but Teddy Kennedy” or “boy, I love Supreme Court appointments.”

I don’t suffer under the illusion that any of this is new information. We have walked over these arguments for more than two years. Viewing The American President, though, brought these shifts newly into focus. The Era of Trump has rendered the film passé. Even the nature of Shepherd’s scandal, where a widower is sharing his bed with a single woman, feels old-fashioned by today’s hyper-evolving “standards.” Imagine Shepherd saying, “well, of course I paid an old mistress to stay quiet as I tried to lure evangelical votes, but the public doesn’t need to know such things.” I am not even sure how a screenwriter, poet, or novelist will write of such transitions in the future. We seem, almost, beyond fictionalization because the truth is communicative in its own right.

Grade: 3/4 egg-heads

*Of course, Shepherd’s die-hard defense of the Bill of Rights, and of all civil liberties, magically, falls short as he pronounces plan to handle guns of all kinds through legislation due to “national security” concerns. There is a deep vein within progressivism to assign all power to a noble chief executive. Perhaps Trump will, at least temporarily, cure progressives of that impulse, but I doubt it.