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.