We can imagine almost anything, but only a tiny fraction of what we imagine can become real. There is no easy way to verify how much change is possible. Hard-nosed realists may be right much of the time, but then, periodically, they become dramatically wrong. Wild-eyed visionaries may be wrong much of the time, but occasionally they become

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In theory, there's nothing wrong with fiction being aspirational: one of the things that fiction can provide is a space to imagine what doesn't exist in reality. But in the case of The West Wing, aspiration and inspiration went further into something like delusion, a desire to patch the problems of American political reality through the re-creation

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