The architect of television’s ‘walk and talk’ is back and taking on Facebook – again

Why do you keep on being attracted to those particular types of characters? You are asking me a very interesting question, and I don’t know the answer. I think it has something to do with my father. I always felt like he had one foot in another century, you know? He was just a very sweet, very bright man for whom decency was the measure of a man.

I actually wanted to talk about the way you grew up. Part of your family fled the Russian ghettos to come to the US, right? Yeah, my father’s parents were chased out of Russia by the czar’s police because they were Jewish, and they came here with $3 in their pocket, as teenagers. Then they had my father, who on his 18th birthday signed up for the Army in the middle of World War II. When the war was over, he went to college on the GI Bill [which provides educational benefits to eligible military service members and families] and then law school. In the course of one generation, the Sorkins went from lower middle-class to upper middle-class.

What did your parents understand about patriotism and duty? They understood patriotism wasn’t the kind of bumper-sticker patriotism that we get sold so often. I was very little at the time of the Watergate hearings, but I do remember watching them, and I didn’t feel like my parents thought this was a national shame. I thought they felt like, “Look at these guys railing against the most powerful person in the world”. And on that day in August, when Nixon resigned, it was nothing but pride that the most powerful person in the world was giving up power and there wasn’t a tank in the street. And so, January 6 becomes a lot more heartbreaking.

Without giving too much away, what happened on January 6 [2021, when rioters attacked the US Capitol in Washington] plays a role in your new film. It comes up. But I believe in all of us, even now. I ­believe in this country, I really do.

You’ve said that you’re romantic about the institutions of American democracy. I want to confess that watching The Social Reckoning was a little bit disorienting because of its reverence for working within the system – Congress, the courts, journalism – to achieve this goal. We’re at this moment where people are angry at our institutions. They feel the system is rigged. Do you not despair sometimes that your reverence is misguided? It may well be, but what’s the alternative? I mean, what would I do if it was misguided? If I said, “Hey, these institutions, they’re terrible, they’re rigged,” what do we do? All we have are elections. Other than taking to the streets, that’s the only time we get to raise our hand.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The New York Times.

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