Our Natasha Simons debuts her first NRO piece today, a rumination on the politics of Mad Men. It’s really good, and Natasha is better-equipped than I to have this conversation, but still I can’t help picking a bone with her take on the show’s leading man, Don Draper.

Natasha says:

Clearly, Don Draper is the starring figure of this collapse. He is the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, an Ayn Rand–ian allegory of a stoic firmly in the past. He is the prototype ’50s representative male, confident in his role without, and in turmoil within. Don is member of a dying breed who wants to play by the old business rules, and he can barely conceive of the ways in which advertising is inexorably moving (unlike, say, fellow ad man Pete Campbell). He is a relic waiting to be phased out.
But [Mad Men creator Matt] Weiner’s flaw is that he loves Don Draper too much to make him that relic, as intended — he is clearly not going to leave Don in the past, if season-four promotional posters are any indication. So the show attempts to imbue him with the sympathy of the audience, despite his stodgy ’50s limits — which leads to all sorts of annoying contradictions. Don looks down on Roger for the blackface, yet behaves dismissively toward his own black servant; Don assaults his mistress in a bathroom and demands women not speak to him “like that,” despite facilitating his former secretary Peggy’s surge upward through the ranks; Don lectures his wife about being a good parent even as he picks up strangers in his car and recklessly partakes of some unidentified drugs. These frustrating contradictions can’t simply be chalked up to mere nuance of human character, either; it seems clear that Weiner started out by using Don as an emblem of the ’50s, defining him in opposition to the ’60s to come.

I think she gives herself away here. Let me explain.

Don Draper is too nimble, his motives too muddled and his survival instinct too strong, to be the archetype she’d have him be (that he was, she says, “intended” to be — by whom if not Weiner, one wonders). If Weiner had really written Draper as a relic, had merely built an effigy of the 1950s and contented himself to watch it burn, the show would have gotten old rather quickly. It’s like Scott Fitzgerald said: begin with an individual, and soon you have a type. Begin with a type, and soon you have — nothing.

But Natasha’s piece is about the different prisms through which liberals and conservatives view the show, and so it shouldn’t surprise Cornerites that I’ll take the one on the right. It seems to me that the brilliance of Draper, and of Mad Men as a whole, is its ability to make people born in 1974 or 1983 or 1990 nostalgic for a world they never knew, except through a second-hand public school narrative that paints it in the gray flannel and sharkskin tones we’ve been trained to find so stultifying. Note, I’m not just talking about the Romanticism of a generation of liberals and feminists waiting pins-and-needles for the deliverance of the 60s. It’s a bona fide sense that something was lost that we can’t ever get back.

Don’t get me wrong, there is much that is contemptible in Draper and in the world of Mad Men. And as viewers we are repeatedly invited to wag our fingers at the show’s characters. But if we didn’t nevertheless feel some sympathy — hell, some empathy — for Draper and the misogynist scoundrels of his milieu; if we didn’t see something in that time and place that was worth saving, or nevertheless something which loss was worth fretting about, then the show would be pure pulp. Sexed-up, dime-store genre fiction.

This is where the Natasha is wise. She sees that Mad Men is at its core a dialogue on whether the 60s were necessary or even advisable. She says:

Conservatives and liberals cannot see the inevitability of the ’60s the same way. The hedonism, the “licentious fury” set up in these soldiers of such terrible, soul-destroying consumerism, is about to give way to the tortured emoting of Frank O’Hara and reggae-inspired coffee commercials, both of which have been featured in the past few seasons. But conservatives understand that the hedonism is only just beginning. The Me Generation is about to swing into full effect, after which we lose both the unrepentant ambition and charming earnestness of the American Dream — a phrase never to be uttered without a small smirk again.

But she’s only done half the job when she places that tension exclusively in the political preferences of the beholder, rather than in the very creative fabric of the show. And just as her confident claim that though Draper is “clearly. . .intended” to be a tragic relic (even if Weiner loves him too much to have the courage of his convictions) rings false, her suggestion that,

Weiner’s chosen narrative posits that our present is much better than the ’50s zeitgeist he portrays, but the essential paradox is that he portrays it with so much love and tenderness that it is sometimes impossible to pull out the theme of generational decay

invites a smirk and an “oh, really?” (especially to a colleague who delights in provoking Natasha around the watercooler).

Likewise I might say that the music of Sir Mix-a-Lot portrays over-sized fundaments with so much love and tenderness that it is sometimes impossible to pull out the theme of man’s inhumanity to man. Or maybe he just likes big butts.

So, Natasha’s flaw is in attributing to a kind of formalistic mistake, a technical flaw in the construction of the show, what should rightly be read into ours and Weiner’s very schizophrenia about the 60s, equality, consumerism, the American Dream — the whole kit and caboodle.

Indeed, Weiner’s schizophrenia is our schizophrenia is Natasha’s schizophrenia. She hates Draper (trust me) and everything he stands for. But she loves Mad Men, and so she can’t help trying to rationalize away the ugly bits (the show’s creators, represented by Weiner, want to have the correct politics, but their pesky “love” for maintaining the integrity, and the appeal, of their work gets in the way.)

The fact is that Americans’ deep ambivalence about change, our love-hate relationship with our collective history, and our perpetual worry over whether it is or isn’t “morning in America,” enabled us to sympathize even with Tony Soprano – another character Weiner had a hand in shaping — who is every bit the chauvinistic hypocrite as Don Draper, and a sociopathic murderer to boot.

Recall that Tony’s foundational gripe, in the series’ very first episode, is a fundamentally conservative worry:

Tony: The morning of the day I got sick I’ve been thinking it’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’ve been gettin’ the feelin’ that I come in at the end. The best is over.
Melfi: Many Americans I think feel that way.
Tony: I think about my father, he never reached the heights like me. But a lot of way he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, and pride. Today, what have we got?

Dr. Melfi’s character is exactly right. Many Americans did, and do, feel this way. And while it would be tempting, it would be a mistake to cordon this off as a “rich white male” problem. Neither Don Draper nor Tony Soprano are birthright heirs to the WASP tradition, after all, but duplicitous frauds and criminals. (Does their success say something about the nature of the social order they’ve lied and cheated their ways into? Probably, but that’s another post.)

Rather — and I’ve gone on for too long already to properly flesh this out — I suspect that this anxiety is widespread, and felt at all points along the ideological spectrum, even if our political culture compels us to give it voice only though the most deplorable characters. (It is a point that has now been made so often as to become banal, but all of our best new television is about average Americans leading double lives as criminals and deviants).

We let Tony Soprano and Don Draper say and do the things we mustn’t, and we condemn them for it, even as we come back week after week to be scandalized anew. This means something. . . .

. . . But since I have no interest in re-adjudicating the battles of the 60s, I prefer to embrace this schizophrenia rather than posit it as the horns of an existential dilemma.

Perhaps this is why I find Don Draper more interesting than Natasha does. Anyone who has watched the show will know that while he has a great many vices, his virtues too are substantial, and his reasons for acting virtuously often categorical rather than merely instrumental. Draper isn’t — couldn’t be — merely the hypocritical, patriarchal relic. Rather he is — can be — much more. We don’t yet know how he’ll turn out, but the possibility that he might go through the ringer of the 60s and come out clean on the other side — or more intriguing still, that he could transcend the 50s/60s opposition and find some redemptive and uniquely American synthesis, is what keeps us watching.