It is now streaming on Netflix. And to its many liberal and independent-leaning fans, in particular, it has become something more than just a nostalgic drama from a time when men’s suits with pleated pants are fashionable and Twitter does not yet exist. For many in the Trump era, the show is an idealistic alternative reality, an escape from the vitriol and ill-will that they see coursing like poison through contemporary politics.

Much as people may return to the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” to remind themselves that feeling worthless does not mean you have no worth, or to the children’s book “Goodnight Moon” to remember that bedtime once meant being enveloped in a cocoon of love, fans revisit “The West Wing” to recall an era — even a fictional one — when it seemed possible for the three branches of government to be populated by public servants of integrity, intellect and wit.

“When I feel the need for comfort from the circus in the White House, I watch the pilot,” said Terry Callanan Kempf of Glens Falls, N.Y., who belongs to the Facebook group “Fans of West Wing Weekly Podcast,” whose members share a passion for revisiting the show. “Seriously, almost every night before I go to sleep.”

“The West Wing” premiered two years into President Bill Clinton’s second term in office, but the bulk of it was broadcast during President George W. Bush’s administration. The partisan divide was bad then, but it was not nearly so awful — so personal, so vicious, so apocalyptic, so apparently beyond redemption — as it appears to many people now.

Bradley Whitford, the actor who played Josh Lyman, the deputy White House chief of staff, has called the show “liberal porn,” and that is true, in a way. Its president, Josiah Bartlet, is a progressive Democrat whose policies run firmly to the left. Erudite, articulate, empathetic, able to speak Latin and quote the Bible, inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, he seems almost painfully distant from many American presidents (some perhaps more than others).