“There it is,” Jed Bartlet said softly, pointing at his opponent across the presidential debate stage. “That’s the ten-word answer my staff’s been looking for for two weeks. There is it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They’re the tip of the sword. Here’s my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we gonna do it? Give me ten after that. I’ll drop outta the race right now.”

It was the fall of 2002, early in the fourth season of NBC’s hit political drama The West Wing, and Martin Sheen’s erudite Democratic president was landing his final, crushing blow against his Republican opponent—a dimwitted southern governor created by writer Aaron Sorkin to evoke George W. Bush. In the real world two years earlier, Al Gore had lost a debate with Bush by appearing condescending. And two years later, nuance and complexity would trip up John Kerry in his own bid against Bush. But on this night, in the fantasy world of primetime TV, technocratic and intellectual liberalism had its moment. “There aren’t very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that’s way too big for ten words,” Bartlet said. “I’m the president of the United States, not the president of the people who agree with me. And by the way, if the left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.”

No one on the left had a problem with it. Though Bartlet’s fictional presidency looks centrist in retrospect, he was at the time the perfect vehicle for progressive escapism. “For liberals in particular,” Juli Weiner wrote in Vanity Fair in 2012, “Martin Sheen’s Nobel Prize-winning, Latin-speaking President Bartlet was a soothing foil to George W. Bush’s down-home anti-intellectualism and execrable consonant swallowin’; it was as if each week Sorkin and his colleagues were writing the counter-factual, shoulda-been history of the Gore administration.” One of the show’s main appeals was that, as Bartlet press secretary C.J. Cregg put it in that 2002 episode, “complexity isn’t a vice.”

Today, complexity is indeed regarded as a vice by a growing number of Democrats, who point to Hillary Clinton’s defeat last fall—and to Bernie Sanders’s enduring popularity—as evidence that the party should eschew nuance in favor of simplicity. “I think we need to be in the business of communicating big, easy-to-understand ideas to people in a way that we didn’t in 2016,” Senator Chris Murphy told Politico last week. “Donald Trump had very dangerous ideas, but they were easy to get your head wrapped around. Hillary Clinton had very good ideas, but they were so obtuse that few understood them.”

Some Democrats aren’t having it. “Where was she obtuse?” asked Bob Lehrman, a former Gore speechwriter. “In the debates? In her convention speech? I don’t think she was obtuse at all.” He added, “By the way, if he used the word ‘obtuse’ in a speech, probably only a third of Americans would know what the word meant.”